Even by Berlin standards, the Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus – the vast headquarters of the German Finance Ministry – echoes Germany’s turbulent history more viscerally than perhaps any other building in the federal capital. Constructed in 1936 to house the Ministry of Aviation of the Third Reich, headed by Hermann Göring, after the war it was the House of Ministries of the German Democratic Republic, and became the home of the Treuhand privatisation agency after reunification, whose Social-Democratic president, assassinated in 1991 by the Red Army Faction, provides its name. It was from here that Göring directed the participation of the Luftwaffe’s Fliegerkorps…

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