The “selling” of cities (like nearly everything else) has a long history. It depends on the manipulation of deeply rooted myths and symbols. The editors of this volume therefore argue that historians should contribute to the study of urban marketing. To that end, they have collected essays that reveal the variety of efforts to stamp Berlin with particular identities. Berlin is an obvious choice for a study of the diversity of urban images and image-making. Whereas Berlin's marketers have sometimes envied the strength and stability of the image of Paris, Berlin's turbulent history has guaranteed that its identity—in the eyes of its own citizens, other Germans, and foreigners—has been frequently reinvented.

The book comprises an introduction and twenty-one essays (two in English). Its present-mindedness is most apparent in the later essays, including one by a politician and city marketer (Volker Hassemer) and another by an active architect (Thomas Albrecht). Since the book's topic is framed by twenty-first-century concerns, it is no surprise that the earlier chapters are rather diffuse. The first five essays, on the royal capital during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, offer fragments of an early history of “selling Berlin.” Melanie Mertens looks at Friedrich Wilhelm I, the Prussian king least likely to be thought of as a booster. She argues that it was with an eye to his capital's image that he promoted not only the endless drills of his soldiers but also the expansion of Friedrichstadt in the 1730s, which produced impressive baroque streetscapes intended to impress and attract foreigners. Daniel Schönpflug examines the tentative and partial inclusion of the citizenry in eighteenth-century royal wedding ceremonies. Thomas Biskup shows that by the late eighteenth century, Berlin boosters such as Friedrich Nicolai were recasting the image of a city built on Brandenburg sand from a symbol of poverty and instability into an unlikely success story. Marc Schalenberg looks at early nineteenth-century verbal and visual descriptions of the city, and Esther Kilchmann presents Heinrich Heine's Berlin letters as the work of a gently subversive flaneur.

More recognizable efforts at city marketing emerged by the late nineteenth century. Tilmann von Stockhausen's brief history of the museum island argues that as early as the nineteenth century, museum professionals recognized that they were marketing a brand. Katya Zelljadt's essay (in English) describes a key turning point in the use of urban history: the turn-of-the-twentieth-century invention of “Old Berlin” as a golden age intended to cement a local identity (and to sell beer as well). Peter Fritzsche suggests (also in English) how his well-known work on the Berlin press can be read as a contribution to the study of the creation of local identity. Jan Rüger looks at Berlin humor during World War I and Christian Saehrendt at the ways war memorials were planned with an eye to tourists during the following years. Daniel Kiecol's essay on the 1920s introduces the organizational history of tourism promotion and sketches the tensions between public and private institutions. Robert Graf's essay, the only one on the Third Reich, argues that the regime's plans for Berlin (including Albert Speer's famous reconstruction project) were all about putting the city on display for a domestic and international audience.

Defeat and division introduced a drastically revised set of political, economic, and aesthetic needs. Stephanie Warnke describes how guidebooks portrayed and compared reconstruction in east and west. Alexander Sedlmaier points to east-west competition in the realm of consumption during an era when each half-city claimed to offer (sometimes literally) the display window of its side of the Cold War. Hendrik Tieben's essay examines architectural projects keyed to the divided city's competing celebrations of its 750th anniversary in 1987, while Angela Borgwardt reveals the GDR regime's futile efforts to uphold its monopoly on the creation of an image of “Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic” in the face of subversive portraits offered by critical intellectuals and artists. The book's final section, on the post-unification 1990s, is also a story of officials struggling to achieve partial success in their efforts to frame the image of a new Berlin. Alexa Färber compares the promotion of Berlin as the bustling hub of eastern and western Europe to the emerging counterimage of a city of dropouts and losers. Sybille Frank's look at Potsdamer Platz reminds us of the use of the myth of the golden 1920s as a real-estate marketing tool.

The title of David Midgely's concluding observations, “Berlin as palimpsest,” calls attention to the many ways Berlin has been simultaneously rebuilt and relabeled. A study of the marketing of Paris might tell us how much that city's persistent image has depended on conscious efforts to promote it. The same question can be asked of Berlin, but it must take account of the astonishing variety of changing and competing images the city has presented to the world. In placing this wide range of topics between the covers of a single book, the editors invite readers to contemplate the many forces—public and private, boosterish and oppositional—that contribute to framing a city's image. Indeed, the book as a whole is best appreciated as such an invitation, since the job of putting the pieces together is left largely to the reader.