In search of Berlin

Ever since John Kampfner was a young journalist in Communist east Berlin, he hasn’t been able to get the city out of his mind. It is a place tortured by its past, obsessed with memories, a place where traumas are unleashed and the traumatised have gathered. Hit by plague, fire and war, it is a city of reinvention, a city that is always becoming. Over the past four years Kampfner has walked the length and breadth of Berlin, delving into the archives, and talking to historians and writers, architects and archaeologists. It has been a trading post, military barracks, industrial powerhouse, centre of science and learning, hotbed of decadence – and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. Now a city of refuge, it is home to 180 nationalities and more than a quarter of the population has a migrant background.