What is it about the food In Germany? You don’t hear much about it but it’s absolutely brilliant. Here’s a strange experience.

Berlin has a reputation as being quite alternative and edgy but deep in the heart of the most conventional, if opulent, retail surrounding of KaDeWe, the Berlin equivalent of Harrods, lies a little secret that is pretty popular with the locals. On the 6th floor, when we visited surrounded by Christmas offerings, is the Potato Bar. It does exactly what it says – serves food that always has potatoes at the heart of the eating experience.

First find somewhere to sit if you can – a bar stool or hard wooden seat around the cooking arena. Peruse the menu whilst watching the chef prepare potatoes many ways. There are quite a few sophisticated combinations but basically this is food as fuel to keep the retail experience going. Bratkartoffeln – fried potatoes with ham – is a favourite and with a glass of beer is just lovely. Hearty winter food in a most unexpected place. (NB Germany also has a Potato Hotel – ed.)

And then there’s the ice cream. It doesn’t get much more hip than the area of Kreuzberg in Berlin (Neukölln perhaps?) but the coffee shop Fraulein Frost and its Guzimi ice cream (one of many flavours made by the Frost team) does it for me. The Guzimi is composed of cucumber, lemon and mint and it has become perhaps their signature flavour. Great café, great ice cream. Summer heaven.

Unfortunately not every visitor shows the right level of respect and appreciation. On my last visit I was pleased to witness the following exchange which illustrates just how confident Berlin’s restaurants are becoming in what they offer:
American customer (calling across several tables to a waitress): ‘Can I have some garlic bread with that?’
Waitress (calling back): ‘No, that’s Italian.’
Customer: ‘Well, some bread with herbs in then.’
Waitress: ‘No, this is a Prussian restaurant. I will bring you some bread but not with herbs in it. That’s Italian food.’

Berlin, I think I love you.

I first became interested in the illusion of painting as a child. I started to do a lot of drawing, and acquainted myself with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, whose mastery of perspective I still find breathtaking. As a young man I studied architecture in Dresden and then painting in Berlin, and one of my first jobs was the design for an exhibition about historic panorama paintings of the 19th century. As part of that I recreated a historic panorama depicting Rome, and we reproduced it in huge size for the exhibition.

Then in 1995, during German reunification, there were big discussions about Berlin and the rebuilding of central places such as Potsdamer Platz and Alexanderplatz. I did four panoramas that showed how these and other places would eventually look, and the project was a huge success as ‘normal’ people now could understand what was being discussed.

Later a great opportunity came my way: I wanted to do a panorama of Mount Everest on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its first successful climb, and I heard that Leipzig in Saxony, where I had spent my youth, had an old disused gasometer. They let me restore it, and do my ‘Everest 360°’ inside. It was a great success, and I followed it with ‘Rome CCCXII’, and that’s how the whole thing started.

Dresden was next, and then another in Leipzig, and then in Berlin, and our first export panorama, at Rouen in France. The latest to be developed is the ‘Luther 1517’ panorama which just opened this October, in a new specially built setting in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, the focus of the 500th anniversary celebrations for 2017. In the immediate future there’s a new Leipzig panorama opening in January, and we are working on several more in the next ten years.

Over the last few years I’ve found that the panorama concept attracts a wide range of people, more than just classical museum goers. The impact of having the image all round you is effectively one of total immersion, in a space of time, emotion, thought and memory.

More information on the Asisi homepage.

Last week I was back in Dresden after a long absence. I was last there in 2005 for the inauguration of the Frauenkirche, the church that looks like an ornate teapot and which epitomises the whole bittersweet, phoenix-from-the-ashes story of the city.

Dresden was, of course, completely flattened by Allied carpet-bombing. Since the reunification of Germany its old town has been mostly reconstructed, although there are still one or two gaping holes. Its epicentre, the Frauenkirche, was rebuilt completely from donations, with its tower cross funded by the British (including the Royal Family) and made by a blacksmith whose father was one of the bomber pilots that destroyed the church in the first place.

These days the city’s atmosphere is something like an Oxford or a Prague for Germany. Beautiful, relaxed, timeless, with music echoing off ancient stones. The old town areas are almost entirely car-free, and much of the architecture is massively ornamental, with sculptures of electors, dukes and margraves peering down at the general public from lofty rooflines. The river is busy with steam-powered paddlesteamers, the cobbled streets overflowing with diners from designer restaurants. All in all it is a lovely place to be.

Even the new town along Prager Street, the section built during the communist era which links the railway station to the old town, has been spruced up. It used to be a soulless canyon of dreary shops, but capitalism has injected both life and colour and filled in some of the gaps.

