That is certainly not obvious at first, as the dimensions of the canal remain the same, and even the kilometer-post numbering continues as before.

We ran east from Burg bei Magdeburg on a rainy Bastille Day, and we were all day reaching our chosen berth in the middle of Brandenburg.

We persevered, however, like the huge number of commercial ships that come through here every year, but soon turned aside from the main route to take the channel leading to the the Brandenburger Niederhavel.

Thc commercials take an improved canal north of the city, so the Havel River is quiet, beautiful, and woodsy. Just deep enough for Barbara, it requires care in negotiating its sharp bends among the many rowing and paddling craft, not to mention an occasional excursion boat. After only five kilometers however, we were able to pull in alongside the wharf at "Am Slavendorf" (the "Slavic Village," an open-air museum of the life of the earlier inhabitants of this area), where a space had been reserved for us between two other boats. So we had a quiet, tree-shaded berth in the center of town, where we felt very comfortable.

The city was wrested from the Slavic Hevelli (whose name lives on in the name of the Havel River) in the early 10th century, but did not come solidly under German control until the early 15th century, when a younger member of the Hohenzollern family (for whom there was presumably no room in their castle in Swabia, south of Stuttgart) made himself useful to the Emperor and was rewarded by being made

In the 18th century, by a series of military conquests, Frederick the Great made Prussia into a major European power, and almost everywhere in Northern Germany has stories of life under Prussian rule.

Under its Hohenzollern kings, Prussia remained powerful, even as the rest of Germany broke up into a confusing patchwork of Duchies, Bishoprics, and City-states after the essential dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Eventually, in the late 19th century, it was another Hohenzollern, William I, Kaiser Wilhelm, who put all these little states together into the new German Empire, but that is both ahead of our story and behind it; ahead because we are really interested in the older history of this area, and behind because the German Empire didn't last very long. Like Napoleon, the Emperor over-reached and attacked too many other countries, giving impetus to an alliance against which he could not prevail.

But we were speaking of Brandenburg, which was the royal capital during the period from the 15th century until it suffered heavily in the Thirty Years' War, and has, in consequence, many elegant buildings, principally in Late Gothic or Baroque style.

In a small chapel behind and a little below the main altar, there is a chilling memorial to churchmen killed by the Nazis, in the form of a snall altar with a simple box, filled with cards, each card telling a story.

By great good luck, we were there for one of a series of organ concerts in the cathedral, which Barbara particularly enjoyed.

Our way to the grocery store led along the river, on what might once have been a towpath, past the back gardens of elegant villas. One of these, in particular, puzzled us, because it was obviously a fancy house, but shuttered and with very unkempt grounds. We hypothesized some sort of inheritance battle, but soon discovered the truth.

The house had been taken over by the Gestapo in the Nazi period and its basements used as prison cells, and after the war it was the Soviet Kommandatura and later the Stasi headquarters.

We could imagine the dilemma the city faces; it is a beautiful house, clearly very valuable, but it is also a place of unspeakable horrors. What to do?

This question, along with the memorial plaques in Magdeburg, with the memorial in the cathedral, made graphically clear what we already knew intellectually, that Germany, especially in the former East Germany, is wrestling with her past and determined not to forget it.

North and west of the city, where the commercial bypass canal, for all the world like a modern ring highway, was dug, is the industrial heart of the city.

Part of one steel mill has become a museum, with all its tools and equipment as though ready for the next shift and housing the last Siemens-Martin steel furnace left in Europe. The scale is mind-boggling, and the furnace on show in the museum is only one of twelve originally in the enormous building, most of which now houses other enterprises.

The Siemens-Martin furnace may have given way to modern computer-controlled machinery, but the Silo Canal is lined with steel rolling mills and machine tool manufacturers. As we passed, we saw rows of powerful steam locomotives waiting to be melted down and their steel re-used, and all along the Mittelland Canal we saw ships laden deep with coils of shiny new rebar, destined for the construction-hungry west.

The Havel has been straightened by cuts by-passing loops that would be fun to explore in a small boat, but it is still very pleasant, and soon we were following the buoys across the Trebelsee, followed closely by the Göttinsee and the Sacrow-Paretzer Canal.

The lake here was part of the border between West Berlin and East Germany, and the Glienicke Bridge, one of the few crossing points, was the scene of many spy exchanges during the Cold War.

	P	C
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A gentlrman we meet at one of our stops, perhaps in Mölln, told me that he always left his boat in Potsdam and took the train to Berlin, but Barbara clearly wanted to visit Berlin and to see for herself the castle in Spandau that we had seen on an earlier trip.

So we went back under the Glienicke Bridge and through the eastern part of the Jungfernsee into the Berliner Unterhavel and past the old German and then British airbase at Gatow, that had such a large role in the Berlin Airlift.

Just before the Spree, the river that runs through the middle of Berlin, joins the Havel, and just short of the Spandau Lock, we ran under a bridge and alongside at one of the many quays reserved for pleasure boats in Berlin. These are limited to a 24-hour stay, but they are free.

Spandau used to have a prison that was used to house many former Nazi leaders; its last inhabitant was Rudolf Hess, and after his death the prison was razed, so that it should not become a neo-Nazi cult location. There is now a mediocre shopping center on the site.

The fortress is imposing, but surrendered without a fight to Napoleon's troops, and was relatively easily reconquered by the Prussian Army in 1813, showing once again that Renaissance fortifications, although visually pleasing, are not really much use in the age of artillery.

These western precincts of Berlin were not particularly important before the Second World War, but after the old centre became part of the Russian Zone and then East Berlin, they thrived as West Berlin grew in importance.

In the beginning of the twentieth cdentury, the city fathers decided they had outgrown their original Town Hall and decided to build a new one, a huge building that combines Gothic and Jugendstil elements and is crowned by a tower higher than that of the nearby Palace.

Evelyn had been a mentor to Barbara when she was Director of the Near Eastern Museum in Berlin and Barbara was in the early stages of her career, and, while we are all getting older, it was a joy to see them still active and engaged.

We did not hurry, but we made steady progress, and soon were in new territory, west of where we originally joined the Canal.

We stopped in little towns, most of which we much enjoyed, but that is a story for another time -- this instalment is delayed enough already.