kept and maintained by the German government, as they are part of the city’s identity, just like the Brandenburg Gate or Checkpoint Charlie or the Reichstag. Skateboarders, she said, delight in using the monument’s great stone surfaces, some of which are gently sloped, while others have stairs and stone banisters perfectly spaced and tiered for skateboard action. For lower-income Berliners, Treptow Park, with its grassy expanses, its lake and its patches of forest, is a favoured setting for summer outings. As we walked I noted that the graffiti, ubiquitous in Berlin, are somewhat subdued here: they share stone surfaces with a sequence of Soviet realist bas-reliefs of workers and soldiers overcoming Nazi might that lines the promenade leading up to the statue.

En route to Treptow Park, Ilonka tookme first to the Jü discher Friedhof, one of Europe’s largest Jewish cemeteries and one, surprisingly, not destroyed by the Nazis. The first thing I noticed after walking through the mock-moorish style gate and administration complex was the size of the gravesites and mausoleums. They looked like scaled-down mansions and gardens. Many had walk-in-style facades of black marble or polished granite, complete with pillars and friezes, and the plots around them were arranged in the classical French garden style. Many sites were being rebuilt: before one of them, a woman had set up a tripod and was photographing the reconstruction details: the relationship between the stone, earth and plants, and the tools used to link them into a coherent whole.

The second thing that struck me was the names