The garden, which one reached by a few steps lined with stoneware flowerpots, stretched from the palace to the Europahaus, a plump modernist cube set down on the Askanischer Platz and contrasting oddly with the calm, sinuous volutes of the lanes laid out between the mulched flowerbeds, the little round fountains, and the still-bare trees on which the first buds were forming. No one was there.

