Berlin Wall

"Berlin has too much [history]." Sinclair McKay cites this rueful observation in the preface to his new book about the city. Given that he is not simply discussing Berlin between the wars, or during the second of those wars, or in the Cold War that followed, but all of it, this may come off as a cry for help. History may — in those words attributed to, well, take your pick — be “one damned thing after another,” but when it came to Berlin, those things hurtled through time in a horde, colliding, overlapping and refusing to form an orderly line. And, in Berlin’s case, they had a way of mattering. Not for nothing does this book’s subtitle refer to Berlin as “the city at the center of the world.” Bad news for a writer aiming, presumably, at a degree of concision.

Each time I return to Berlin, the wonderful, awful city where I spent the best days of my misspent youth, I pay a sentimental visit to Grolmanstrasse, where my German grandparents used to live. There isn’t much left to look at. Their apartment block was destroyed in 1945 in the Battle of Berlin. The site where it stood is now occupied by a children’s playground. For me, that empty space seems to symbolize the way Berlin has changed — mainly for the better, but at enormous human cost. So much has vanished — not just the buildings, but also the people who inhabited them. For my children’s generation, Berlin is a party town. For me, it’s a city full of ghosts. It is these ghosts that keep bringing me back to Germany’s battered, bombastic capital.