daughter on a rainy Sunday in March of this year. The empty chair in the greenhouse – it was just like a chair from my East German school days – was gone. Does magic just vanish like that? Actually, I do not fear the loss of magic from Nordend. Even if it is paved over with shopping centres and residential buildings, the magic will just move on. We will find it somewhere else, at times in us and in whatever the future brings. So I stand on the vanishing point at the border of the city and, reassured, ride back to the city centre.