For my thirtieth birthday, J had organised a surprise trip. This time, unlike so many others, she managed to keep the details a perfect secret for three whole months.

Köln (Cologne)

When work started in 1248 on the Kölner Dom – better known to anglophones as Cologne Cathedral – few of the craftspeople would have expected it to remain unfinished for over six centuries.

The thirteenth century was a high point for Gothic cathedral architecture. Laon had just been finished, Reims and Chartres were under reconstruction. Durham and Rouen were already half complete, Notre Dame de Paris and Strasbourg were well on the way and foundations were laid at Amiens.

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Köln and Bonn

I turned 30 and J managed to organise and then keep a special surprise secret for three whole months!

The Köln project however was destined to stall, like its contemporary at Beauvais and those of later periods at Valladolid, Sagrada Familia, St John the Divine.

Work progressed relatively smoothly for over two centuries until what appears to have been “a lack of money and interest” meant that tools were downed for almost four centuries.

The crane erected on the south tower, which appears in famous medieval paintings such as Memling’s Legend of St Ursula, could still be seen in the late 1800s, when massive civic fundraising saw the Dom finally completed, 632 years on.

Bonn

Local hero Konrad Adenauer was designated Mayor of Köln after the war in 1945. He was soon dismissed for alleged incompetence, though he later managed to run West Germany competently enough for fourteen years.

Under Adenauer’s leadership, West Germany rebuilt itself rapidly, eventually dominating the western European economic sphere. The Chancellor helped his own region, installing his government and civil service in Bonn to the surprise of many Germans.

Though Berlin is now once more the capital of reunified Germany, Bonn retains considerable government business and thus its starchy character.

A curious place, then, to find an extraordinary exhibition of paintings and drawings by the painter Amedeo Modigliani.

Source: modigliani-foundation.org

Questa specie d’amore

Modigliani, who verily personified the Candle That Burns Brightest, died poor, sick and largely unrecognised in 1920. This tragic Italian, ever aloof and dissipated by alcohol, left behind an huge number of works that have since been scattered across the globe.

And tragedy, left by the Greeks, enjoyed by the Romans and adopted by the Italians, is never far from the eyeless faces of Modigliani’s figures.

In his nudes, the undulating beauty of line accentuates a peachy softness in the shading of the cheeks, the hips and the breasts. In his figures, there is simplicity, piety and just a hint of priggishness.

His faces are rarely so carefree, never so relaxed. In them there is the animation of life itself: love, infatuation, fear, vulnerability: the myriad shades of thought and personality.

One of Modigliani’s models once said that the artists never asked for a particular pose: he would just paint what he saw.

And the artist, who distilled all his own emotions into his paintings, whose frenzied activity hastened his end, he surely saw everything.

Berlin is a city of strong contrasts and illogical progressions. Graffiti-covered artist squats to cool, glassy government buildings. Triumphant neo-classical architecture to empty plots of weedy wasteland.

Enlightenment, growth, political extremism, the Wall, enlightenment and growth again. It all comes out in the wash.

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Berlin

Everywhere you go in the German capital, there's a reminder of the past and a vision of the future.

Larger Map at GoogleMaps

The merits of grandeur

It was probably the restless Frederick II, ‘the Great’ to his friends, who really put Berlin on the map.

Rapidly expanding the patchwork kingdom of Prussia, Frederick’s mix of war and risky brinksmanship cemented Berlin as the capital of a grand European power. He also sealed the authority of the Hohenzollerns until 1918, when the aristocratic imperative vanished everywhere.

Frederick’s influence in Berlin is still clear today in the form of the Sankt-Hedwigs-Kathedrale, the art collection of the Gemäldegalerie and famously the Sanssouci Palace in nearby Potsdam.

Burning down the house

On the night of 27th February 1933,  the Reichstag – the parliament building of the German Empire – was attacked by arsonists, quickly judged to be Communist conspirators.

With the Communists expelled from government, the Nazis gained the parliamentary majority. Just five months later, they managed to make the Nazi party the only legal party in Germany.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The walls came crashing in, so they built a new one

The shattered German forces fought hard for Berlin in April 1945. Surrender to the Russians, by now pressing hard down upon them, was a terrifying prospect when the western Allies were mere miles away.

Stalin’s alliance with his western counterparts was uneasy and, already thinking of the future, he urged Zhukov to push rapidly into Berlin. He needn’t have worried: Eisenhower had decided to back off Berlin due to the risk of friendly fire.

The Soviets moved into the suburbs of Berlin during the third week of April, facing opposition from soldiers, many of them children and old men. By May 1st or thereabouts, they had captured the Reichstag. In July, at a conference between the Allies in Potsdam, the city and the nation as a whole were carved up into zones under the control of each Allied victor.

