Germany remains a nation divided between East and West

On the left bank of the Rhine, on the leafy outskirts of Bonn, there’s a building that encapsulates the Bundesrepublik’s best and worst of times. For 44 years, the Villa Hammerschmidt was the official residence of the German President, Germany’s equivalent of the White House. No longer. Now, the German President resides in the Bellevue Palace in Berlin, 300 miles away.

Architecture reveals a great deal about the shifting psyche of a nation, and these two contrasting buildings sum up the difference between the Bonn government of the Cold War and today’s government in Berlin. The Villa Hammerschmidt here in Bonn is ornate yet modest – the Bellevue Palace is bigger, grander, more bombastic. Bonn never could have remained the capital of a reunited Germany – the move to Berlin in 1994 was inevitable. Yet strolling along the towpath, squinting in the autumn sunshine, watching the huge barges chugging past, north to Holland and south to Switzerland, I can’t help feeling nostalgic for those few heady years after the Wall came down, when Berlin was a city of layabouts rather than civil servants – and the capital was still confined to this quaint university town beside the Rhine.