Imagine Berlin. Imagine a city of fragments and ghosts, a laboratory of ideas, the fount of both the brightest and darkest designs of history's most bloody century. Imagine the most arrogant capital of Europe devastated by Allied bombs, divided by a Wall, then reunited and reborn as one of the creative centres of the world. The German capital resonates with the echo of lives lived, dreams realised and evils executed. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low. No other city has been so shaped and defined by individual imaginations. Through a series of intimate portraits of some of its key residents over five centuries, Rory MacLean weaves together a rich, interconnected, energetic history of this volatile city. From the crippled medieval balladeer whose suffering explains the Nazi's rise to power, to the architect Schinkel whose insomnia created a capital on the barren Prussian plain, to Christopher Isherwood, who let his fiction reshape the city.

Alongside them we encounter Marlene Dietrich flaunting her sexuality in 'The Blue Angel', Goebbels concocting Nazi iconography, Hitler fantasizing about the mega-city Germania and David Bowie recording his 'Heroes', as well as the ambitious prostitute who refashioned herself as a royal princess, the Scottish mercenaries who fought for the Prussian Army, the fearful Communist Party functionary who helped to build the Wall, and the immoral, genius chemist who invented both agricultural fertiliser and poison gas. BERLIN: A BIOGRAPHY uncovers and evokes the seen and the unseen, in a unique portrait of one of the world's great cities.