Lou had always been a master narrator, a short story writer at heart, who always lacked a producer who could transform his literary sensibilities into vinyl dramas. In fact, Lou's entire output with the Velvet Underground can be seen as a four-record passion play dealing with depravity, perversion and, ultimately, redemption….

[Berlin is] an incredibly powerful story full of depravity, emasculation, violence, suicide, detachment and anomie…. It's not an overstatement to say that Berlin will be the Sgt. Pepper of the Seventies.

Larry Sloman, "Lou Reed's New Deco-Disk: Sledge-hammer Blow to Glitterbugs," in Rolling Stone (by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. © 1973; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Issue 144, September 27, 1973, p. 18.