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Berlin provides a somewhat glossy reminder of where Western culture has come from, and where it might be going. In peaceful scenes of reconstruction humanity may yet find itself again, in a moment of renewal and creativity, symbolic as well as geographical. But just as surely as the chiefs of capital seek out ever new and unexploited places and bind them up with money – the language of power – so they lock humanity up in shopping malls, the sanitised walls of steel and glass. Potsdamerplatz in the 1990s no longer signified an empty, broken hearted city in which people's grieving longing from their irrepressible tyrants could be seen. Today, Potsdamerplatz is where dreams are underwritten with credit cards.