In Europe

the
Kampfbund
, the
Deutscher Ring
, the
Deutsches Tagblatt
, and all are marked with the inevitable swastikas cut deeply these days into every bark.’
    Joseph Roth also wrote a striking piece about meeting an old worker who had just been freed after fifty-one years in prison. He had skipped half a century: the final quarter of the nineteenth century and the firstquarter of the twentieth. In line with his own sense of propriety, this nineteenth-century man went out onto the busy streets in search of work. He had barely noticed the First World War, he had never ridden in the U-Bahn, never seen a car – let alone a plane – and suddenly all of modern Berlin came crashing down on him. He had not been gone for half a century, no, it seemed more like three.
    And now here I am, three quarters of a century further, and I feel almost as lost as that old prisoner who recognised nothing of his old home town. In 1999 one can search long and fruitlessly for the Berlin of the 1920s, for all the old cafés, restaurants, shops, department stores, boarding houses and attic apartments, for the wild city of Brecht, Lotte Lenya, Erich Kästner, Roth and all the others.
    Where the Romanisches Café once stood there is now a complex of offices and middle-class residences built in the 1950s. All that is left of old Nollendorfplatz is the pump for watering horses, dating from the days of the kaiser. Along the long stretch of Bülowstrasse behind it, no more than ten pre-war houses are still standing. The busy working-class neighbour-hoods have vanished, replaced now with a great deal of greenery, they have become quiet, park-like districts. The façade of Tietz's department store is still standing, as is the lower level of the Jannowitzbrücke S-Bahn station, although the sound of the train whistles, the steam and the promise of the steel tracks is gone now. Only the old Hackescher Markt station is intact, a red-brick construction with wrought-iron archways and stonework ornaments that have survived this century as though by a miracle.
    Where, then, is all the rest? Quite simple: today most of that Berlin lies in the Grunewald woods. It is covered by trees and bushes, a pile of rubble more than a hundred metres high, the Teufelsberg. Here and there a few chunks of cement stick out of the ground, a piece of marble, a rusted pipe. In the distance the new city sparkles in the afternoon sun. One hears a bird singing, a little boy's voice, the barking of a dog, the snapping of a twig. In that silence, the old Berlin lies buried.
    The Russian embassy is a hundred-metre-long chunk of Stalin along Unter den Linden, built in the early 1950s. It is a boot heel, designed to pushBerlin as far into the ground as possible. Power, grandiosity and indomitability, that is the message shouted to the street by the hard granite, the overbearing façade and the staunch pillars. The building stands on the site of the old embassy, the elegant Courland Palace, famous for the most extravagant rococo hall in Berlin. That exquisite, light-green marble now lies beneath the rubble at Grunewald as well.
    These days the embassy swimming pool is open to the public. The good people of Berlin swim laps there while the poolside statue of Lenin stares off into the distance over their heads. Russia is now in dire need of added revenue. When the first Soviet ambassador, Adolf Ioffe, arrived here in April 1918, he had with him a red flag and twelve million marks in starting capital for propaganda work. Berlin, in Lenin's view, would ultimately become the capital of the worldwide revolution. The German's subsidy for his revolution was now being turned against Germany itself. The embassy personnel hung up a huge banner right after Ioffe arrived: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ Books, newspapers and pamphlets followed by the carload. Along with them there arrived new personnel, solicited and unsolicited: revolutionaries, adventurers, profiteers from the old Russia, bureaucrats from the new. Much of the antique furniture, many tapestries, chandeliers and paintings evaporated onto the black market. The use of weapons in the building became a serious problem: almost everyone carried a pistol, to ‘defend the revolution’.
    Despite this chaos, the Soviet embassy was one of the most important diplomatic posts for a defeated Germany. Berlin viewed with extreme interest everything that happened in and around the new revolutionary state. Here, perhaps, lay the future for German