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In 1995, Christo realised his project to "liberate" the burdened Reichstag from the homogenising voice of totalising history and militarism that had descended on the German people’s house (Dem Deutscher Volk). Under Christo's aura, the Reichstag became a symbol of ... well, almost anything. And who, amongst the unselfconscious revellers who came to look at Christo vision of how an old abandoned house could be re-occupied, didn't think that they were witnessing history in the making – the emergence of a new "revolutionary" democratic global order based on the chaotic mass of people.

Yet Christo's transformation only aesthetised people's attempts to express their independent will in the shadows of power structures that had only been temporarily masked and suspended. Through their aimless strolling, the desecrated face of German Democracy was restored by no less than the imperfect body of idling humanity. Still, Christo's reclamation of the people's house was only a symbolic gesture that hid much more than it revealed. A short time later, elsewhere in Berlin, other buildings – taking a leaf from Christo's book – began to shamelessly flaunt the people's rejection of Communism in monumental photographic displays draped across shiny new buildings that concealed their own global aspirations.