So, sitting there in my grey-upholstered compartment, I began to think about how different European centuries had ended. I recalled, for instance, that in 1889, one hundred years before the Berlin Wall came down, the Eiffel Tower went up. It went up because just a hundred years before that, in the turbulent ending of the previous century, the French Revolution had exploded, the world had turned upside-down, even the calendar had briefly begun anew. And so, in the same year as the Mayerling tragedy, when Vienna became so modern, and so gay, the French decided to celebrate, as the French do, by building an edifice, and turned to M. Gustave Eiffel. Why not? He was their greatest bridge-builder, and his triumphs were many. He had built an amazing span across the River Douro at Oporto, designed the locks for de Lesseps’ Suez Canal, built the Observatory at Nice, even put up a charming railway station in Budapest, into which I hoped I would shortly be stepping. He could therefore be counted on to put up some fine modern buildings for the Centennial World Fair, and maybe throw a fine iron bridge across the Seine that would give Parisians better access to their favourite cafés, boîtes, museums and artists’ studios. They gave him the commission.

What they didn’t know was that Eiffel’s thoughts had recently shifted from sideways to upwards. In a matter of months Eiffel got out his ironwork and built his tower. One morning in 1889 Parisians woke up and there, by God, it was. You couldn’t miss it; but, like a building that had a cabbage on top of it, it seemed to make no sense at all. It was fairly evidently a monument to something, but unfortunately there was nothing written on it to say what it was a monument to. It looked like the spire of a great cathedral, but the nave was missing, and there was no altar to worship at and no particular deity mentioned. It resembled the great new American business skyscrapers going up in the cities of Chicago and New York, but because there was no inside to its outside, there was not too much hope of doing any real business in it. Thirteen years earlier, to celebrate the centennial of another revolutionary war, the American War of Independence, the French had shipped across the Atlantic another great memorial. This was the Statue of Liberty, sculpture by Bartholdi interior ironwork by Gustave Eiffel. But its meaning was absolutely clear, its message, to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, perfectly plain. This time Eiffel seemed to have omitted something, in fact everything. He had given Paris the ironwork without the statue, the engineering without the sculpture, the torch without the liberty, the bones without the flesh.

Today, of course, high on our fine postmodern wisdom, we know exactly what Gustave was all about. Eiffel’s Tower was a monument to only one thing: itself. It was a spectacle, and there was nothing much to be done with it, except look up at its head from its feet, or down at its feet from its head, or clamber up and down in it, staring at the panorama of Paris it opened up and controlled on every side. So of course it annoyed the classicists, affronted the romantics, angered the realists, infuriated the naturalists, and offended almost everyone, with the exception of the Douanier Rousseau. Leading writers hated it, including Guy de Maupassant, who always dined afterwards in its restaurant, because it was the only place in Paris you couldn’t see the tower from. The shopkeepers demanded that the tower be pulled down before it fell on them – a familiar fate of monuments to something, or indeed, in this case, nothing. And when, a couple of years later, Eiffel, in some complicated and very French financial scandal, was accused of picking the locks on the Suez Canal, and nearly went to prison, most people thought it served him more or less right.

Then, a decade or so later, the French suddenly discovered what the Eiffel Tower was really for. It made the perfect radio transmitter, and this meant it was a perfect act of prescience on Gustave’s part, because radio hadn’t even been invented when he put it up. Instead of putting him in prison, Eiffel was feted and given the Légion d’Honneur, and the Tower, far from meaning nothing, came to mean everything, became the symbol of modern, future-hungry Paris itself. And so, a hundred years on, in 1989, when it once again came time for end-of-the-century celebration, the Bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution also became the Centennial celebrations of the Eiffel Tower. The much-hated, monument of modernity was now lovingly restored (by, I believe, the firm of Eiffel, which survives). Of course the French also celebrated, as the French do, by putting up an edifice. They therefore went to a postmodern Chinese-American architect, I.M. Pei, ours being a multi-cultural age. Pei’s thoughts were moving neither sideways nor upwards. He looked downwards, into the labyrinths and catacombs of the Louvre, exposed foundations and dungeons, the theme-park of old history, and then capped the lot with a small crystal pyramid of latticed precision.

And why not? Don’t we live now not in modern but postmodern times, the age of pluristyle, form as parody, art as quotation, the era of culture as world fair? In Berlin Honecker’s wall was coming down and turning into art-work, everywhere politics and culture were becoming spectacle. So, that July, lit by lasers and beamed worldwide (courtesy the transmission facilities of the Eiffel Tower), an international soprano sang the Marseillaise, and in the Champs-Elysées Egyptian belly-dancers gyrated with Caribbean limbo dancers, gays danced with, les­bians, Structuralist philosophers bunny-hopped with feminist gynocritics, Hungarian security men tangoed with French riot cops, in a great multiplication of images and styles and cultures and genders, so that everything was everything and nothing at the same time. And I know this, because this time I was there myself, writing some smart Deconstructive piece about it for my Serious Sunday. Great changes, great changes; we had learned how to live in the age of virtual reality, or so I said in my piece. And great changes need new philosophies, I observed also, mentioning the names of various new pioneers of thought: Lacan and Foucault, Deleuze and Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard, and – it now all came back to me – Bazlo Criminale i himself.

But even the thought that new times needed new thoughts was not itself all that new. For example, I remembered, when Gustave was pushing up his great phallic tower over Paris in 1889, a young philosopher named Henri Bergson was publishing his book Time and Free Will, which argued that the inner life of human consciousness had its own strange clock, quite different from that of daily historical time – a very modern notion which was found very appealing by his relative, by marriage, the even younger Marcel Proust. Meanwhile back in Vienna, which was becoming so modern and so gay, the young Doktor Sigmund Freud was having rather similar thoughts. He was not yet a great professor, he had not yet moved to his famous consulting rooms at Berggasse 19, which I had so conspicuously been trying to avoid in my last night’s dream-work, and the secret of dreams had not yet revealed itself to him as he bicycled through the Vienna Woods. But in 1889 he had already put out his plate, and was already trying out the method of free association – later to be known as the talking cure – on the contorted mental interior and labyrinthine psychic dungeons of a certain Frau Emmy von N.

But such things were happening everywhere in 1889. On that other great European river, the Rhine, in the Swiss city of Basel, another great professor, Professor Doktor Friedrich Nietzsche, had devoted himself to bringing the modern about. It had not been an easy job, and in fact in 1889 he started to go mad from rather too much of it. He began singing and grimacing uncontrollably in the streets, was found embracing carthorses, and he took to predicting, not very accurately, various plagues, earthquakes, droughts, global warmings, world wars and other millennial things. He sent letters to the Pope and other world notables, signed ‘Nietzsche Caesar’, suggesting that various people and some entire races should be shot. It was his divine and imperial mission to bring the fatality of the modern into existence, as he explained to various fellow academics (‘Dear Professor, in the end I would much have preferred being a Basel professor to being God. But I did not care to carry my personal egotism so far that for its sake I should fail to complete the creation of the world’). They got the great philosopher to the doctor at last. He conducted an examination, noting in his report: ‘Claims he is a famous man and asks for women all the time.’ Well, why not; he was, after all, a Herr Doktor Professor, the maker of the modern, and surely deserved his fair share of kindly human attention.