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Your article, which in the online version carried the headline “‘Stuck in this Nazi building’: Germany’s bickering coalition halts finance ministry move” opens with a description of Germany’s finance ministry building (Report, March 25).
Yes, the building that houses Germany’s federal finance ministry in Berlin does have a whiff of Goering about it. But one redeeming feature is its paternoster lift, one of the few remaining in the world and a marvel of both engineering and psychology, as would-be riders contemplate their mortality while timing their leap into the open box continuously looping its way up and down through the building.
Construction of new paternosters was stopped in the mid-1970s out of safety concerns. The device (of which there was one at the London School of Economics when I studied there in the early 1980s) reportedly got its name from the resemblance of its design to rosary beads — Pater Noster being the Latin words that begin the “Our Father”. I prefer my late father’s explanation, also an LSE alumnus. He joked that anyone brave enough to jump into a paternoster would be wise to first make a prayer to any god.
Matthew P Goodman
Washington, DC, US
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