Berlin has always been a Faustian metropolis
Each time I return to Berlin, the wonderful, awful city where I spent the best days of my misspent youth, I pay a sentimental visit to Grolmanstrasse, where my German grandparents used to live. There isn’t much left to look at. Their apartment block was destroyed in 1945 in the Battle of Berlin. The site where it stood is now occupied by a children’s playground. For me, that empty space seems to symbolize the way Berlin has changed — mainly for the better, but at enormous human cost. So much has vanished — not just the buildings, but also the people who inhabited them. For my children’s generation, Berlin is a party town. For me, it’s a city full of ghosts. It is these ghosts that keep bringing me back to Germany’s battered, bombastic capital.