So Dresden could be a major tourist destination for British and international travellers, but it isn’t. Why?

The answer lies in two things. The main one is its transport connections: there are very few international flights into its airport, and none from the UK. Lufthansa tried, as did Cityjet, but their main market was the business traveller, and there isn’t enough business traffic.

We do have lots of flights, of course, from the UK to Berlin, which is only a couple of hours away from Dresden by train, so you can get there with a bit of extra effort. The extra £30 outlay is easily made up by cheaper hotels, meals etc, but there are surprisingly few direct, fast trains. It is almost as if the authorities didn’t want the travelling public to discover this Saxon city.

And then there’s the unfortunate impact of Pegida. Germany-watchers will know that this is the thuggish right-wing anti-immigration movement which has been hogging the headlines, and which has chosen Dresden as its meeting point. Although it is no longer allowed to demonstrate in the heart of the old town, as it used to, it is still a presence in the city.

But the numbers are growing. The graph is still upwards. Dresden’s time will come.

We went to stay with our friend Andrea in Berlin earlier this year. She lives in Kreuzberg, an up and coming area of the city full of mixed housing and apartments, cafes and restaurants. Although the area is gentrifying, it should keep its varied mix of people due to the combination of private and public housing. Let’s hope so.

Anyway, the point is that whilst we were staying there, our hostess asked us if we would like to go a piano recital in a factory. What an excellent idea!

This is how it can happen in Berlin. A local neurosurgeon loves piano music and pianos, so he begins to restore them as a hobby. He then rents an old factory space to enlarge his hobby into a business. He then thinks it would be great for people to hear these lovely pianos played by really good pianists. So every so often they clear a space in the workshop and arrange a motley collection of chairs to seat around 150 people. A pianist visiting the city will be invited to perform on one or more of their pianos and a series of piano concerts is born – fantastic.

We went along to this Piano Salon Christophori on a cold evening and parked in the works car park next to the factory. Wheelchair access for our friend is good as it is all on the ground floor – the factory floor in fact. We pay and wind our way through heaps of piano parts and equipment to our seats a few feet from the stage. It hadn’t occurred to me before that to store lots of pianos you need to take them apart and stack up all the components separately.

Two huge industrial heaters are blasting away to warm the large space. Pianos are wheeled about on stage and a very eccentric looking piano tuner works on the pianos right up to the last minute. The atmosphere is more relaxed than a traditional classical concert or recital but still purposeful.  The neurosurgeon does a short introduction introducing the music to be played and spending rather more time talking about the pianos it is to be played on. At this point, one of the staff squeezes past our chairs, turns the heaters off and then the concert starts.

The first part of the recital seems almost subdued and intimate but the second part, after a change of piano and composer is far more powerful and the sound easily fills the space, floating up through the girders and winch machinery. The pianist receives rapturous applause and although we can stay for drinks at the honesty bar we decide to go out into the cold night air and home for coffee.

A magical evening.

The state visit of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh to Germany from 23-26^th June has gone little noticed by most of the media, eclipsed by the likes of royal babies and G7s.  But it will be a significant one, and the first official visit since 2004.

Despite very strong family connections, the royal party will be ignoring the roots of the Hanoverians and the Saxecoburgs. Instead they will be concentrating on more contemporary locations, particularly Berlin, Frankfurt and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle.

The first day, in Berlin, features a welcome at the Bellevue Palace by Joachim Gauck, Germany’s President, after which they will travel down the river Spree by boat to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel at her office. The two women will then lay a wreath at Germany’s Central Memorial for all the victims of war, before attending a state banquet back the Bellevue in the evening.

From Berlin, the royal couple will travel across to Frankfurt next day to visit St Paul’s church, greet the public in the Romer, Frankfurt’s reconstructed central square, and have lunch with the President of Hesse. That evening, back in Berlin, there will be a Garden Party hosted by the British Ambassador.

On their final day, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will start in Pariser Platz by the Brandenburg Gate with Berlin’s Mayor, then fly to Celle (near Hanover) to visit Bergen-Belsen. The latter was a Nazi concentration camp between 1941 and 1945 and the site is maintained as a memorial to the 70,000 people who died there.

The royal couple will lay a wreath at the memorial’s inscription wall after which they will return to Celle Military Airport, and back to the United Kingdom.

It’s a pretty heavy itinerary for anyone to complete, let alone a couple in their late 80s and early 90s.

It’s been another good year for German tourism. Figures to June show a rise in British visitors of 7.5 percent over 2012, and while a good proportion of that is undoubtedly due to the upturn in business travel and the European economy, 55 percent is still leisure travel, particularly city breaks (Berlin accounts for a whopping 22 percent of all overnight stays). Looking back further, the number of British overnights in Germany has increased by a massive 30 percent in the decade since 2003, whilst the likes of France and Spain have been largely static over the same period.

