Free In Europe by Geert Mak Page A

with a red marble staircase broad enough for a horse. To the left and right of the imperial box, apostles and Electors look down on us as one; in God's eyes, all men are equal, and the emperor is more equal than all.
    As I pass by the imperial crypt, I notice that there is a celebration in progress: Elector Johan Cicero (1455–99) has been dead for precisely 500 years, and atop his spick-and-span sarcophagus – the crypt's
mise en scène
resembles nothing so much as a garage – is a fresh wreath with a lovely black ribbon. At the solemn consecration ceremony, Wilhelm promised the church leaders that he would make Berlin a second Vatican. So much has happened in this church since then – the benediction for the armiesof 1914, the weekly prayers for Hitler, Göring's wedding – that it is a miracle the building itself did not go completely – despite the heavy damage it incurred during the Second World War – by the sword.
    Then, of course, there was that other Berlin, the Berlin of the gigantic housing projects, the massive blocks of flats built around one, two or sometimes even three courtyards, hundreds of dank little apartments, beehives that stank all day of nappies and sauerkraut. Like London and Paris, Berlin experienced a population explosion: from one million inhabitants in 1870 to almost four million in 1914. In the end, almost every square metre had been built upon. The regulations handed down by the city administration were limited almost entirely to the minimum size of the courtyards: 5.34 metres square, the minimum turning circle of a horse-drawn fire engine. The term ‘housing blocks’ says it all: red and ochre piles of shoeboxes that overran the city, inhabited not by individual families, but by ‘the masses’.
    Hobrecht's vision of the integrated city had come to naught: the 1912 edition of the
Bärenführer
advised ‘adventuresome’ visitors to take a ride on the Ringbahn, to catch a glimpse of ‘that other Berlin’, where ‘hoi polloi’ lived. In my research, I came across a written complaint filed by residents of the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood concerning the lack of toilets. The reply from the Prussian civil servant stated that ‘an average bowel movement takes three to four minutes, including the time needed to arrange one's clothing’ and that ‘even if the bowel movement were to take ten minutes, the twelve hours in a day leave sufficient time for seventy-two persons to make use of the toilet.’
    Berlin had a reputation as one of the cleanest, most efficient and best-maintained cities in Europe, but the city also had something chilly about it. The Polish writer Jósef Kraszewski saw streets full of soldiers walking along ‘like machines’, with measured tread, but what was more: ‘their demeanour was mimicked by the corner merchant, the coachman, the doorman, even the beggar.’ It was a city, he wrote, that was orderly, obedient and disciplined, ‘as in an ongoing state of siege’.
    Today, in early 1999, all that has changed. West and East Berlin are now doing their cautious best to become reacquainted, like a couple following a long separation. In clothing and lifestyle the citizens of Berlin are heading inch by inch towards rapprochement, but chaos still reigns inthe shared household. Drivers from West Berlin keep colliding with the trams of the East, a phenomenon they forgot about long ago. The sewers of East Berlin regularly produce huge potholes in the streets; amid the victorious class struggle, the communist authorities of the last half-century forgot that the city's subterranean pipes and tunnels needed some occasional maintenance. Sometimes a water main will burst, and huge geysers will blow in the midst of traffic.
    Just outside the door of the Dom stands a weathered chunk of concrete. Once it was a monument to commemorate anti-fascist resistance by the city's young communists: ‘United always in friendship with the Soviet Union.’ Now it has been put up on four