Karl Friedrich Schinkel

As I return to Philadelphia for the spring (back in Weimar for its cool summers!), I can't resist parting words of praise for your architecture critic, Heinrich Wefing of Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung. His brilliant piece on the heritage of Karl Friedrich Schinkel reminded me of my first flabbergasted view of the Altes Museum. Ever since, my first question in visiting a new German place is,"Do you have any Schinkel here?"

I can hardly wait to get to Gdansk to see the church pictured in his piece. I wish, for example, that the few newspaper architecture critics we have in America made our great Art Nouveau architect Louis Sullivan as accessible as Wefing makes Schinkel. Which brings me to your ludicrous flap over national pride currently keeping your politicians from more substantive issues. With all due respect to Johannes Rau, it is surely possible for anyone to have pride in something someone else have achieved.

Indeed, in a democracy every voter has a say in the kind of enlightened preservationism Wefing is describing. Our wrecking ball culture has much less to be proud of than you have every right to relish. I have been amazed as a resident of Weimar off and on for three years at how the town renewed itself for its stint as cultural capital. That is a cultural achievement replicated throughout Germany.

Pride is only dangerous when it touts unworthy aspects of a country's history and traditions. Or when it is debilitatingly defensive. I think Germans have beaten their breasts enough for the Holocaust. If Britain and France had not inflicted an impossible settlement at Versailles, there probably wouldn't have been the disaster of Hitler. (Surely the victors were every bit as anti-Semitic as the Germans.)

The moral disasters of the twentieth century were the teething pains of the proudly emerging transnational Europe. (The Balkans are still enduring those pangs.) Schoolyard name-calling doesn't contribute to the maturing of the EU. It just wastes the energies which should go to building prouder futures together.