Berlin is not a city of tall buildings. From the rooftop of the newest presence in its skyline you can still see the old patchwork apparatus of Prussian power laid out beneath you: the Altes Museum, the imposing Protestant cathedral, the red-brick Rotes Rathaus town hall.
If you twist your neck and look upwards, you will see, crowning the ensemble, a 4.7m-high gilded cross fixed to the top of a baroque cupola, the pompous ghost of a history long buried beneath the moral grime of the Third Reich.
In the dome beneath the cross, golden letters the size of an adult’s forearm proclaim the words of Philippians 2:10, the slogan that underpinned the supposedly divine authority of the Prussian monarchy: “At the name of Jesus,