or many a seventeenth-century Grand Tourist, the reward after many weeks of hard travel and study was a sojourn in Venice. The city was by then starting to fade as a commercial and industrial powerhouse (its boatyard is the origin of the term “arsenal” ), but it remained a stylish city of art and opera and epic masked balls, alongside countless other strains of cosmopolitan indulgence (the words “casino” and “ghetto” also once described singularly Venetian phenomena, and by many accounts the word “brothel” probably should have).

The New Grand Tour’s closest analogue is probably Berlin. Still littered with the ruins of the Nazi and Stasi regimes, the contemporary city is a sort of life-sized sequential diagram of enlightened green urban revival. It is nearly broke but rife with ultra-modern new buildings and state-of-the-art transit. There are notable art galleries and elegant little cafés on every block, yet the rents still make it the preferred European capital for cash-strapped artists and trust-funded poseurs alike. There are Communist-era blocks of bland flats with brand new green roofs. Remnant chunks of the Wall and sombre World War II plaques still haunt the city, but its nightlife is among the most ceaseless and exuberant anywhere. Germans are famous for inventing just the right compound word to describe something ineffable. They should make one up for the sensation of being simultaneously exhausted by the past and ecstatic about the future. In English, let’s call it Berlinism.

We steeped ourselves in Berlinism at its epicentre: the funky downtown neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg. Another overly modest Craigslist ad had secured us another ideal apartment, though in this case the preschooler heaven of a local park was a full half-block away, in the shadow of a historic water tower that had served for a time as a makeshift concentration camp. There’s Berlinism for you in a single incongruous line: the old concentration camp is really a wonderful place to bring your kids.

There might be no other urban district in the industrialized West as ravaged by the twentieth century’s excesses as poor Prenzlauer Berg. Its capsule history reads like a litany of the sins of the industrial age — from prewar tenement slums to concentration camp deprivations to forty years under the boot of the East German police state. By 1989, it was so exhausted, so bereft of sustainable life, that many of its elegant old flats were abandoned, fully furnished, by East Germans fleeing west when the Wall came down. Yet today, just twenty years removed from its wholesale desertion, Prenzlauer Berg is as livable a neighbourhood as you’ll find anywhere. Among many other blessings, it is now home to the best farmers’ market I’ve ever overindulged at.

I could go on for some time about the Markt am Kollwitzplatz — the bread, the chanterelles, the olive oil pressed on site, the currywurst lunch with beer poured from a tap and served in a real glass, despite the takeout counter. To do so would really be to make a larger point about the New Grand Tour in general, thereby restating a well-known fact about Europe: that the food is, you know, weak-at-the-knees good. But moreover, that the culture of growing and eating food in Europe has largely skipped the most severe deprivations of modern agribusiness, meaning that even the most workaday greengrocers and mini-markets and takeouts deal mostly in what the huddled North American masses have come to think of as gourmet food. The Grand Tourists had their Venetian galas, but I found my own private decadence — even a hint of transcendence — in a sausage mit Pommes and a big glass of Hefeweizen.

An extreme example to underscore the point. There is a German pastry chain called Wiener Feinbäcker that you find in shopping malls, train stations, airport concourses. The location my family came to know was the one at the Alexanderplatz station. Like all Wiener Feinbäcker outlets, this one had a long glass counter that encased great piles of cherry Danish (which got my wife addicted) and croissants (which hooked my daughter). It also served passable coffee and, on a high shelf above the till, bread. Real bread. Big wheels of hearty German rye and sourdough, oblong baguettes and Italian loaves, plus bins filled with six varieties of Brötchen — Germany’s ubiquitous, delectable little dinner rolls. Wiener Feinbäcker is mass-market fast food. It’s the Tim Hortons of German baking. And yet its bread kicks the bland, dry stuffing out of I’d guess 98 percent of the places I’ve ever bought bread back home. The Alexanderplatz station has better bread than almost all of Canada. This is my point.

I wasn’t in Berlin for the food, though, nor even for the general bonhomie of Berlinism. Like a Grand Tourist in Rousseau’s Geneva, I’d come to soak up the wisdom of Hermann Scheer, long-serving Social Democratic Party MP and co-author of the German renewable energy law that had done more than any other piece of legislation anywhere to launch the global green economy. We met at the Café Einstein, across from the parliamentary office block on the Unter den Linden, beneath trees that shaded triumphant Nazi martial parades in the years of Scheer’s infancy. He explained to me in his playful baritone growl how he’d launched the German feed-in tariff that has rapidly rewritten the energy policy of most of Europe.

(The New Grand Tour is not the occasion for policy wonkery, but briefly: Starting in 2000, the feed-in tariff, championed primarily by Scheer and Green Party MP Hans-Josef Fell and passed by the Red-Green coalition government of their two parties, set prices for electricity from renewable sources at substantially higher rates than those for power from conventional sources, and guaranteed those rates for twenty years. This not only sparked a massive nationwide boom in new wind and solar installations, but also moved the worldwide investment and production hubs of both industries to Germany, almost overnight. There is no taxation involved — the added cost is distributed to ratepayers nationwide at a price per kilowatt hour of electricity — and the estimated total cost to the average German household is €40 per year, amounting to a 3 percent surcharge.)

It began, more or less, with Scheer’s vote against ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, which made him the only German MP from any party to do so. “It is not a real locomotive,” he told me. “It’s a barrier.” Scheer recognized as soon as he learned about the gravity of climate change in the late 1980s that solving it would require a fundamental restructuring of the global energy economy. When Germany passed a weak afterthought of a feed-in tariff for wind power in the early 1990s, Scheer recognized it immediately as a potentially powerful lever.

For the rest of the decade, he slowly built alliances, helped establish a law journal to develop the legal foundations for the tariff, and squeezed a 100,000 Solar Roofs commitment through the Bundestag. With the election of the Red-Green Coalition in 1998, the drive for a muscular feed-in tariff began in earnest. It was passed in 2000, amplified in 2004, and reconfirmed by Angela Merkel’s Conservatives (who had opposed its original passage) in 2008. “We have the critical mass, and we have the public support,” Scheer explained. “In the renewable energy sector, there are more turnovers than in the conventional power sector now, more new investments.”

The fruits of Scheer’s labour crop up everywhere on the German landscape. Keen to give my kids their first real taste of quick, comfortable long-distance rail travel, we traversed the country from Berlin in the northeast to Freiburg in the far southwest. Wind farms and vast fields carpeted in solar panels were as much a part of the scenery as castle ruins and red-roofed villages. We skirted the rim of Solar Valley, the newly christened hub of the solar industry, just south of Berlin, where thousands of new jobs in the manufacture of solar panels have finally brought the former GDR’s chronic unemployment problems under control. We passed through whole cities where passive solar design has become a part of the building code.

As we veered south at Wolfsburg, gateway to the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s historic industrial heartland, I thought of my father’s stories of flying over the region in the late 1960s, when it was all but permanently obscured by clouds of smog. And then I recalled recent press releases I’d read about old Ruhr coal mines covered over with vast solar arrays. We didn’t make it to the North Sea coast, but German trade officials in Berlin had shown me pictures of the Seven Wonders scale of the work now occupying the city’s ports: the construction of towering five-megawatt wind turbines and the 45-metre-high, 710-ton steel tripods that anchor them to the ocean floor. In the next ten years alone, Germany intends to develop 10,000 megawatts of wind power in the North Sea, a generating capacity only slightly less than the entire current capacity of my home province of Alberta.