On my last day in Germany I visited Sanssouci, the summer castle of Frederick the Great from 1747, in Potsdam.  I expected to find the rococo architecture overwrought and tiresome but instead I found it powerfully expressive, an impression enhanced by the drizzly weather and empty grounds, which made it feel as if the place were a marvelous ancient and abandoned city.  The most outstanding feature of the buildings are the much-larger-than-life figural sculptures that grace the pilasters, posts, and roof ridges.  They exceed ornament and become full-blown characters, clinging to another, enchanted world.

The buildings are perfectly grounded in designs by the German landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenne.  In back the main house drops off into terraces growing grapes, plums and figs.  The gardens beyond are laid out simply, on flat lawns, with a grand, central axis to the New Palace, built by Frederick William II in 1769, and curving walkways to smaller but no less striking accessory buildings, like the gilded China House.  The landscape, amazingly, manages to be natural without being romantic (like Hampstead Heath) or picturesque (like Central Park).  Walking the gravel paths, flanked by stately, ancient trees, I felt deeply connected to both the ground and the sky.  And I felt as if I belonged to the place.  With all the recent fuss over royal weddings, it was a curious affirmation.

An American’s dreamy notions about European train travel are dispelled by Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof, the city’s huge new central station completed in 2006.  The great glass shed, just across the River Spree from the capitol buildings, is a nexus for both local and long distance lines.  But it offers no public space.  There’s no central hall, and the main entrance leads you right out into the street.  (Landscaping, anyone?)  The Hauptbahnhof is basically a bunch of train tracks running through a shopping mall.

On a very hot day I took refuge outside along the east side of building.  There were cascading steps in the shade, and groups of locals were sitting, eating lunch and talking.  From here I could look across the water and see the dome of the Reichstag floating in the distance.  The first time I visited Berlin, fifteen years ago, the Reichstag was covered in scaffolding.  Then the last time I visited Berlin, three years ago, I walked up Norman Foster’s great glass dome and wondered what precisely I was supposed to feel when I reached the top; it was an empty, pretty spectacle.  From the vantage of these shady steps the Reichstag felt much more comfortable, and so did the train station.

There’s a new temporary museum at the former site of Reich Main Security Office in Mitte, Berlin called Topography of Terrors, which documents the history of the organizations who used the site as a base of operations, including the Gestapo and the SS.  It was at this location that the transports and concentration camps were organized, and enemies of the state were detained and tortured.  The museum building (by architect Ursula Wilms) is, appropriately, a banal and chilling one, a flat glass ring layered with metal scrims that sits within fields of rubble-like gravel.

The exhibitions themselves are powerful, with lucid text and graphic photographs.  But they’re the kind of materials that could be displayed at any holocaust memorial at any place in the world. When I visited, on a brilliant summer afternoon, there were crowds gathered inside, on the very ground where these atrocities originated.  We wanted to know about the place itself.  What was the building like?  What were the detaining cells, the conference rooms, the bathrooms, like?  What was the architecture of the regime, how did it empower those in charge, and how was it complicit in what happened?

Does art always have to go deep?  The Kohlhaas Curtain, the Frank Stella - Santiago Calatrava collaboration on view now at the New National Gallery in Berlin, makes me feel that it doesn’t.  Big, bright and bold, the installation consists of nearly 100 linear feet of paintings on white tarp (by Stella) wrapped inside and outside a giant wire drum (by Calatrava) that’s suspended in the center of the glass-box gallery (by architect Mies van der Rohe).

The paintings might not be so compelling in themselves, but as displayed in the round like this they energize the gallery, drawing visitors forward while keeping the majestic panoramas along the edge of the building clear. The Curtain is installed at just the right height, so that guests can wander underneath and, for a few minutes, get lost inside. The artwork adds a welcome bit of funk to the archly elegant gallery. It pleases the eye, doesn’t get in the way, and doesn’t require too much thought.  It’s the finest kind of decorator art.