In the brief period between the twentieth century's two cataclysmic world wars the modern city was invented in Berlin. It was a vibrant metropolis of night-people, visionaries, thinkers and bohemians -a place filled with intrigue and decadence, where vice and virtue abounded in equal measure. Like one huge salon, it became the incomparable centre of European intellectual life where the arts and sciences met and flourished...

In the brief period between the twentieth century's two cataclysmic world wars the modern city was invented in Berlin. It was a vibrant metropolis of night-people, visionaries, thinkers and bohemians -a place filled with intrigue and decadence, where vice and virtue abounded in equal measure. Like one huge salon, it became the incomparable centre of European intellectual life where the arts and sciences met and flourished.

Subcultures and club cultures invented gender-bending lifestyles and fashions to match. Architects and designers struggled to free themselves from the past and planned for the needs of the future. There was a boom in popular artforms, from photography and cinema to cabaret and agitprop. Daily life throbbed with new rhythms: the coming and going of the latest planes and trains and automobiles;the clacking of typewriters in vast offices; the jazz band that never sleeps.

Engaging and eminently readable, here is a compelling portrait of this astonishing cultural melting pot and its most important protagonists -personalities such as Max Reinhardt, Mies van der Rohe, Bertolt Brecht, Leni Riefenstahl andWalter Benjamin. But also of lesser known yet equally remarkable figures - Count Harry Kessler, Gisele Freund, Hannah H6ch and many more.

With chapters on the key movements and creative spirits of the era, this book traces and illustrates the rise of an artistic and cultural milieu that bloomed brightly but all too briefly. Berlin in the 1920s was not simply a time and a place, but a state of mind;it was here that the modernist dream of art and life being one and the same came closer to reality than anywhere else, before or since.

Chapter 1

The Changing Face of Berlin: A Decade of Rapid Expansion

Chapter 2

The November Vanishing Point: Revolution and Reaction

Chapter 3

War and Peace: Expressionism and Dada

Chapter 4

Vile Circumstances: The Aesthetics of Verism

Chapter 5

Unity and Purity: Utopias, Collectives and Futurisms

Chapter 6

Metropolis of the Modern: Detachment and Indifference

Chapter 7

Cult and Culture of the Superficial: The New Objectivity

Chapter 8

Eternity in Transience: Berlin and the 'Other Modernity'

Chapter 9

The Argument of the Masses:

Four Million People Cannot Be Ignored!

Chapter I0

The Heart of the Reich: Hitler's Capital

Select Biographies

Select Bibliography

Picture Credits

Index