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  E-mail Message: I thought you might be interested in this item at http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/38842162 Title: Faust's metropolis : a history of Berlin Author: Alexandra Richie Publisher: New York : Carroll & Graf, 1998. ISBN/ISSN: 0786705108 9780786705108 OCLC:38842162

  
  

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Faust's metropolis : a history of Berlin

Author:	Alexandra Richie
Publisher:	New York : Carroll & Graf, 1998.
Edition/Format:	Print book : English : 1st Carroll & Graf edView all editions and formats
Summary:	HIST The ending of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany have brought about an outpouring of books on the new Germany. Richie (Fellow, Wolfson Coll., Oxford) has added this lengthy study of Berlin. With its checkered past, the city stands at the center of the reunited nation's history. According to Richie, the making of an 'instant capital' in Berlin after the demise of the Wall has been fraught with problems. After World War II the city did not regain its former importance, as many still saw it as the capital of Hitler's regime. Even many of the city's residents today protest the idea of the new capital. Berlin must evolve, according to the author, in a natural way and not by edict. On the face of it, Richie's first book is about a two-bit provincial city situated in the sandy slump along a river of no great significance. In fact, Richie's well-researched, endlessly fascinating study is about the history of Germany, of Europe and, sadly, the brutish nastiness of humanity. Richie starts at the beginning ('Berlin's history was shaped by an event which did not take place. The area was never conquered by the Romans'), but this is not merely some academician's idea of completeness. One of Richie's goals is to divide myth from reality and, by detailing the Slavic settlement there, she quickly disproves the enduring myth of Berlin as a pure German city. Likewise, Richie re-situates Romanticism in Berlin, despite postwar attempts to distance the city from it and its nationalistic progeny. But most of all she tears down Berliners' cherished self-image as a city of rebels, of rule-breakers. 'It was Lenin who said that Berliners were incapable of sustaining a revolution,' she writes, 'as they would never disobey the Do Not Walk on the Grass signs which stood between them and the palace gates. He was right.'There are some moments of human grandeur U.S. Gen. Lucius Dubignon Clay's Berlin airlift; Ernst Reuter's brave opposition to Soviet pressure but basically this is a story without heroes. None of the Hohenzollerns come off terribly well (though in fact, Frederick William I is less thoroughly maligned than usual); nor does Bismarck, either of the German Kaisers, the Russians or the ever-naive Americans. Even the Nazi resistance is appropriately portrayed as basically reactionary and half-hearted. Nor does Richie, a British scholar descended from one of the most famous Prussian families, the von Moltkes, let her own ancestors off easily. Richie has filled her book with detail historical, cultural, political, social but none of it is extraneous. Each anecdote, literary reference, newspaper article and personal observation drawn from the five years she lived in and visited Berlin propels the narrative, illuminates the period and hints at what's to come; e.g., the reader sees clearly the connections between the 1843 famine, tenement blocks and the rise of radicalized masses. Carroll and Graf is comparing Faust's Metropolis to Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's a big claim, but they are right.  Read more...
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Subjects	Berlin (Germany) -- History. Berlin -- Geschichte. Berlin (Allemagne) -- Histoire. View all subjects
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