A sweeping yet intimate portrait of a metropolis

BerlinImagine A City

**By** Rory MacLean

**W&N,** €18.90

**Reviewed by** Brendan Daly

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In the balmy summer of 1940, more than 100,000 men started to sculpt a fiction. Chiselling enormous stone and fashioning white-flecked granite to adorn Hitler's residence, they were remaking Berlin.

The city would be renamed Germania. As the Third Reich swaggered towards war, Albert Speer had convened the country's leading architects and designers. ''Imagine a new Berlin, he urged them, ...