Berlin History

At the age of 25, in 1931, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became the vicar of the Protestant Zionskirche in Berlin Mitte. What

‘All the streets around here were named after South American countries, so that when their soldiering grandfathers return from exile,

I am about to visit one of Berlin’s most beautiful, undiscovered and under-appreciated interiors. Take the 100 bus through the

The commercialisation of the former Wall’s no-man’s land progresses as fast as the cranes can haul girders. Awful, says a

Today is an anniversary. The Berlin Wall went up 50 years ago. Imagine a family arriving at Friedrichstraße station in

Blood red, sometimes purple, the marble’s colour was signed off by Hitler himself. It decked his grandest building, the New Reich

Their bodies were doused with petrol and incinerated in a bomb crater, here, in what is now a parking lot. Adolf

There’s a blaze of colour on Alexanderplatz. When Berlin is at its winter’s darkest, the sensation of alienation heightened by

This underground station in Kreuzberg has had many names. It was born Hasenheide in 1924, it became Kaiser-Friedrich-Platz and then

I walk through the former death strip of the Berlin Wall and relief floods through me. I don’t miss the

It’s easy to forget that Germany is a new country and that, for much of its history, the term ‘German’