Imperial Berlin

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Kirkus Review: It's all here: the monumental vulgarity of the public buildings along the Konigsplatz; the spineless Chancellors and the camarilla of fawning mediocrities who succeeded Bismarck; at the Berlin Opera the lustiness of Strauss' Rosenkavalier, and at the theater Hauptmann and Wedekind and fistfights in the aisles by the outraged burghers; the pusillanimous Reichstag and Kautsky, Leigen and Ebert, immobile revolutionaries of the SPD; the exaltation of the Officer Corps in a city which lived on "all the bellicose trappings of uniforms, parades and official glitter"; the first stench of anti-Semitism emanating from the university which once housed Ranke and Hegel; and the Kaiser himself, Wilhelm II, symbol of his age -- blustering, vain, petulant and sentimental. Masur has written a biography of Berlin, parvenus of European capitals, spanning the years of the Second Empire (1871-1918); he follows its metamorphosis from second-rate provincial town to a metropolis which rivalled Paris, London and Vienna. More than an evocative rendering of the German capital, the book succeeds in depicting the bumptuods arrogance as well as the hidden decadence of the pre-war era, the rootless artificiality of democratic institutions grafted on to an authoritarian, militaristic society, and the antagonism of Macht and Geist, a tragic leitmotif of modern German history. An effortless blend of cultural and political history studded with portraits of Der Berliner stolid and imperturbable, in a society "immersed in a process of self-delusion which has few parallels in history." The author, whose Prophets of Yesterday (1961) was an outstanding study of European intellectual life on the eve of World War I, has in this case, the added advantage of being a native and exile of the grim, divided city he chronicles.

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