I have just a couple of photos from my quick round trip to Berlin. Stopping over at Nollendorfplatz I noticed for the first time this Denkmal.

Schoeneberg with its many clubs and bars had always been a free-thinking and open-minded Kiez in Berlin. An ideal target for the Nazi repression.

Today, breakfast. I open my copy of Repubblica and the first news I see is this: “the Holocaust was invented by the english, it never happened”, said a professor in a roman gymnasium yesterday afternoon.

It is really true, that in the recent months it happens to hear things that never before people like this individual dared to speak out. They must feel somehow “protected” or “in tune with the sign of the times” to say such things, that they may have believed all along, but never dared to say out loud.

Bad symptom. Very bad. Together with the outcome of the Genoa’s Diaz school massacre trial. Several disturbing epoisodes. Yes, that’s a typo, but maybe a freudian typo. Poisonous episodes, they are.

It’s a soft urbicide. Metropolis has dealt with the urbicide theme extensively. But soft urbicide occurs when in a town, tolerant and welcoming like Rome – a good-hearted big mama, a bit chaotic and messy but always ready to add an extra plate on the table – aggressive and violent behaviour is tolerated, approved with a nod (repressed so far) and, behind closed doors, fostered and planned.

Walkingclass dedicated the 9.11 anniversary to “the other 9 november”, 1938’s Kristallnacht. Have a look at the video. The tragic consequences of severing the ties keeping cosmopolitan cities together, among different cultures and beliefs, is a fact that some still don’t want to learn. Cattivi maestri. We need more than ever History in the Streets.