Berlin

Berlin

by David Clay Large
Berlin

Berlin

by David Clay Large

Paperback

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Overview

In the political history of the past century, no city has played a more prominent-though often disastrous-role than Berlin. At the same time, Berlin has also been a dynamic center of artistic and intellectual innovation. If Paris was the "Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Berlin was to become the signature city for the next hundred years. Once a symbol of modernity, in the Thirties it became associated with injustice and the abuse of power. After 1945, it became the iconic City of the Cold War. Since the fall of the Wall, Berlin has again come to represent humanity's aspirations for a new beginning, tempered by caution deriving from the traumas of the recent past. David Clay Large's definitive history of Berlin is framed by the two German unifications of 1871 and 1990. Between these two events several themes run like a thread through the city's history: a persistent inferiority complex; a distrust among many ordinary Germans, and the national leadership of the "unloved city's" electric atmosphere, fast tempo, and tradition of unruliness; its status as a magnet for immigrants, artists, intellectuals, and the young; the opening up of social, economic, and ethnic divisions as sharp as the one created by the Wall.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780465026326
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication date: 11/08/2001
Pages: 736
Sales rank: 299,786
Product dimensions: 7.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Lexile: 1340L (what's this?)

About the Author

David Clay Large, Professor of History at Montana State University, is a specialist in modern German history. He is the author of Where Ghosts Walked, Germans to the Front, Between Two Fires, and Berlin. He lives in Bozeman, Montana, and San Francisco, California.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrationsix
Acknowledgmentsxv
Introductionxvii
1 Berlin Under Bismarck1
2 World City?47
3 Discord in the Castle109
4 The Great Disorder157
5 The World City of Order and Beauty203
6 Hitler's Berlin255
7 Now People, Arise, and Storm, Break Loose!319
8 Coming into the Cold369
9 The Divided City445
10 From Bonn to Berlin517
11 The Berlin Republic585
Notes649
Index685

What People are Saying About This

Gordon A. Craig

Large's ability to summon up the physical appearance and feel of this vibrant capital-its streets and railway stations and hotels and nightclubs and department stores-is remarkable. As in his Munich book, Large demonstrates in these pages that he is as good a ranconteur as he is a historian.

Peter Fritzsche

A metropolis of astonishing subversion, horror, and ingenuity, a capital of ideological experimentation, racial injustice, and democratic new beginnings, Berlin is the audacious, craved city of modern times, and David Clay Large the star reporter at its city desk.

Peter Hayes

This book is an absorbing, penetrating, and-in the best sense of the word-entertaining exploration of Berlin's turbulent modern history. Both novice and specialist will learn much from it-and be delighted by the author's wide-ranging knowledge and stylistic gifts.

Fritz Stern

Drawing successfully on a wide range of sources David Clay Large's Berlin gives a vivid picture of a city alternating between dynamic growth and destruction, including views of its politics and culture, its urban landscape and its international setting. Admirably broad and informative.

Niall Ferguson

David Clay Large has written a vivid and compelling history of the city which was in many ways the fulcrum of the twentieth century. From German unification in 1871 to reunification in 1989, he captures the extraordinary vitality of the city and inimitable black humor of the Berliners. As Large leads you down those vice-ridden, history-strewn streets, you can almost smell the intoxicating - in both senses - 'Berliner Luft'.
— (Niall Ferguson, Oxford University, author of The Pity of War)

Peter Gay

There are several good books on modern Berlin, but none I know has quite the authority and flair of David Clay Large's Berlin. It shows not only an intimate acquaintance with the literature but with the city as well, and it speaks with equal felicity about politics and art, anti-Semitism and democratic forces. — (Peter Gay, Director, Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library)

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