Though the fledgling East German state, under Soviet supervision, was tied to a democratic process by wartime Allied agreements, in practice democracy was nominal since all parties were members of a coalition controlled by the ruling SED.

The SED gradually cemented their political power, using mass organisations and the coalition to secure an absolute majority, but it faced growing social unrest. The population also steadily decreased as East Germans headed west.

By 1950, the SED leaders had decided to act upon their growing paranoia by creating the Ministry for State Security, better known as the ‘Stasi’. Later, borders were restricted and closed altogether when it became clear that as much as 20% of the population had left. The time of the Berlin Wall had arrived.

Museums and galleries

Berlin can be justly proud of its remarkably diverse array of museums, by no means all of which we managed to visit during our short trip. I have written separate articles on three of them:

• Gemäldegalerie – houses the city’s collection of older art works from the 13th to the 18th century;
• Pergamonmuseum – is a testament to the history not only of earlier civilisations but of German archaeology itself
• Stasimuseum – the headquarters of the former East German Ministry for State Security (the Stasi) is now a museum and a chilling reminder of the all too recent past

Modern memory

Berlin never seems to tire of memorials. It has, after all, a lot of recent history to chew over.

There was insufficient time to reflect on the rise and fall of Nazism, the genocide of Jews and minorities, the second total war to involve the nation. Insufficient time indeed before the ideological division between East and West became a daily reality that diverted the attention of Berliners and the world at large. Even now Berlin seems ever to be racing on ahead.

A relic of 1905, the Berliner Dom seems to me seems incredibly lonely, even embarassed by its neo-Renaissance silhouette. It has been set adrift on the Spree like an exotic, useless ark.

Lonely too are the crosses dedicated to Easterners who tried and failed to swim to freedom further downriver. The backdrop for these crosses is the massive and shining new government Bibliothek, a massive and shining irony that these lost souls cannot share.

And yet Berlin is always restless, youthful, uneasy. It suffers none of the constipation of other administrative capitals. In Berlin, even the past is memorialised by the future.

A case in point is the centre now being built over the site of the SS and Gestapo headquarters. This innovative building itself will break new ground whilst marking the ground below it. In the same way, Berlin’s oldest art works are housed in the newest buildings. And a monument to Jewish suffering is abstract, postmodern and – in my opinion at least – rather unrepresentative.

What may be the enduring truth, the justification for all the monuments and plaques, is that somewhere in amongst all the glass and concrete of Berlin’s architectural future, there is the sad truth that the twentieth century has cut off the city from the rest of its past.

Though the fledgling East German state was tied to a democratic process by wartime Allied agreements, in practice democracy was nominal since all parties were members of a coalition controlled by the ruling SED.

The SED gradually cemented their political power, using peoples’ organisations and the coalition to secure an absolute majority in the volkskammer.

By 1950, the SED leaders had decided to act upon their growing paranoia. The people had shown considerable and increasing dissent towards the political process and the population had already begun to decrease through outflows to the West.

The Ministry for State Security was founded the same year and soon became known by its famous abbreviation ‘Stasi’ (Staatsicherheit). With its bureaucratic base in the enormous, monolithic headquarters at Lichtenberg, the Stasi instituted a reign of fear that lasted almost forty years.

The sword and the shield

With funding thought to be about 3% of total government expenditure, the Stasi established itself in every nook and cranny of East Germany, until there was truly nowhere to hide.

The museum that now occupies Haus 1 of the Lichtenberg complex, run by the Anti-Stalinist Action Normannenstraße (ASTAK), has numerous exhibits that show the extent and the extremes of the Stasi’s power.

Wherever citizens went, the Stasi was secretly gathering evidence: photographing them with bizarre devices, entering their homes, bottling their scent, tracking them with dogs.

When you left for work in the morning, you couldn’t be certain that someone hadn’t entered your house to collect samples during the day. Then, while you were waiting for the bus, any car that passed by might have a film camera rolling inside the passenger door. If you asked someone the time, you were implicating them in your suspicious activities. If your colleague turned up to your office wearing a nice new tie, you couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a camera embedded in it.

Every investigation into every citizen generated a file of paperwork. Every file wound up in the concrete blocks of Normannenstraße. It is estimated that there are in excess of 33 million pages in these files.

The banality of evil

Such an operation required a fastidious sort of manager. That manager was Erich Mielke, a man who had instructions for the layout and composition of his daily breakfast typed out and communicated to the relevant parties.

When Mielke left for work in leafy Wandlitz, he could be confident that no-one was watching him. Probably.

Mielke operated the long arm of the state from his office on the first floor of Haus 1. The office is frozen haplessly in time: all brown carpets, nicotine-stained ceilings and amateurish watercolour paintings.

And when not busy persecuting citizens and sponsoring death squads, Mielke supported his beloved FC Dynamo, grooming players as spies and fixing their matches.

