John Lapsley's article about Berlin, ''Modernity masks historical horrors'' (ODT, 29.8.16), suggests that real evidence of the Nazi period, the Holocaust and The Wall are covered over by modern building developments and that you have to travel to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp site on the periphery to find a little museum of horrors.
Somehow he missed the gigantic Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Holocaust museum, at the city centre, within sight of the Brandenburg Gate and the Bundestag.
Somehow he did not get to visit the ''Topography of Terror'', the indoor/outdoor museum at the old Gestapo and SS headquarters.
Somehow he missed the fingerpost at Wittenbergplatz, pointing in the directions of the death camps. Somehow he missed the plaques and memorial stones in Mitte, marking who was rounded up and sent to the camps.
Somehow he did not visit the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden, the National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny with Kathe Kollwitz's affecting sculpture of mother and son. And that's for starters.
As for East Germany, the Wall and Checkpoint Charlie, I have my own stories of having my car deep-searched (and a friend strip-searched!) but I am not sure what Mr Lapsley thinks should be there now.
I can assure him that a theme park is better than the real thing. Enough of the Wall remains, and street markings, to show where the rest of it was, where the division was between east and west.
There is a memorial on the east side of the Bundestag building to those who died trying to cross the Wall in those dark years between 1961 and 1989.
The Stasi archives are open to those who lived in East Germany during that time, if they want to read what informers reported about them.
Mr Lapsley notes that private subscription was needed to erect a noticeboard marking the site of Hitler's bunker: ''the city refused to pay for one''.
The reason? ''The city'' is not keen to encourage rubberneckers to view where one of the most infamous men in history committed suicide or, worse, to mark a site that might become a shrine for neo-Nazis from all over the world.
No other capital city in Europe, and indeed the world, more publicly and honestly admits to and displays the horrors of war and genocide committed by its past political regimes.
Where, for example, in London is the memorial to the victims of slavery? Or other atrocities of empire, such as the great Indian famines of the 1870s?
The victors, of course, get to write the history. A statue to Bomber Harris was erected in London's The Strand, a man who not only directed the bombing offensive on Germany that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and destroyed great cities but also sacrificed an unacceptably high number of his own men.
They, rightly, have their own memorial a decent distance away.
But Berlin is not just a living memorial to past horrors. It has become one of the most progressive and lively cities in Europe, with superb museums and galleries, the best symphony orchestra in the world, parks and palaces as well as concentration camp sites out of town.
It fosters so much energy and innovation that it draws in young people from all over the world.
Recently, I was asked to provide a line about Berlin for a website there. It goes: ''If Berlin did not exist it would have to be invented - a city that embodies all of European history and culture in modern times.''
The good and the bad.
Dunedin writer Philip Temple first went to Berlin in 1987. In 2003-04 he held the Creative NZ Berlin Writers Residency and has published two novels with Berlin settings: To Each His Own and I Am Always With You.
