Hellenistic disaster in Berlin | The paper

What was the story of German efficiency like? Germany, a European superpower, the fourth largest economy in the world, the second largest contributor to the United Nations, a symbol of reliability, precision and industrial excellence, is faltering and struggling to live up to its image in the world. There are many examples and the latest in the series comes, once again, from the capital Berlin, champion of the split between projection and reality. It has been talked about for years, it has been official for a couple of months, but the wave of criticism in the media has not subsided, and it is unanimous: the Pergamon Museum, the city’s main tourist attraction, closes for a general renovation and will only reopen in 2037. A bit as if in Italy the Uffizi in Florence or the Vatican Museums in Rome were closing for a long hibernation. Couldn’t it have been done before with all the mechanical and technological means available today? Couldn’t we have proceeded by sections allowing partial public access? Couldn’t we have opted for a less megalomaniac, pharaonic and expensive restructuring? Questions after questions bounced around in the newspapers, including the more prosaic one on the negative fallout of the shortfall in ticket receipts on the finances of the city-state which is already drowning in debt (66 billion euros).