Breaking down the door to democracy

The resonating frequencies of glasnost fell largely on deaf ears among the East German authorities. The people however had heard them loud and clear.

On 15 January 1990, a crowd swept through the gates of Normannenstraße. Few doubted then that the surveillance state’s days were numbered.

Where once visitors might have noted framed photographs of bemedalled officials on the walls of Haus 1, today there are photographs of graffiti and angry faces young and old.

Nevertheless, as with seemingly everything in the brief history of East Germany, there was a twist in the tale. So deeply embedded was the Stasi in the fabric of society that it managed to place people in the crowd of protesters, people who had been briefed to destroy documents.

Indeed we know today that the Stasi machine had a considerable hand in destroying itself.

Occupying the lower flanks of a deep green valley, through which the Rur river flows frothy the colour of beer, old Monschau seems almost hidden away.

Barely a few kilometres from the Belgian border, this little town of timber frame houses embodies the very notion of traditional, upland Germany.

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Monschau and Vogelsang

This wild and wintry corner of Germany is home to icy clear rivers, thick woodland, quaint villages of timber frame houses and the odd Nazi training camp.

A cold wind pours sleet on the streets, forcing visitors into warm, bright pubs advertised by black letter signs. Inside these cosy salons, below walls covered by old newspaper cuttings, celebrity photos and an array of antlers, folks sit with pink faces nursing a cup of Glühwein.

The precarious position of some warped old houses over the Rur might well seem like a metaphor for Monschau’s relationship with touristic cliché.

For at the weekend, Monschau bustles with strolling, felt-hatted couples dressed in taupe and walking enormous dogs.

The yellow lights of shops illuminate displays of collectors’ toys, cold weather garments and local speciality foods.

Stay until Monday, though, and you would think yourself the only living entity in a silent, shut-away town. All doors are closed and every footstep echoes on the shiny cobbles. There’s even something vaguely sinister about the place, like the inevitable dark side of every Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.

Ordensburg Vogelsang

Climbing north from Monschau into the Eifel National Park, the countryside grows increasingly dramatic. Wild plateaux of bent over brown grasses tumble suddenly down thickly forested precipices into lakes and rivers far below.

On the edge of one such plateau, alike in austerity if not beauty, silently stands a forbidding complex of buildings incongruously named Vogelsang (“birdsong”). There is something vaguely familiar about the appearance and type of these long, low blocks, their dark grey-brown stone blending with the bleak landscape. All of a sudden a foreboding symbol on one wall makes clear Vogelsang’s origins: it is a large, strident stone eagle.

Between 1936 and 1939, Vogelsang was a training camp for the youth of Hitler’s Third Reich. The alumni of this windswept outpost would be the future propagators of the National Socialist ideal. The idea was to take each ‘junker’ and instill in him the rhetoric of race theory and physical discipline.

The outbreak of war postponed the junker programme at Vogelsang and as it turned out, indefinitely so. Used sporadically in the years that followed, the camp was bombed by Allied forces in 1944, presumably because it was considered of sufficient strategic importance in the German Westwall (or “Siegfried Line”), the defence perimeter of the Fatherland.

Nevertheless, these air raids did not do the intended damage and when the Americans finally arrived a year later, after a famously difficult campaign in the Hürtgenwald nearby, Vogelsang was still largely intact.

Vogelsang was thereafter controlled by NATO and the land on which it stood was under Belgian sovereignty until 2006, when the site was vacated and returned once more to the German state.

The camp today can be visited “as a reminder and warning to practise tolerance and humanity” though it seems plain so soon after taking receipt that its custodians are still very much thinking about what to do with it.

When Charlemagne died in early 814, he left behind him the strongest empire known to Western Europe since that of the Romans. Barely a generation later, it had been dissolved.

The wholesale division of territories among the royal issue led to weakness and fragmentation. In the case of the Carolingian empire, the sum of the whole had been greater than the parts.

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Dutch Limburg

Part of a day trip that included the medieval town of Valkenburg and Maastricht, the birthplace of the European Union.

Nevertheless, this carving up of land gave us a prototype of modern Europe. The transition from tribes to feudal kingdoms to nation states had begun.

Valkenberg

Where the plains of Flanders spread east towards the Rhine, the land rises in sudden bursts in a series of wooded valleys. As we saw in Geraardsbergen, hills in this part of the world are prized assets. In Valkenburg, the ruined castle sits atop one such steep incline above the houses, cafes and shops.

With a long and painful history of sieges, the latest of which is being mounted by determined tourists, the town has settled into a quieter pace of life after centuries as a major city of Dutch Limburg.

Maastricht

This fine city, cleaved by the great river Maas (to francophone Belgians, it’s the Meuse), was no easier to navigate in the car despite the fact that J passed through here on her Grand Tour in 1996.

