Berlin at New Year

Few cities in the world carry the weight of history quite like Berlin. Scarred and rebuilt, divided and reunited, repeatedly remade yet unmistakably itself, the German capital is a place where the past is never truly buried. Its world-class museums — many gathered on the storied Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site — house collections ranging from ancient Mesopotamia to nineteenth-century European painting. Its architectural heritage spans Schinkel's Neoclassicism, the modernist experiments of the Weimar period, the monumental pretensions of the Nazi era, and the bold contemporary rebuilding of the post-reunification decades. It offers offer such a concentrated survey of how power, ideology, and aesthetics have intersected across two centuries.  

And there is, of course, the New Year itself. Berlin welcomes the turn of the year with characteristic exuberance, and to celebrate it here, in a city that has survived so much and emerged, battered but vital, is to feel its particular resonance all the more keenly.