you can see the legacy of Prussia – from the neo-classical elegance of the State Opera House and the Pantheon-styled dome of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral (the Berliners’ ‘up-turned tea-cup’), to the grand columns and sweeping facades of the Humboldt University. It’s hard to imagine that this enlightened square, the Bebelplatz, was the site of the Goebbels’ book burnings. Though painful, Berlin chooses to remember: right in the centre, a glass panel in the ground peers down onto empty bookshelves. Like most memorials in Berlin, the idea is simple and clear, and the message is powerful – though with so many heads buried in phones, it’s all too easy to miss. Another collision can be found on Museumsinsel, or Museum Island. Approaching from the Lustgarten, one is immediately struck by the façade of the Berliner Dom, the grandiose Prussian attempt to rival St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Looking left or right, the traveller sees constructions testifying to the ambition of the Kaiserreich: from the vast Pergammon Museum – inside, in full, is the Ishtar Gate of Babylon – to the Stadtschlosss, or City Palace, which was begun in the 15th-century, extended by successive Hohenzollern egoists, and is now being restored, as if nodding to Mrs Merkel’s imperial pretensions.
The remains of communism scattered around the city have a dark charm
But there’s another layer to the Island. The Cathedral is pockmarked with bullet ricochets and other visible signs of the climactic, 16-day struggle for the city in the spring of 1945. The Stadtschloss is a perpetual construction site because the original was callously destroyed by the GDR in 1950 – even though the Palace was the site of the declaration of the original German Communist Republic in 1919. This monarchical structure is being built with the funds of the Bundesrepublik: the German people are eager to restore not only their ancient architectural heritage, but perhaps even a little of their pre-communist past. Not enough to ever change the names of streets like Karl Liebknecht Strasse, though. Indeed, the remains of communism scattered around the city have a dark charm. There’s the striking mural by Max Lingner to the German Worker on the walls of the former GDR House of Ministries – a building which was once the Luftwaffe headquarters and which became, ironically, the focal point for the workers’ rising of 1953 against the Stalinist regime.
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