The modern ecology of news: Berlin edition

I love Berlin, and in the late 1990s I wrote a very brief item in the Atlantic's travel section with some reasons why. (Link here; the item in its terse totality is after the jump.) At the time I wrote, I hadn't been back to Berlin since its reunification, and I worried that its smoky, feverishly-doomed evocative nature might have disappeared along with the Wall.

In several visits since then, I've found I had little reason for concern. The place is spiffed up and modernized, but it is still plenty noir! Yesterday it was Berlin as I imagined and remembered it: raw, overcast, pouring rain, the noontime sun very low in the sky as it headed toward twilight at 4:30 and pitch blackness at 5. As we walked through the rain and wind and blear on Unter den Linden, I was thinking: This is so atmospheric! My wife, the reality-based member of our household, was thinking and finally came out and said: This is so miserable!

So we ducked into the nearest dry structure, the Deutsches Historiches Museum. (The difference between visiting Europe and visiting Asia: any English speaker can guess what the name of this structure means. Its counterpart in China, which would be called something like 中国历史