The first time I visited Berlin was in the spring of 1989. Falling into conversation with a Berliner on a bus one day I asked him if he thought the Wall would ever be taken down. Of course it would, he replied, though not in the lifetime of any of us. But by November of that year, as we all now know, the Berlin Wall was breached and the process of removing it had begun. Perhaps we should have been prepared for Berlin to surprise us. Stuart Braun seems to agree, and City of Exiles (Noctua Press) is his explanation why.

Transformation, Braun argues, is embedded into the very bedrock of Berlin. He notes the German writer Karl Scheffler asserted as long ago as 1910 that: ‘Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never to being.’ Thus, concludes Braun, the Wall was fated to fall:

‘For me, however, Berlin felt so intrinsically free that the Wall seemed like an aberration. Its fall was less about struggle than inevitability.’

Go to minor literature[s] to read the rest of this review.