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|title=Roads to Berlin

|author=Cees Nooteboom and Laura Watkinson (Translator)

|publisher=MacLehose Press

|date=September 2012

|website=http://www.ceesnooteboom.com/?lang=en

|video=

|summary=A cultural tour de force concerning Germany and Central Europe, the changing landscape of Germany from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. It surveys politics, poetry,art and architecture as observed in the light of recent developments.

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''Whoever controls Berlin controls Germany and whoever controls Germany controls Europe'' is a remark which is attributed to Lenin. Until November 1989, the Berlin Wall bisected the historic city and divided its citizens from each other. Berlin was occupied, militarised and yet its people carried on with their daily lives amongst the ruins. Cees Nooteboom, a distinguished Dutch travel writer, knew something of the devastation of the past. He is old enough to have experienced, and at impressionable age, the Nazi Blitzkreig and occupation of Holland. A sensitive and susceptible person, he meditates upon the various strata of meaning, history, heroism and time itself. The result is a prose poem on a unique city that is condemned to be constantly developing, becoming rather than just being.