As long as there has been inequality among humans, death has been seen as the great leveller. Just like the rest of us, the rich and powerful have had to accept that youth is fleeting, that strength and health soon fail, and that all possessions must be relinquished within a few decades. It’s true that the better-off have, on average, lived longer than the poor (in 2017, the least deprived 10th of the UK population had a life expectancy seven to nine years longer than the most deprived one), but this is because the poor are more exposed to life-shortening influences, such as disease and bad diet, and receive poorer healthcare, rather than because the rich can extend their lives.

Sales of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have spiked twice recently, both times in response to political events. In early 2017, the idea of ‘alternative facts’ called to mind Winston Smith, the book’s protagonist and, as a clerk in the Ministry of Truth, a professional alternator of facts. And in 2013, the US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden compared widespread government surveillance explicitly to what Orwell had imagined: ‘The types of collection in the book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us – are nothing compared to what we have available today.’

Snowden was right. Re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2018, one is struck by the ‘TVs that watch us’, which Orwell called telescreens. The telescreen is one of the first objects we encounter: ‘The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.’ It is omnipresent, in every private room and public space, right up until the end of the book, when it is ‘still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter’ even after Smith has resigned himself to its rule.

Berlin was a partitioned city from the end of World War II and a city divided by a wall for about 28 years. A foreboding, fortified border down the middle of a city would seem a considerable obstacle to the continued evolution of its built environment. Yet not only did construction continue on both sides of the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989, but the division fueled development  in both direct and indirect ways.

Just how did officials on each side go about building half a city? What follows is an overview of architectural development in East and West Berlin, which reveals the extent to which the Wall was perhaps not so much a divide as a “zipper,” in the words of East German poet Lutz Rathenow, “The cement holding the whole of Berlin together.”

They are modernizing industry and changing the ways of the labour market: robots are being increasingly used in companies. That makes companies more efficient, and could give employees more free space.

In the factory, metal trolleys move back and forth between stacker racks and six assembly islands, halt before individual workers, then drive to their next goal. In the southern German town of Graben-Neudorf, SEW-Eurodrive produces gear motors – among other things, for escalators and cranes. Mobile robots help the workers.

Berlin's history is certainly part of its appeal. Some of that history is wonderful and some is quite the opposite. Its story had an inauspicious beginning but it led to great heights: residence of the kings of Prussia, capital of the German Empire, metropolis feted throughout the world in the 1920s, capital of the Third Reich, ruined city, front line in the Cold War, city of the famous Berlin Wall – and, now, once more capital of a united Germany and seat of government. The historian Alexandra Richie said, that »no other city on earth has had such a turbulent history; no other capital has repeatedly become so powerful and then fallen so low. ... This city's identity has always been based not on stability but on change.«