Daily quote by Berlin

• To many visitors, Germany in the 1920s was the United States of Europe: big, industrial, ultra-modern. It was home to some of Europe's biggest and best corporations: the electrical engineering giant Siemens, the financial titan Deutsche Bank, the automobile maker Mercedes-Benz, the chemical conglomerate IG-Farben. Berlin boasted the biggest film industry in Europe, producing in Fritz Lang's Metropolis the science-fiction masterpiece of the twenties and in the same director's M the definitive film noir. Berlin had newspapers as sensational as William Randolph Hearst's (the 8Uhr-Abendblatt); department stores as big as Macy's (the Kaufhaus des Westens); sports stars as idolized as 'Babe' Ruth (the boxer Max Schmeling). So pervasive was the transatlantic influence that Franz Kafka felt able to write Amerika without even going there.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p.  235
• Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1932, when he moved to Princeton, but in 1914, when he was appointed Professor at the University of Berlin, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany. There was, however, another Germany - a Germany of provincial hometowns that felt no affection for the frenzied modernism of the Grossstadt. This Germany had been traumatized by the upheavals that had begun with the ghastly revelation of military defeat in November 1918. Nearly all the revolutionary events of the immediate post-war period took place in the big cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich. Despite the decision to draft the new republic's constitution in the sleepy capital of Thuringia, the Weimar Republic was always a metropolitan affair.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p.  235