I’m standing at a bar in a car park on the rooftop of a shopping centre. I ask the bartender if the beer on draught is big or small. ‘That depends on your definition,’ he says. ‘What is big? What is small?’ The oonce-oonce of German trance music makes it hard to hear, and I’m distracted by the solitary figure on the dance floor wearing all black and contorting her body into the shape of a pretzel. ‘Is the beer groß or klein?’ I shout. The bartender – who is well over 50 and has the fashion sense of a Green Day groupie from 2005 – just smirks and says, ‘That’s for you to decide.’ I order the beer anyway. It is small (klein). I don’t tip.

This is Berlin. Berlin is big. (I don’t care what our analytic philosopher-turned-bartender thinks about the relative concept of big and small; we’ve all

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