Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin - Rilegato

Alexandra Richie is a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her family has been influential in shaping the history of Berlin since the thirteenth century. This is her first book.

In Berlin, history is almost tangible. The sense of the past – of Europe, of Germany, and in particular of the twentieth century with its myths, depravities, idealism and horror – hangs in the air around the Hinterhofs and deserted railway stations. It is for good reason that Berlin has been named the 'Schicksal Stadt Deutschlands', the city of German destiny. No other city has played such a part in the tides of twentieth-century European affairs, none been so lionised, so mythologized, so cast down.

'Faust’s Metropolis' is an exciting, radical history of this city, a breathtaking portrait of its achievements and errors from the time of its founding in the twelfth century until the present day. From the revolutionary fervour of its teeming slums, to the insufferable pomp of Imperial Berlin, from the frantic modernism of Weimar to the brutality of the Nazis, to the symbolic defeat of communism as the Wall came down, Berlin has played host to all the movements that have uplifted and afflicted German and European history. Alexandra Richie writes superbly of its role as a crucible of change.

With Berlin poised to become the capital of a united Germany, its role in that country’s past has taken an greater significance. This extraordinary ambitious but supremely assured history offers a scholarly, thematic analysis of the ways in which the city has reinvented itself through the ages, the tensions which historically existed between Berliners and other Germans, and the crucial role which Berlin has played in shaping the political and cultural life of Europe. In drawing together the complex strands of its actual and imagined past, Alexandra Richie reveals herself as a brilliant new historian formidably in command of a fascinating subject.