concentration of willow, birch and poplar bush that had turned the outer, entirely unsaniert reaches of the graveyard into almost a jungle, and when eventually, after digging with their hands right down to the underlying earth, they found a fallen stone inscribed with the man’s family name, all of them wept.

Some of the Jews now living in Berlin returned in the 1950s and ’60s, many more immigrated from the Soviet Union after Glasnost, and quite a few live in the area around Hakescher Markt, which had been the Jewish quarter before the war. It was originally known as Scheunenviertel, “barn quarter”—a site, in the imperial era, of revolutionary upheaval, and in the 1920s of bohemian artistic fervour. Jews were Germany’s first multiculturalists: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesthey had come to Berlin from many European countries during the relatively tolerant Prussian and Wilhelmine eras, and fostered here the potent mix of cosmopolitan and communal identity, ­educated culture and economic muscle, liberal politics and intellectual sophistication that produced the great art and science Germany ­became known for, and which was such a threat to the Nazis. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hakescher Markt became one of hippest neighbourhoods in Berlin, Eine coole, trendie, hippe Szene. Sehr in. Eine gechillte Atmosphäre. Ilonka had suggested that I go there to experience the now slightly subdued aftermath of this heady time in a formerly rundown East Berlin neighbourhood. Today it contains more small galleries—two, sometimes three on a block—than any other neighbourhood in Berlin, and cafés and