No matter, for we eventually managed to park and headed into the streets on a hot summer’s afternoon. In the Vrijthof, there appeared to be a boules tournament in progress. We later learned that this is a major international event, as far as the game of boules goes, anyway.

As we paced around, J’s memory occasionally sputtered into life like a knackered engine. She would remember the minutest detail while the general topography mysteriously eluded her.

We lunched at Brasserie Britannique, not because we were missing Britain, but because I had spied a rather natty looking croque madame and, less importantly, it brought back memories of the UK’s rather naff diplomacy in ’92.

For no Briton over the age of, say, 20 (except perhaps J with her memory being what it is) will hear the name Maastricht without remembering something about the Treaty of the European Union signed there, whose rubric included the foundation of the Euro.

That was also the beginning of a slow, ugly decline for the Conservative Party, the resuscitation of which may be complete in 2009 when Britain will vote to rid itself of the cretinous Gordon Brown and cronies.

Aachen

It may be somewhat unfair to suggest that, apart from its marvellous Carolingian heritage site, there isn’t much else going for Aachen, or Aix-La-Chapelle as it has also sometimes been known. That’s just how it seemed to J and I as we arrived from Maastricht during the late afternoon.

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Aachen

Once the seat of Charlemagne's empire, Germany's westernmost city still boasts his stunning cathedral his rather more modest throne.

Charlemagne liked the hot springs so much that he stayed and ruled his empire from here every winter from 768, living late into his 60s. It is strangely edifying to imagine perhaps the greatest leader of the Middle Ages gingerly dipping his toes into the 70-plus degree waters.

Subsequent kings of the Holy Roman Empire were crowned in Aachen throughout the course of the next half-millennium at the world-famous cathedral he founded, about which more in a moment.

Indeed, the city’s history is long, distinguished and notably cosmopolitan. It sits on Germany’s border with Belgium and the Netherlands. In modern times, it is twinned with two other heavyweight cathedral cities, Toledo and Reims. More dubiously, it is also twinned with Halifax, West Yorkshire.

Aachen Cathedral

The great kaiserdom was one of the earliest, and one would expect one of the more easily acknowledged, proposals for UNESCO World Heritage status. Stepping inside, we began our fourth visit to a UNESCO site this year.

Built in 792, this is the oldest cathedral in Northern Europe. With a richly diverse mix of architectural styles and decoration, it is certainly one of the most beautiful.

The beautiful interior dazzles visitors, in contrast to the simple, rather sober, marble throne on which Charlemagne sat in one of the upper galleries.

The lofty, domed Palatine Chapel dominates the overall plan. The chapel was Charlemagne’s own chapel and it appears to have been modelled to some extent on the basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, a building the well-travelled King probably knew well.

Such was the headline at the El Pais website this morning.

There can be little doubt that Spain was consistently the best team on the field in Euro 2008, playing their entertaining brand of fútbol total.

In a thrilling climax to a tournament full of surprises – exciting turns from Russia and Croatia, spectacular deadline management from Turkey, Germany actually reaching the final – the crowning Spanish success spelled the end of a forty four year drought of major championship titles.

Perhaps this is also a changing of the guard at the head of European football. Whilst Italy and Germany both looked stale, the Dutch failed to live up to early expectations and France, bof, il vaut mieux ne rien dire.

Better for football, better for Europe.

• Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
• Austria, 2007
• 

A busy master forger, Salomon Sorowitsch is a man with little concern for political ideals. And that’s what keeps him alive when war breaks out and he ends up in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Receiving preferential treatment to other prisoners, Sorowitsch is given the task of forging the currency that will keep the Nazi war effort alive and ruin the Allies’ economies. Put simply, it’s a case of “(y)our money or your life”.

The balance of principles and survival adds massively to the tension of the movie. We are never left in any doubt that Sorowitsch and his colleagues are moments from the same fate as those over the wall. As a result the film feels much weightier than its mere 98 minutes.

Karl Markovics is an agreeably grim Sorowitsch. An opportunist with few redeeming features, but in the circumstances, we still find ourselves rooting for him even though other characters perhaps deserve more regard. Sachsenhausen is certainly no place for lofty words, yet oddly it brings Sorowitsch a sort of redemption.

• Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
• Germany, 2006
• 

Crass Hollywood remakes of European art film aren’t often successful. The big budgets, the bigger country and the biggest names tend to kill off every single cell of zeitgeist in the original. And I can see that happening here, when they get sad-jowled Nicolas Cage to emote all over this one.

A Stasi official instigates a surveillance operation on a successful playwright. Beginning with an implacable dedication to finding the evidence he needs to condemn his subject, the official instead grows to respect and perhaps envy him, with difficult consequences for both.

The Lives of Others is steeped in atmosphere, the performances are beautifully restrained and the material is worryingly relevant to our times. Top that, Weinstein. Or rather, don’t bother.