"Why are we drawn to certain cities?" asks Rory MacLean in the prologue to his brilliant new history of Berlin. I myself came here on a whim. Following a weekend visit some years ago, I made the spontaneous decision on the train journey home to move my life here; this often ungainly yet seductive city has an urgency about it that today entices and inspires so much creativity.
And yet, for a city that feels to be ever evolving and buzzing with the zeitgeist of our modern generation, this is also a city where history is inescapable. It assaults you as you walk Berlin's streets. Never before have I known a city where the layers of history are so present – even in their absence – and often so palpably recent. MacLean brings these monumental and clashing historical layers vividly to life in Berlin: Imagine a City. "No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low," he writes. "No other capital has been so hated, so feared, so loved. No other place has been so twisted and torn across five centuries of conflict, from religious wars to cold war, at the hub of Europe's ideological struggle."
But what makes MacLean's history of Berlin stand out is that this is an intensely human document, a rich tapestry spanning five centuries and woven together through intimate portraits of 21 of its former inhabitants which collectively reveal the narrative of the city. These are the people who shaped Berlin in all its various incarnations, who dared to imagine what it might become, who fabricated the myths that cast the reality.
This is how I love history to be told, through the people that lived it. Not merely the ones we're familiar with – the Isherwoods, Goebbelses, Kennedys – but also those who lived seemingly inconsequential lives. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, for example, visionary Prussian architect, is described alongside the account of destitute Moabit factory girl Lilli Neuss consuming phosphorus match heads in an attempt to induce an abortion. MacLean brings the city's ghosts to life and lets us feel the temper of their hearts and minds, from the likes of a medieval minstrel poet, to the antics of elegant prostitute Else Hirsch, model for the golden angel atop the Victory column, or the drabness of the East German soldier enlisted to help build the Wall.
Their stories are wholly engaging, written with the flair of a novelist; indeed, MacLean readily admits that he has employed "some of the techniques of the novel". Consequently, this book probably won't be for those who feed on hard facts and footnotes, and some might find MacLean's prose a touch literary, but as he states in his defence, "Berlin is a city of the imagination. A portrait which hopes to capture this aspect of its nature needs to let invention cohabit with reality, to juxtapose fiction with fact."
While the tone is reminiscent of Anna Funder's Stasiland, in which she recounted history via personal stories of those behind the Wall, MacLean's historical scope is much broader, spanning right back to 15th-century Berlin. This bringing to life of an earlier age of the city, so often eclipsed by the turbulent events of the 20th century, is particularly welcome.
"History, which used to be written about princes and potentates, has become more personal," acknowledges MacLean, and it's clear that his desire to write about Berlin stems from his own lengthy relationship with the place. MacLean came first as a teenage backpacker, returning to West Berlin to work on films with David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich. Later, he researched his book Stalin's Nose in East Berlin, and most recently spent a good deal of time living in the unified capital during the writing of this new one. While his direct experience is clearly pertinent and lends credibility, the interruption into what is, in the main, a third-person narrative with first-person interjection, for example in the Dietrich chapter, feels incongruous. Had he waited until the final chapter, written entirely from his own perspective, the revelation of his personal involvement in some of these later episodes in the book might have been more powerful.
Rory MacLean's fascinating book has already brought my adopted city more keenly into focus. Just the other night I walked down Unter den Linden, past Schinkel's Altes Museum and the open land of the communist-razed Prussian palace that the city hopes to reinstate. A little further along, I was picturing MacLean's medieval minstrel cavorting in the Marienkirche graveyard with his harlot wife just as the 13th-century church's steeple came into perfect alignment with the iconic Soviet-era TV tower rising needle-sharp behind it. Not only has MacLean's book helped to place the odd, mish-mash remains of this city into historical context, but I suspect his ghosts will long haunt me, just as they do this strange and wonderful city.
Clare Wigfall is the author of The Loudest Sound and Nothing (Faber)
