Berlin: Imagine a City

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. Today it resonates with the echo of lives lived, dreams realised and evils executed with shocking intensity. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low; few other cities have been so shaped and defined by individual imaginations.

I’ve known three Berlins: West Berlin where I made movies with David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich, East Berlin where I researched my first book, ‘Stalin’s Nose’, and now the unified capital. To tell the city’s story, I have assembled a remarkable, eclectic cast of Berliners over five centuries, from a wild medieval balladeer to the ambitious prostitute who refashioned herself as a royal princess, from a Scottish mercenary who fought for the Prussian Army to the fearful Communist Party functionary who helped to build the Wall. Alongside them appears Dietrich flaunting her sexuality in ‘The Blue Angel’, Goebbels concocting Nazi iconography, Hitler fantasising about his mega-city Germania and David Bowie recording ‘Heroes’.

In its architecture, through its literature, in its movies, songs and unrealized dreams, these men and women conjured Berlin into one of the world’s most volatile and creative capitals. No other city has so often surrendered itself to its own seductive myths. ‘Berlin: Imagine a City’ captures, portrays and propagates the extraordinary story of those myths and their makers.