Lilly Nelly Aphrodite is an unlikely screen idol. Her mother, a cabaret dancer, is killed by her father when caught in flagrante with the philosophy student in the next apartment. The lover shoots dead the husband and baby Lilly is alone in the world. Rejected by her adoptive parents, she is sent to an orphanage run by Sister August, a beautiful, six-foot-two nun. She arrives on her third birthday with only a manila envelope containing personal papers and a doll with a wind-up smile.

From that moment we are entranced by the character that Beatrice Colin creates and the world she inhabits: the Kaiser’s Berlin before and during the first world war and then the decadent aftermath that was the Weimar Republic. Lilly grows up to become a silent movie star in what was the biggest national film industry outside Hollywood. Her ability to convey emotion with the smallest movement makes her a natural in the new medium. Expressive grey eyes and a certain melancholy mean Lilly “brings gravitas to any part, however trite”.

Free from the prudish American censor, German cinema in the 20s and 30s explored sexuality, including homosexuality, with a candour that shocked audiences across the Atlantic. Marlene Dietrich’s androgyny was not simply a fashion statement, she really did have female lovers, as did Louise Brooks, she of the iconic bob, who moved from Hollywood to Berlin to find more challenging roles. Modern art movements, especially expressionism, influenced the early cinema of the country, which in turn inspired American film noir and horror.

Meticulously researched by Colin, a Glaswegian novelist whose family were themselves immigrants from Russia via Berlin, the Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite shows early 20th-century Berlin as a magical but harsh imperial city whose suffering from 1914 to 1918 is seldom acknowledged in this country.

Lilly picks blooms from the orphanage rose garden and sneaks over the wall at night to sell them to courting couples in nightclubs. With her friend Hanne, she saves the rose money in a tobacco tin and they plot their escape.

But life outside is harder. Lilly is sacked from her position as a lady’s maid after being raped by her aristocratic employer’s feckless husband. When the war begins, Lilly and Hanne are working in The Blue Cat bar and living in a room so cold they wear boots and overcoats until bedtime. When the English blockade the ports, they survive on black coffee and unappetising Kaiser bread, made with potato and rye flour and “spread with a block of lard”. Then they have no jobs and no money and live on turnips.

Hanne follows the soldiers to the front and returns with a bag crammed with cash in various currencies. Lilly remains in Berlin, respectable but starving. In one memorable scene she watches as a carthorse collapses dead in the street and the crowd descends on it with knives and bowls. We hear of the Battle of the Somme as it affected the other side: women gather around the Reichstag where a list of those missing presumed dead is pinned up once a week.

How Lilly survives turnips and the cold to become the leading silent movie star of her day drives the narrative of this book. The fictional actress overlaps with the real-life Dietrich and other, forgotten stars of the early screen, such as Henny Porten, who was persecuted after 1933 for marrying a Jew. Lilly even has her own von Sternberg, whose pioneering use of lighting made Dietrich an icon. And instead of the masterpiece Metropolis, Colin gives us Kinetic, which is launched at a sumptuous party where cocktails are served by cardboard robots.

But this is not fact dressed as fiction. While Dietrich entertained allied troops in Europe, such was her loathing of the Nazi regime, Lilly’s relationship with the Nazis is more complex and hesitant — as it was for many in the industry.

In the hands of a lesser writer Lilly’s misfortunes could have strayed on to sentimental ground. But Colin’s eye for the quirky detail and the intelligence of her imagination never allow this to happen. The storytelling is masterful and the language magical. The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite is a rich book, in both its prose and in the strength of its characters, whose lives cross in the chaos of war and its brief, glittering aftermath.

Beatrice Colin will read and sign copies of The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite in Waterstone’s, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, on August 7 at 6.30pm. The book is published by John Murray.

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist