politics in the 20th century than Berlin. Yet unlike other major West European capitals-Rome, Paris, London-old Berh bloomed late as a cosmopolitan center. "Prior to 1871," as Gerhard Masur points out in Imperial Berlin (Basic, 1971), "the great powers of the world would not have considered the city worth the price of a bitter international struggle."
The city, writes Gordon A. Craig in The Germans (Penguin, 1983), was founded late in the 12th century as a tiny traclmg settlement...