Berlin

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Berlin is a city of fragments and ghosts, a laboratory of ideas, the fount of both the brightest and darkest designs of history's most bloody century. The once arrogant capital of Europe was devastated by Allied bombs, divided by a Wall, then reunited and reborn as one of the creative centres of the world. The city resonates with the echo of lives lived, dreams realised and evils executed. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low; few other cities has been so shaped and defined by individual imaginations.

Rory MacLean assembles a dazzlingly eclectic cast of Berliners over five centuries. We meet the crippled medieval balladeer whose suffering explains the Nazi's rise to power, the ambitious prostitute who refashioned herself as a royal princess, the Scottish mercenary who fought for the Prussian Army, the fearful Communist Party functionary who helped to build the Wall. We see Marlene Dietrich flaunting her sexuality in THE BLUE ANGEL, Goebbels concocting Nazi iconography, Hitler fantasizing about the mega-city Germania and David Bowie recording HEROES.

Through these intimate portraits, Rory MacLean masterfully evokes the seen and unseen, in a richly varied, unexpected tour of Berlin's history. The result is a unique and vivid portrait of one of the world's great cities.