Berlin aquarium explosion: German pundits see a ripe metaphor in the collapse of this gigantic structure.

Firefighters had already cleared the dead fish from the frigid street by the time I showed up, on Friday morning, outside the smashed front doors of Berlin’s five-star Radisson hotel. Just hours before, the hotel’s massive AquaDom—billed as the largest freestanding cylindrical aquarium tank in the world—had exploded suddenly, causing a surge of more than a quarter-million gallons of saltwater, along with roughly 1,500 fish, to course through the hotel’s lobby and onto street. Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey, who described the aquarium’s sudden bursting as “a downright tsunami,” initially declared that none of the marine life survived the disaster. Der Spiegel ran a column describing the explosion of the aquarium as “the perfect symbol for 2022” and a potent metaphor for the last year in German public life.