60 NOVEMBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The author at a groundbreaking ceremony for the new U.S. embassy in Berlin in 2004, a few years after the Kissinger visit. COURTESY OF FLETCHER BURTON Statesman as Cityman Berlin fascinated Kissinger. He wanted to know about all its varied aspects: the reconstruction of the kaiser’s palace (now the Humboldt Forum), the remnants of the Berlin Wall, the location of the chancellor’s residence, and the Norman Foster design of the Reichstag dome. When we passed the Holocaust Memorial next to the Brandenburg Gate, he wondered out loud about the political e ect in Germany of building “a monument to its shame in the heart of the capital,” as he put it. When we passed a theater, he asked if plays of Bertolt Brecht were still staged with their “mordant view of human nature.” His inquisitive attitude manifested itself as a series of quizzes: Did I know if Daniel Barenboim was still conducting at one of the opera houses? (He was.) Who was up, who was down, in the German Foreign O ce? (I could speculate, for that was my beat.) And could I identify the near-identical churches, known as the German and the French, on Gendarme Square? (I made a lucky guess.) We discussed the dramatic changes that had swept across the city. I recalled my summer internship at the U.S. mission in Berlin in 1987, when, as I told him, I had drawn on his memoirs, using some of his same language on Berlin’s special status in my own reports. “Oh really?” he said. “Probably the rst time the State Department had read it.” Leadership Comparisons He was particularly interested in the varying styles of German leaders. We discussed Churchill’s sardonic put-down of Kaiser Wilhelm, who strutted around desperately hoping to be taken for another Napoleon or Frederick the Great. Churchill got it right, Kissinger said, adding that Kaiser Wilhelm was a miscast gure who marched into a war he did not want.
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