Das Capital

Berlin is a marvelous read. The author does not just pile up the prose like a supersized New Yorker piece. Zeroing in on essentials, he envelops his narrative in a dazzling dramaturgy that makes the reader eager to churn through 400-plus pages.

A consummate storyteller, Sinclair McKay writes like a reporter covering the past, but he knows his stuff, as illustrated by an index running for 17 pages and footnotes for 33. The research is as exhaustive as any academic treatise, yet the style is journalism at its very best—with a lively turn of phrase and a sharp eye for details that matter. Those interested in Germany during its darkest 20th century moments will be roped in. The book holds the attention of amateurs and experts alike.

That said, this reviewer ends up on a note of frustration. Where are the chapters that broaden the book’s ken beyond its main focus on the first half of the 20th century? What about the Berlin before and after—during the rise of the new Reich and especially after the fall of the Wall?

These are not catty questions because the “before” matters as much as the “after.” Presumably, McKay did not want to revisit a field, which English-speaking historians have already plowed. In his Berlin, a massive tome published in 2000, David Large starts with Bismarck and concludes with “The Berlin Republic” after reunification. Even heftier is Alexandra Richie’s Faust’s Metropolis of 1998 with its 1,100 pages. Her departure point is the 16th century; she, too, concludes with a chapter on “The New Capital.”

Why the “yes, but?” You cannot explain the triumph and tragedy of Berlin without going back to the Reich’s “original sin,” when, in 1871, Bismarck pounded 25 little Germanies into one big one. Germany was now too strong for Europe, yet too weak to dominate it; hence the second Thirty Years War (1914-45) that cut the new behemoth down to size. Such a curtain raiser is indispensable for the drama that follows: two world wars, Nazis. Holocaust and all.

McKay compresses Berlin’s CV. Essentially, it spans the period between

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