The character of a city is a hard subject to capture in words, even the partial character of 20 years, and Gill does his best, in a whirlwind political, social, and artistic history of Berlin between the First and Second World Wars.

This book is at its best when it lets ordinary Berliners speak, using journals and interviews to remember the texture of ordinary life. A few people lived in great comfort, many more lived on a ragged edge of starvation, and the ominous politics of the era overshadowed everything. Nightlife, promiscuous sex, cocaine: Weimar Berlin was a city where anything could happen.

Of course the most important 'anything' was the politics, the shaky political norms of Republican politics, and how the apparatus of the State was seized by Nazis and then turned against the world. Gill does an okay job with the politics, though I don't think he does a great job explaining the rise of the Nazis in contemporary terms, rather than the historical horror we know them as.

Where this book spends most of its time is in the arts, the glittering cabarets, concerts, plays, films, poems, paintings, etc. I'd estimate 2/3rds of this book are about artists, and as someone weak on the period, I found my attention drifting. Too much of the art is inherently ephemeral, cabarets and concerts never recorded. The most lasting legacy is the Bauhaus design school, which laid out a visual grammar we still use today.

I appreciated the detail, but this a book that left me with more confusion than clarity.