A WATERSTONES BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2023 'A masterful portrait of one of the world's greatest
cities... A must-read' PETER FRANKOPAN 'Such a delightful read' KATJA HOYER The Times
'Berlin may well be Europe's most enigmatic city and John Kampfner is the ideal guide.'
JONATHAN FREEDLAND Sunday Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist ' Gripping'
Financial Times No other city has had so many lives survived so many disasters and has
reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin. Ever since John Kampfner was a
young journalist in Communist East Berlin he hasn't been able to get the city out of his mind.
It is a place tortured by its past obsessed with memories a place where traumas are unleashed
and the traumatised have gathered. Over the past four years Kampfner has walked the length and
breadth of Berlin delving into the archives and talking to historians and writers architects
and archaeologists. He clambers onto a fallen statue of Lenin he rummages in boxes of early
Medieval bones he learns about the cabaret star so outrageous she was thrown out of the city.
Berlin has been a military barracks industrial powerhouse centre of learning hotbed of
decadence - and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. Now a city of
refuge it is home to 180 nationalities and more than a quarter of the population has a
migrant background. Berlin never stands still. It is never satisfied. But it is now the
irresistible capital to which the world is gravitating. In Search of Berlin is an 800-year
story a dialogue between past and present it is a new way of looking at this turbulent and
beguiling city on its never-ending journey of reinvention.
