A house without decorations is like a man who never laughs, wrote the architect Jože Plečnik.

In 2005, a ride on a bike route brought me to Dessau on the Elbe. The city is quite deserted. After intense bombing in the Second World War, it was incorporated into the GDR. Many cities of today’s Germany have a similar history, but when I compare it with all the other cities I saw on my trip along the Elbe, Dessau must be the most hopeless. Such a statement is nothing special in itself: the various systems for sorting, classifying, grouping, scaling etc. can always provide the criteria to identify the biggest, the prettiest, the heaviest, the oldest, the most hopeless…. If someone got together all the tallest people in the world, one of them would still be the shortest. This was just an example. I would not be writing all this if Dessau were not a special city after all.