The numbers break down as follows: The most popular city is Berlin, with more than twice as many overnights (1,002,175) as the secondmost popular, Munich. After Munich comes Frankfurt and then Hamburg. Berlin also counts as the most popular federal state, with Bavaria hard on its heels, followed by North Rhine-Westphalia (Dusseldorf, Cologne and the Ruhr) and then by Hesse (Frankfurt and part of the Rhine valley). Germany also tops the worldwide league table when it comes to culture-related trips (ie classical concerts, opera festivals etc).

So why are British visitors picking up on Germany? The German tourist board ascribe some of the increase to the positive publicity emerging from the 2006 World Cup, staged in Germany. Positive leadership during the economic crisis has clearly helped, and Germany surprised everyone by emerging top in a ‘most popular country’ survey done by the BBC this year. Good air links have played their part, as have hotel prices which are considerably better value than elsewhere in Europe. For example the most expensive city in Germany, Munich, has an average price of €123, compared to the average in Paris of €256. And finally a small part of it has to be down to increased awareness of the range and diversity of what Germany has on offer, and a tiny part of the credit for that is due to websites like this one.

Next year’s themes the tourist board will be promoting are: 25 years since the Fall of the Wall (yes, it really is 25 years!), all the German UNESCO World Heritage sites, a big barrier-free travel initiative, and a celebration of 300 years since the first of the House of Hanover acceded to the British throne (being marked with the launch of the new Royal Heritage Route and website http://www.germany.travel/en/ms/royal-heritage/start/royal-heritage.html)

Onwards and upwards!

Walking around Berlin this week, it struck me quite how much Germans (Berliners in particular) are forced to be acutely aware of their own history, with monument after monument, museum after museum, all reminding them just how awful their ancestors have been. The memorials, displays and exhibitions are all there to serve as lessons for future generations, and boy have those lessons been learned. Germany has transformed itself from tyrant to titan, pretty much single-handedly holding together the European Union, the institution set up to promote European peace and cooperation in the wake of WWII.

So what’s the lesson that has been learned?  That the Allies and the EU succeeded in teaching the German people the error of their ways, and have helped them forge a reformed nation for themselves?

Well maybe. But let’s not fool ourselves here, because there’s hypocrisy at work. For although the Allies arguably succeeded in helping Germany become what it is today, a peace-loving economic powerhouse, they failed to see the irony in them ‘teaching the lesson’. The British, Dutch and French Empires have histories which are cumulatively as bloody as the Third Reich’s, and the US has massive quantities of post-WWII blood on its hands from its obsession with being ‘leader of the free world’.

The problem is that their malfeasance never happened anywhere near their own countries, so national leaders could somewhat sweep the more gruesome details under the carpet. It’s also a feature of winning; if you’re a winner, you get to run the war crime courts and create the perspective through which history is written.

So it’s time for us to learn from the Germans. If we had museums and memorials to all the innocents that have died at the hands of the British Army and details of their deaths freely available in London, I’d stake my life on the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan never happening.

Yes, keep the Cenotaph in Whitehall, but how about putting next to it a Bloody Sunday memorial? Or something to honour the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in India in 1919, where British troops fired on unarmed men, women and children ‘until [they] ran out of ammunition’, killing over 1,000 people? The US can keep its Vietnam war memorial, but again, what about some sort of recognition of the My Lai massacre, or to the countless victims of Agent Orange, discussion of which has been conspicuously absent from the recent debate over Syria?

By all means condemn that which is wrong and act against it. But do so while acknowledging your own failures, and you can take a far more measured and more just response to any situation. Germany, show us the way.

This year the Germans have published the results of their first census since 1987, and it has revealed some interesting trends. Firstly, it notes a decline in the overall population to 80.2 million, which is 1.5 million fewer than had been presumed. The majority of the ‘missing’ are actually 1.1 million foreign citizens (ie Russians in the former east, NATO soldiers in the former west) who have since left.

It also records what everyone already knew: that the working population has made a general move westwards (unemployment rate circa two percent), to where the economy is stronger, leaving the east (unemployment rate circa four percent) under-populated. This is particularly shown in the age balances, because it is the elderly who have stayed behind: in eastern states, on average 22-25 percent are over 65; in the western states, that figure is more like 19-22 percent.

In general, it is becoming a nation where the elderly dominate. Germans have been prudent about birth control, so there are 12.6 million children, but 17 million over 65s, which is partly why employers have been so welcoming to overseas workers. And it is slowly becoming more ethnically diverse, with nearly one in five citizens coming from a migrant background, mostly concentrated in the south and west.

