In Europe

oak staircase, always smells of beeswax. The hall is covered in golden curlicues, forms in stucco and plaster. The balcony is held on high by two nymphs. The portico to the neighbour's house, with its profusion of marble, borders on the royal. Above the landing are two blank coats of arms. The façade is punctuatedby half-pillars. The copper nameplates beside the massive front door blare the message; this is a house for dentists, doctors, insurance agents and a respectable widow, who takes in boarders.
    This street is one great cultural derivation: Berlin's nouveau riche copied their emperor's style in the same way that their emperor copied his from the capitals of a more ancient Europe. They were built this way everywhere in the better neighbourhoods, the apartment buildings with a gateway for carriages – used, in actual fact, only by the coal merchant or milkman – the impressive vestibules and palatial stairways, the divided stateliness of a façade, the cut-rate grandeur.
    In this campaign for glory, Kaiser Wilhelm himself set the tone. The whole city was permeated with his romanticised view of history. Wilhelm's hand could be seen everywhere: in the countless statues of winged deities, in the many museums, in the thirty-five neo-Gothic churches – one of the empress’ hobbies – in the thousands of oak leaves, laurel wreaths and other ‘national’ symbols, in the copper statue of the city's pudgy pseudo-goddess, Berolina, at Alexanderplatz, in the Siegfrieds with their imperial swords, in the Germanias with their triumphal chariots. London and Paris had long histories, but Berlin lacked continuity; these instant monuments served to fill the historical vacuum.
    Wilhelm was deeply impressed by his arch rival England and copied whatever he could: Kew Gardens at Lichterfelde, Oxford at Dahlem, the famous Round Reading Room of the British Museum in his own Kaiserliche Bibliothek. But everything, of course, had to be bigger than its counterpart in England. At the Tiergarten, as an eternal tribute to his ancestors – but above all to himself – he had built the 700-metre-long Siegesallee, lined with marble statuary. That eternity, by the way, did not last long: the marble statues of the Electors (which Wilhelm felt looked ‘as though made by Michelangelo’) were tossed into the Landwehrkanal not long after the Second World War; today, a few of them have been dredged up and brought back to the Siegesallee and the Tiergarten.
    Wilhelm had a specific objective in all this, of course. As Germany made its ascent it was not only faced with the same conflicts seen in Great Britain and France, but it was also one of Europe's youngest nations. When Wilhelm II took the throne in 1888, the country was less than twenty years old. Most of its inhabitants did not even consider themselves Germans;they were Saxons, Prussians or Württembergers. Every town, every valley had its own dialect. Only the upper class spoke High German; when travelling, middle-class Germans had trouble understanding each other. The local courts at Munich, Dresden and Weimar still maintained their royal status, with jealously guarded ranks and privileges. Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony and Baden had their own armies, their own currencies and postage stamps, and even their own diplomatic services.
    At the same time, young Germany had major ambitions in the field of international politics. Europe had been living in relative peace for decades, a situation often summarised by the phrase ‘inside Europe, balance rules; outside Europe, Britain rules’. The great Prussian chancellor Bismarck's sole objective was to make a united Germany's new-found power a part of that system, and at first he succeeded wonderfully well. With patience and wisdom he had allowed Europe to grow accustomed to the new configuration. He had circumvented the major risks: an alliance between Russia and France which would have locked Germany in from both sides, and the disruptive potential of the perpetual issue of the Balkans, to say nothing of the danger of Germany being dragged into a possible war between Russia and Austria. Bismarck's Germany was, as the diplomat and author Sebastian Haffner put it, a contented nation.
    In 1890, Bismarck was bumped aside by the young Wilhelm, effectively putting an end to the politics of patience and caution. The kaiser and his new ministers represented a discontented, restless, misunderstood Germany. Just as the eighteenth century had been