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Cities display a worship of history in the monuments and memorials that they choose to erect, through which the past is paraded like a religion In his book Hope and Memory, Tzvetan Todorov writes: ‘While history makes the past more complicated, commemoration makes it simpler, since it seeks more often to supply us with heroes to worship, with enemies to detest; it deals with desecration and consecration’ But in Berlin the past is a very strange and warped place – not one to celebrate per se In its monuments and memorials one sees a more agnostic effort to come to terms with a recent past filled with fascism, fanaticism and false futures As in any major European capital, Berlin is full of the familiar vestiges of wars waged and won in the name of colonial ambition Out of the centre of Tiergarten Park rises the Victory Column, presiding proudly over the traffic island The huge image of winged victory has one hand held aloft against the traffic, the other holding a staff like a magnificent lollipop lady On successive corners of the Victory Column roundabout are several large bronze effigies of Prussian generals, but the names have been removed and their gestures of victory are pathetically obsolete Nearby is a huge statue of Otto von Bismarck, the author of German unification and the first Chancellor of the German Reich He struts boldly, flanked by allegorical figures: atlas holding up the world, Siegfried forging a sword to celebrate German industrial might, Germania pinning a panther symbolising the suppression of rebellion, and a sibyl reclining on a sphinx reading the book of history These boastful symbols seem absurd given how the twentieth century unfolded Berlin’s is a confused landscape that commemorates both victors and victims, both German and other In his work on public memory and national identity, Pierre Nora writes about our obsession with commemoration that has come to dominate ‘all contemporary societies that see themselves as historical’ In Nora’s eyes, monuments such as the Bismarck statue were designed to align history with the sanctioned version, to boost