This transformation in German perceptions of their own Stunde Null (zero hour)—from “our end” to “our liberation”—unlocked what has since, intentionally or not, become a distinct theme in Germany’s political discourse and an accompanying aesthetic in its public art and architecture. The past and its scars must never be hidden. They must instead be acknowledged, preserved, and displayed as an implicit reprimand to be moral and responsible in the here and now.

All these “stories of suffering, of the rupture, of the accepting of guilt, this official treatment of guilt is part of German representation,” said Heinz Jirout, an architect and guide in Berlin. “I don’t see that anywhere else.” He certainly does not see it in his own home city, Vienna, which he left more than three decades ago. After World War II, the Austrians rebuilt their capital to regain as much as possible of its old Habsburg splendor. Today, Vienna looks as though nothing much happened there between 1938, when Hitler annexed his native country, and 1945. By contrast, Jirout noted, in the German capital the new aesthetic has subtly become “a basis for a new identity” and “a form of strength.”

All countries, of course, have memorials to their traumatic moments—the Japanese to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Americans to Vietnam, and so forth. But these tend to be discrete monuments, standing apart physically and narratively. Even Berlin’s commemorations began in this style. Between 1957 and 1961, officials in West Berlin, then an island behind the Iron Curtain, commissioned the architect Egon Eiermann to rebuild the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche, usually called the Memorial Church, which had been bombed to rubble in 1943. Eiermann’s plan was to raze it completely and put a modern structure in its place. But after sustained protests, he kept the ruin and surrounded it with a modern tower, church, chapel, and foyer. Yet the old and the new elements are simply standing next to each other, without any interaction. They are not yet integrated into a new narrative. Berliners call the church the “hollow tooth.”

Integrating the old and unbearable with the new and hopeful only became possible after reunification, and perhaps only in Berlin. “When the Wall came down, all the wounds were opened, not only physically but infrastructurally,” recalled David Chipperfield, a London-based architect who rebuilt the famous Neues Museum, best known for its bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, on Berlin’s Museum Island in the Spree River. Sewage systems, railway systems: Everything had been cut asunder and duplicated in East and West.

“From a physical point of view it’s a broken city, so it’s full of gaps,” Chipperfield told me in his Berlin residence, a modern structure of concrete slabs that he built inside a bomb crater in the former East Berlin. “And the gaps are both physical and mental, if you like. If you go to Paris, there are no gaps. In London, there are hardly any gaps.”

One approach to filling these gaps is to build something entirely new. Both in its former West and former East, Berlin has plenty of ultra-modern structures. Chipperfield’s residence is one. The Jewish Museum, built by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind and opened in 2001, is another, with its angular windows and crooked floors signaling a haunted historical backdrop. But for most public buildings in the city center, it seemed more appropriate to integrate the past than to replace it.