In Europe

throne; all hope, all thought, every utterance and all writing stems from this conviction.’
    During his exile, Wilhelm stopped throwing parties. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands never once deigned to meet him. She had, people said, no desire to consort with rulers who abandoned land and army after hitting upon hard times. But Wilhelm's memoirs betray no shred of guilt. He still saw himself as the German emperor. He read everything he could about politics and psychology, and preached to his visitors, but he himself was incapable of extracting any learning from the knowledgeand experience of others. He would simply change the facts to make them fit the world of his imagination.
    Yet he was not the ogre people for so long supposed him to be, the man who had purposely paved the way for a pan-European war. He had been more of a magician's apprentice, haplessly unable to get the genie back in the bottle. Or, in the words of Winston Churchill, a ‘careless tourist [who] had flung down his burning cigarette in the ante-room of the magazine Europe had become’, then went sailing on his yacht, and upon his return found ‘the building impenetrable with smoke … His undeniable cleverness and versatility, his personal grace and vivacity, only aggravated his dangers by concealing his inadequacy,’ Churchill wrote. ‘But underneath all this posing and its trappings, was a very ordinary, vain, but on the whole well-meaning man, hoping to pass himself off as a second Frederick the Great.’
    Doorn and Berlin lay a universe apart, yet turn-of-the-century Berlin was nonetheless a reflection of that attitude towards life expressed in the packed salons at Doorn.
    According to
Berlin für Kenner
, a German Baedeker published in 1900, Berlin was ‘the most glorious city in the world … the seat of the German kaiser and the king of Prussia’, with a ‘garrison of 23,000 men’, ‘as numerous as the railway ties between Frankfurt and Berlin’, while the population had a combined balance of ‘362 million in savings in the bank’.
    At the same time, Berlin was and is a city that lurches back and forth as it moves through time, like a runaway train compartment on the Ringbahn. Midway through the twentieth century, in the 1950s, an elderly citizen of Berlin could have told you about the sleepy nineteenth century provincial city of his childhood, the imperial Berlin of his youth, the starving Berlin of 1915, the wild and roaring Berlin of the mid-1920s, the Nazi Berlin of his children, the ravaged Berlin of 1945 and the reconstructed, divided Berlin of his grandchildren. All one and the same city, all within the space of one lifetime.
    Within that period, there was half a century, from 1871 to 1918, during which Berlin bore the title of ‘imperial capital’. Standing on the banks of the Oder, fifty kilometres outside Berlin, one found oneself at the geographic centre of the German Empire, 600 kilometres from Aken and800 kilometres from Königsberg, the present-day Kaliningrad. Today that spot is marked by a Polish border post.
    Berlin was the parvenu of Europe, but the city – with the frenetic energy of all newcomers – did everything it could to make up for its lagging behind London, Paris and Rome. Even today some of the neigh-bourhoods resemble a febrile European dream: a Jugendstil villa here, something a bit Venetian there, beside it a bit of Paris or Munich, with styles and shapes filched from all over the continent. The myth of Berlin was fabricated as well: supposedly, the city had started out as a Germanic settlement, with the bear as its symbol and eponym. In actual fact, however, for the first 600 years of its existence Berlin was a purely Slavic village. Its name has nothing to do with bears, but with the Slavic word
brl
, meaning ‘swamp’. The actual connotation is something along the lines of ‘Swampy Place’, in Old Polish. Yet that, of course, is hardly the stuff of which a Great German historical tradition can be made.
    I had come to Berlin aboard the TGV and the ICE, travelling at 300kph past the villages of northern France, past cows with dungy backsides, a woman hanging the laundry, a pensive hare in a bare field.
    Next came the broad, stern German lowlands. We were cruising at 200 kph now. The passengers in the first-class compartment spoke only to their mobiles: ‘Yeah, put my name on that EP.’ ‘Take a look at whether that Fassinger order is already on the net.’
    After Wuppertal, a group