BERLIN

Berlin’s greatest hits, from the age of the medieval troubadour to David Bowie’s “Heroes.”

Canadian travel writer MacLean (Gift of Time: A Family's Diary of Cancer, 2011, etc.) walks through Berlin’s fluctuating, unstable past and plucks personalities that best represent the spirit of the city, good or evil, reaching all the way back to the 15th century. He seeks “to map this place, divided as it is between past and present, conformity and rebellion, the visible and the invisible.” Berlin, writes the author, “was never an ethnic German city,” but it always attracted newcomers; during times of plague, there were influxes of Franks, Flemings, Rhinelanders and Danes, as well as Jews—the oldest Jewish gravestone is from 1244. The accession of the austerely militaristic Calvinist Hohenzollern dynasty transformed Berlin from a garrison to a great and beautiful city under the enlightened despot Frederick the Great, who was able to lure Voltaire there to live and work in 1750. MacLean’s minibiographies underscore the highly idiosyncratic temperament these characters imparted to the city, and in his own fictionalized, stylized portraits, he offers the artistically brilliant—such as 19th-century architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose Altes Museum, among other fantastically neoclassical creations, helped forge a sense of a capital city—as well as the obscure and mythical, such as Silesian factory worker Lilli Neuss, a terrible casualty of the mid-19th-century industrial revolution, whose husband deserted her and took their son, leaving her to an impecunious and miserable fate. The city nurtured plenty of evil, as well—e.g., Fritz Haber, the chemist who won the Nobel Prize and offered effective chemical warfare to the Kaiser in 1915 in the form of chlorine; and Hitler’s fanatical mythmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl, Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels.

A series of imaginative and fanciful narrative segments—a history that is not all gloom and doom.