SOURCE: Kazin, Alfred. “Leaves from under the Lindens.” New York Herald Tribune Books (12 March 1939): 10.

In the following review, Kazin views Goodbye to Berlin as an accurate portrayal of Berlin in the years before World War II.

There are cities lost in history, like Sodom, Jerusalem and Confederate Richmond, which were once capitals of some national spirit and whose grandeur has been so mixed with time that they remain mysterious even when the legends they sprouted have grown dull. Today there are cities, somehow always capital spirits incased in the monuments of office, that are far to the present. They have become a new Sargasso Sea, choked with hopes and portents and anxious rumors, and no one knows better than their own citizens, eagerly clutching any foreign newspaper, how many phantoms trouble the voyager and how easy it is to see many-headed monsters rising out of the sea.

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