Actually, I had written this entry right after the last one on tuesday. But somehow it got lost in the digital Nirwana. So here is a shortened version. Don’t bother to complain qbout spelling mistakes as I am currently in Paris, typing on a French keyboard. But you’re actually not entitled to that piece of information until you have read the next entry. So for the time beig let’s imagine it’s still last Tuesday…

Bonn is scary. For those of you, gentle readers, who don’t remember, whqt Bonn is, here my brief executive summary: Bonn is a medium sized city situated on the left bank of the Rhine river, south of Cologne. But far more mportant than what Bonn is, is what Bonn was – the Capital of the Federal Rpublic of German (until 1991) and seat of the German Government (until 1999). I was there for the last time on the 27th fo September 1998. That was the day when Kohl was voted out, and Schroeder became Chancellor; that was in a time gone by, a time in which Bonn was the center of German politics.

When I jogged through the squre lile of doll-house-like abandoned I somehow sensed for the first time how much has changed since then. Actually, Germqn politics have not changed a lot, to be honest. But the atmosphere has. The difference cqn really be summarised in the difference between Bonn and Berlin. Just a few meters from the former Bundestag building there is well done museum about post WWII German history, the “Haus der Geschichte”.

And while it is not actually about Bonn, it somehow was. And while I think the permanent exhibition is going to be expanded as time moves on, it somehow feels indicative that the exhibition “current challenges” ends with the government moving to Berlin. History has left Bonn. It is now being made somewhere else. And Bonn is hurt by this probably more than by the governmental exodus (for which the town is being generously compensated).