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Few cities carry their history as visibly as Berlin. The German capital was divided by a wall for nearly three decades, bombed to rubble and rebuilt twice over in the twentieth century, and yet it has never settled into the kind of polished self-satisfaction you find in Paris or Vienna. There is still something provisional and argumentative about the place, a quality that draws artists, architects, and the simply curious in roughly equal measure. The Brandenburg Gate stands at the western end of Unter den Linden as it has since the eighteenth century, but a short walk in almost any direction will bring you face to face with a gap site, a brutalist housing block, or a stretch of the Wall preserved as open-air memorial, and the collision of those layers is precisely what makes Berlin worth sustained attention.

The city spreads across a flat, lake-threaded landscape that surprises visitors expecting a compact European capital. Berlin is enormous, roughly nine times the size of Paris within its city limits, and its neighbourhoods read almost as separate towns. Mitte holds the museums, the government buildings, and the reconstructed Stadtschloss; Prenzlauer Berg, once the bohemian quarter of East Berlin, is now full of nineteenth-century Altbau apartments and independent coffee shops; Kreuzberg and Neukölln carry the city's Turkish and Arab communities alongside its club culture; and Charlottenburg, in the west, preserves a grander, pre-war bourgeois Berlin that the eastern districts largely lost. First-time visitors tend to anchor themselves somewhere between Mitte and Friedrichshain, which puts the major Second World War and Cold War sites within easy reach on foot or by the city's excellent public transport.