Sinclair McKay's portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city's broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond. It begins by taking readers back to 1919 when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary by-word for modernity - in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. McKay traces the city's history through the rise of Hitler and the Battle for Berlin which ended in the final conquest of the city in 1945. It was a key moment in modern world history, but beyond the global repercussions lay thousands of individual stories of agony. From the countless women who endured nightmare ordeals at the hands of the Soviet soldiers to the teenage boys fitted with steel helmets too big for their heads and guns too big for their hands, McKay thrusts readers into the human cataclysm that tore down the modernity of the streets and reduced what was once the most sophisticated city on earth to ruins. Amid the destruction, a collective instinct was also at work - a determination to restore not just the rhythms of urban life, but also its fierce creativity. In Berlin today, there is a growing and urgent recognition that the testimonies of the housewives, office clerks, factory workers, and exuberant teenagers who witnessed these years of terrifying - and for some, initially exhilarating - transformation should be heard. "The author devoted inordinate amount of details to the fall of the Third Reich and the action Red Army towards Berliners and raced through the years of the Weimar Republic between the construction of the wall till it was torn down. Nevertheless he did mention the American airlift, the Soviet blockade and the atomic research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute." "Dissolution" and "Necropolis," the largest parts of McKay's book, focus on Berlin in 1945, especially April and May, the fall of Berlin and arrival of the dreaded Red Army. The third part "Possession" deals with the GDR and ends with the tear down of the Berlin Wall. McKay believes that "You cannot understand the twentieth century without understanding Berlin." Many rare photos, 16.64 x 24.2 cm, 464 pages.
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