Le Temps des Cérises is a well-known song in the French-speaking world that became popular and took on a political meaning during the Paris Commune. My interest in the circumstances surrounding that doomed revolution became focused on the fate of the Tuileries Palace in Paris, which the Communards burned as their revolution collapsed. I discovered many uncanny parallels between the old royal palace and its Berlin equivalent, the Stadtschloss, destroyed in WWII. Remarkably, there are currently campaigns to reconstruct both buildings, successful in the Berlin case, raising questions of identity, meaning and the politics of architecture.