But Berlin today has something better than the patina of age - something in the air, a magical distillate of its history of militarism, triumph, defeat, excess, guilt and, finally, contrition. It is this seductive and faintly sickening perfume that Rory MacLean has tried to capture. Not for him conventional historical writing. He considers it inadequate to the task. (Those who have read Alexandra Richie's splendid Faust's Metropolis [1998] will disagree.) MacLean's method is to look at Berlin through the lives of 23 people.

It's an interesting idea and an interesting cast, including warmonger Frederick the Great, industrialist Walter Rathenau, poison-gas chemist Fritz Haber, Hitler's architect Albert Speer, Christopher Isherwood, Marlene Dietrich, Bertolt Brecht, master manipulator Joseph Goebbels, artist Kathe Kollwitz, Leni Riefenstahl and David Bowie.

Many of the capsules are excellent, with those on Rathenau, Haber, Speer and Goebbels particularly thought-provoking. However, tying 23 balloons to a maypole called Berlin doesn't do much to explain the pole.

For example, reading about Isherwood following W.H. Auden to Berlin in search of boys or Bowie's idea that Berlin might help with his drug addiction tells us nothing new about the city. Anyway, who really gives a damn about Auden, Isherwood and boys, or about Bowie's drug addiction?

The problem with MacLean's method is that it involves going into a soppy romantic reverie and making up stuff. He doesn't just know what his subjects did: he pretends to inhabit their minds. Two examples will suffice. MacLean imagines poison-gas inventor Haber toying with a Degas statuette and agonising over his inability to have a natural, heartfelt response to art and beauty. In the next vignette, MacLean wrings every drop of sickly sentiment out of an imagined scene in which Kollwitz grieves for her son dead on the Western Front in World War I.

The full armoury of bad novelistic techniques is brought to bear. Consider these sentences, chosen from a multitude:

''Dawn casts the shadow of a vanished palace upon the mist.''

''He never liked to scribe the words, never liked to clip their wings, to fix them in time like the poor glass-eyed songbirds stuffed and mounted in the Kurfurst's Room of Wonders.''

''Death wields his scythe in every corner of the globe.''

And none of this overwrought tosh explains why in 35-odd years Berlin has gone from being the grungy-cool place that attracted creative people, through backpacker ''oh-my-god-haven't-you-been to-Berlin'' exclamations, to being a fixture on the baby boomers' European tour.

Part of the explanation is that Berlin has found a way to profit from guilt. The technique closely resembles corporate crisis management: admit everything and say you're sorry. The result is that there is scarcely a place in the city without a reference to the ghastliness of the National Socialist era, while Nazi tourism is the mainstay of the economy.

This can have perverse outcomes. For example, the hugely expensive and long argued-over monument to the Germans' Sinti and Roma victims hasn't proved popular with tourists. They seem to object to paying war reparations directly to aggressive Sinti and Roma beggars and their children.

Berlin's postwar architecture is another boomer magnet. Acres of bombed wastelands have been sandboxes for foreign architects, with some new buildings appearing to be acts of revenge on the Germans. Ever-cynical Berliners whisper they would welcome another precision strike by Avro Lancaster bombers.

And then there are the human sights. On what other public transport will you see two men chained together at the neck and naked, but for leather bondage helmets and studded jockstraps, quietly reading their newspapers?

Peter Temple is the author of the Jack Irish books. The latest adaptation, Dead Point, airs on ABC TV, Sunday, 8.30pm.