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Berlin

By: Barney White-Spunner
Narrated by: Jamie Parker, Barney White-Spunner - introduction
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Summary

'My only complaint is that it was so fascinating I wish it had been longer. What a story!' Philip Mansel

BERLIN is Europe’s most fascinating and exciting city. The great movements that have shaken Europe, from the Reformation to Marxism, have their origins in Berlin’s streets.


With its unique dialect, exceptional museums, experimental cultural scene, its liberated social life and its honest approach to its history, it is as challenging a city as it is absorbing. Too often Berlin is seen through the prism of Nazism and its role on the front line in the Cold War. Important, frightening and interesting as those periods are, its history starts much earlier.

Telling the story of its people and its rulers, from its medieval origins to the present day, this is a fascinating and informative history of an extraordinary city.

©2020 Barney White-Spunner (P)2020 Simon & Schuster Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History
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Critic reviews

'Aware that Berliners complain the world knows their city only for its Nazi and Cold War epochs, White-Spunner unfolds a municipal history that illuminates the full complexity of this metropolis’s thousand-year evolution... Thoroughly engrossing!' (Bryce Christensen)
'An impressively clear and engaging biography of a fascinating city at the very centre of European history.' (Antony Beevor)
'My only complaint is that it was so fascinating I just wish it had been longer. What a story!' (Philip Mansel)
'Superb. The city that is always ‘im Werden’ has found its narrator... [Barney White-Spunner] has done something astonishing, constructing a narrative that spans more than a thousand years, that can only be told in the context of the higher political history of Germany, and indeed Europe, yet which at every turn shows his depth of personal affection for a city he knows so well and clearly loves. That mix of the private and the public is just one of the things that makes the book so absorbing.' (Neil MacGregor)

What listeners say about Berlin

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Comprehensive, interesting and engaging

What a worthwhile purchase this was. I wanted a history of Berlin to prepare me for a visit later this year. So much history to explore in this city. A truly fascintaing place to explore.

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A fascinating city

Berlin from its medieval beginnings to two decades after the end of the Berlin Wall. Made me want to travel there and see it with my own eyes. So much of European history was made there - and destroyed there. The rebirth of this city as the capital of one of Europe’s most civilized nations has been a tour de force. Really inspired me

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A brilliant and complete history of the city.

I wish I had listened to it before I visited the city. Greatly told story. Have to go back and visit some of the places mentioned.

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