Berlin

Berlin may not be as beautiful as Paris; it may not have the brash allure of Rome or even London's muscularity; but no one can think of the twentieth century without thinking of Germany's capital. It was on the frontline between two of the most powerful ideologies of modern times – communism and capitalism; it was Hitler’s stage when he seized power in 1933; and now it stands poised between a resurgent Russia in the East and a Europe forging a new identity in the West... no longer divided then but still not quite whole.

These upheavals have jumbled not just the city's architecture but also its spiritual chronology. The distant past and the recent past overlap in a way that can make Berlin's present and future seem provisional and improvised. This would have pleased one of Berlin's great writers, the critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin. Losing himself in the city's markets, the avenues of its Tiergarten or in the domestic features of its buildings was for him an act of recovery and of the imagination... a kind of dreaming. That's my hope too for this evening's Words and Music. Its an invocation of the city not a history. I've included an aria from Bach's Matthew Passion, for example, partly because the young Mendelssohn revived the great baroque composer's reputation by conducting a version of the work in Berlin in 1829. It's no coincidence either that I have chosen Otto Klemperer's famous account. Much the same holds true for the writers. In other words if you shake the programme and hold it to your ear you will hear at least some of the sounds and voices that have shaped and are shaping Berlin – Strauss and Mendelssohn as well as Eisler and Weill; Gunter Grass, Joseph Roth and Alfred Doblin as well as Peter Schneider and Nazim Hikmet.

Tonight's actors are Henry Goodman and Liz Sutherland and you should probably listen out too for the supporting cast which includes Adolf Hitler!

Producer: Zahid Warley