For Berlin, the darling of the short-break industry, the figures don’t look good.  As you’d expect, its population has a higher proportion of under 18s than the surrounding states, and the proportion with a migrant background, at 23.9 percent, is particularly high. But its economic problems are considerable, because it has virtually no industry, apart from government and tourism; the unemployment rate in Berlin, at 4.9 per cent, is the worst in Germany.

Its historical and political importance attracts mainstream visitors, while its trendy alternative culture and heady nightlife makes it appealing for the younger traveller.

I was in the city this weekend for the first time in three years, and can report that it is jammed with people and humming with energy. It is, however, still very much a work in progress, still a city in a state of change. It doesn’t feel like it has finally made up its mind quite what to be, and for who.

Sure, there’s the heavyweight government stuff, the Reichstag, the embassies, and the Berlin state buildings (more of which are being re-created with the project to rebuild the Berlin palace).

Then there are the trendy, dishevelled quarters taken over by artists and ethnic minorities, although I thought those had either started to look either a bit tired, or a bit mainstream, on this visit.

Then there’s the historical side, the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie (appealingly scruffy) and all the Jewish history, the Jewish museum and the Jewish memorial.

But the city lacks any real centre, with Unter den Linden frankly dull and the newly rebuilt Potsdamer Platz pretty dismal as a focus. Architecturally, Berlin is lacking any real elegance or grace; its buildings are, for the most part, brutal and ugly. Moreover its transport system is pretty backward if you compare it to other German cities.

But it is hard to feel critical with all the outpouring of energy that it generates.  In the course of just two days I attended a choral concert outside the Bode museum and listened to a Serb string quartet playing on the steps of the Friedrichstrasse station, both excellent and both free of charge. And then after the Bode concert I watched a clown in Hackescher Markt shadowing and imitating couples and groups of friends walking through, with moments of real hilarity. He didn’t seem to want any reward other than approval for those looking on.

Then there was the food. The yoghurt and blackberry ice-cream I had at half time in the choral concert by the Bode was the best half-time ice cream I’ve ever had, and the kebab from the stall on Oranienburgerstrasse was truly first class for only €3. I didn’t get the currywurst thing, though. But then I guess lots of people don’t ‘get’ our fish and chips.

Overall, though, while Berlin may not know quite where it is going, it remains a great place to go.

It always faintly annoys me when I’m confronted with the perception of German food abroad, i.e. that it’s not the country’s forte. It simply doesn’t mirror my own German food reality. Maybe that has to do with the fact that I was born in the 1970s and therefore lucky enough to bypass grimmer times in the nation’s food history.

In general, I’ve always eaten well in Germany and am used to a wide variety of dishes that go far beyond the Bratwurst and Sauerkraut myth. (Although I like both!) German contemporary cooking is a completely different affair, lighter and betraying the influence of different types of cuisine, from Mediterranean to Asian. Similar to their British counterparts, Germans have become a nation of foodies where you can’t switch on the TV without finding some kind of cooking programme on one of the channels, and publicity-minded chefs are happy to show their faces on the screen.

Eating, food and restaurants are topics du jour. People like to talk about food, to spend money on cookery items and books, and you should see what they cook up on ‘Das perfekte Dinner” (‘The perfect dinner’), the German equivalent of ‘Come Dine with Me’. It’s more sophisticated than what the British contestants come up with, if I may say so, and the German participants take the whole thing very seriously. Maybe a bit too seriously sometimes, the Brits are far more entertaining.

But then again this is probably how you achieve excellence in the end, by really committing yourself to accomplishing the best, as exemplified in the latest German Michelin guide which puts the country at number two behind France when it comes to three-star restaurants. There are nine three-star chefs, and 32 two-star restaurants as compared to just 18 two years ago. Berlin is not only the country’s capital but also its culinary centre with 16 stars, followed by Munich with 13 and Hamburg with 11.

And there’s still this curious little corner in the Black Forest, called Baiersbronn, where seven Michelin stars are divided between three chefs. One of them, Harald Wohlfahrt, is exceptional in the sense that not only is he an extremely modest individual (Gordon Ramsay must be his idea of hell), but he has also held his three stars for 20 years now without interruption. No mean feat. Interestingly, Thomas Bühner, Klaus Erfort and Christian Bau –  three-star chefs themselves and names to remember –all trained with Wohlfarth, as have another three two-star chefs now cooking in Sylt, Lübeck and Hamburg.

Wohlfahrt’s ‘Schwarzwaldstube’ restaurant seems to have become something of a talent factory which is good for German cuisine. Maybe one day the word will spread abroad as well.

More information on Baiersbonn