Berlin is not just a European capital like any other. Yes, of course, like Paris, London and Rome, Berlin also has its wide avenues lined with buildings, monuments and statues proudly speaking of the grandeur of empires and prosperity. But Berlin is more: the scars and lessons of a tragic 20th century for Germany and for the entire world are nowhere as tangible and visible as in this city. A century earlier Heinrich Heine had written that 'we do not pick ideas, ideas pick us and enslave us to the point that we fight for them as gladiators in the arena'. A prophecy for what was to come in the 1930s and 40s, incomprehensibly dragging a nation of blossoming and undisputed culture and civility into the folly of an unequalled horror and abomination. The ruined spire of the Gedächtniskirche, the symbolically sloping Holocaust Memorial and the treacherously bucolic setting of the Wannsee villa where the 'Endlösung' for Jews was engineered in 1942 are some of the testimonies which Berlin thus confronts us with. Not to speak of the sequel tragedy of a city literally torn up like a sheet of paper, by a wall of concrete, barbed wire and mine fields, cutting in half streets, squares and even buildings. And with it, cutting also through families, loves, friendships and all other human feelings. The Wall, 'die Mauer' built by the DDR, the 'German Democratic Republic' to keep its inhabitants from fleeing, is gone now, just enough of it left standing for it never to be forgotten. But, are we in our world of today also freed of the dark prophecy of Heinrich Heine? Indeed, Berlin does more with its visitor than just display its grandeur and the creativity of its architecture, art and daily life.