In Europe

time, Berlin's artistic and cultural climate was being shaped more and more by liberal middle-class families with a broad education, a world in which Jews played a central role. The same went for the socialist movement. Furthermore, around 1910 – in Berlin, as well as in other major European cities such as Warsaw, Krakow and Vienna – one could barely speak any longer of ‘the’ Jews. The group had become too diverse for that. You had orthodox believers and communists, atheists and racists, Zionists of all shapes and sizes, liberals and social democrats. Most of them no longer understood Yiddish, the immigrants spoke dozens of languages and dialects, and the Jews of Berlin considered themselves Germans, that above all. The great majority had become completely secularised. Of all the famous German Jews of the day, not one still had ties with the Jewish faith.
    The success of that Jewish community can still be seen in the partially restored synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, once the largest Jewish house of worship in Germany, with more than three thousand seats and an illuminated dome that was more than fifty metres high and stood out sharply against Berlin's skyline. It was a triumphal building: significant is the placement of the dome, which was built close to the street, not above the Torah as usual, to make the building stand out as much as possible. The photographs of the official opening show that everyone who was anyone in the Berlin of that day was in attendance.
    Services and concerts went on in the grand synagogue without interruption, even after the Nazi takeover in 1933. The list still hangs there: on 9 February, 1935 the concert performance of
Joy in Winter
; on 11 November, 1935 a congregational meeting on the subject of emigration; on 20 November, 1935 a benefit concert for the Jewish Winter Aid programme, featuring Ferdinand Hiller's ‘The Destruction of Jerusalem’; on 15 February, 1936 a meeting ‘To Strengthen the Cohesion of the Congregation’; on 13 March, 1938 a memorial service for the victims of the Great War; on 24 April, 1938 a performance of Händel's oratorio
Saul
.During the Kristallnacht in November 1938, the synagogue itself was saved by a brave policeman from the sixteenth precinct who, pistol in hand, chased the
Sturmabteilung
out of the already burning building. The final performance was held on 31 March, 1940: a closing concert for the Jewish Winter Aid programme.
    I come across a photograph taken in 1933. The girls’ section of the Auerbachische Orphanage, a couple of little girls playing in a children's kitchen, proudly pushing their doll around in a pram, their eyes gleaming.
    ‘Peace, solidarity and cooperation are only conceivable among peoples and nations who know who they are,’ Václav Havel, then president of Czechoslovakia, wrote a lifetime later. And here he touched upon a deep human truth. ‘If I don't know who I am, who I want to be, what I want to achieve, where I begin and where I end, then my relations with the people around me and the world at large will inevitably be tense, suspicious and burdened by an inferiority complex that may go hidden behind puffed-up bravura.’
    That applies to individuals, but also to the relations between nations, and it applies even more so to those situations in which the weaknesses of nations and of individuals more or less coincide.
    On the south-eastern side of Berlin, behind the incineration plant and the cable factories, lies Köpenick. This suburb made world news in 1906 when the unemployed cobbler Wilhelm Voigt put on an old captain's uniform, ordered a group of soldiers to follow him, occupied the town hall ‘on His Majesty's orders’ and had them hand over the municipal cash box, containing 4,000 marks.
    Later, I saw a photograph of this captain from Köpenick: an extraordinary hapless character with a cap three sizes too big for him. Köpenick tells the story of a society where the officer's cap was all-powerful, no matter who wore it. In ‘his’ city, the kaiser gave officers free rein. He insisted that his army remain free of all outside coercion. Wilhelm had increased the number of officers sevenfold, but the aristocracy remained in power. The military, in other words, did not become civilised: the civilians became militarised. The captain from Köpenick, it turned out later, had never served in the army, and had arranged the whole ruse more or less on instinct. Everyone fell for it. After centuries of