If it looks like you’re driving somewhere in the Third World, but German is spoken, you might think you’re in Transylvania or Namibia. But if all the license plates of passing cars don’t point to Romania or Africa, you can only come to one conclusion: You are in Cologne, the city that is tearing itself down. Nowhere is this fact more ignored than in the cathedral city itself. Presumably because the careless treatment of the cityscape has been too much internalized in the 600 years in which the cathedral was a building site.