In and Around Berlin

It was seven o’clock on a gray November morning in 1886 when Norton and her husband reached Berlin for their first long residence abroad. She arranges what follows by subject rather than by day: family and social life, schools, churches, the museums, the Reichstag and the Prussian parliament, prominent public figures, the palaces, the streets and cemeteries, the homes of the Humboldts, and the city’s charitable institutions, closing with excursions to the towns and country around the capital. She was present for Kaiser Wilhelm I’s ninetieth birthday in March 1887 and reports the celebration at first hand. The book keeps its best moments small: an apartment four flights up because Berlin houses had no elevators, a Christmas Eve tree, officers’ uniforms on every street.