A palace built for a king’s peace of mind, a wall that split a city, a small car that became a symbol.

Berlin began as twin trading settlements, Berlin and Cölln, facing each other across the Spree and first chartered in the early thirteenth century — a modest medieval start for a city that would later govern an empire. Its rise to grandeur is closely tied to the Hohenzollern dynasty, especially Frederick the Great, who in 1747 completed Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam as a rococo retreat from the ceremony of court life; the name means literally “without cares,” and Frederick used it to write, garden and keep his beloved greyhounds away from the capital’s formality. When the German Empire was proclaimed in 1871 under Wilhelm I and Bismarck, Berlin became its capital almost overnight, and the Reichstag building was completed in 1894 to house the new empire’s parliament — its now-famous dedication, “Dem Deutschen Volke” (“To the German people”), was only added to the façade in 1916, melted down from captured French cannons over the ministry’s objections.

The twentieth century treated the city roughly. The Reichstag fire of 1933 gave the Nazi regime its pretext for emergency powers within weeks of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, and Allied bombing left much of central Berlin in ruins by 1945. The Cold War then split the city outright: the Berlin Wall went up almost overnight in August 1961 and stood for twenty-eight years, with the Reichstag itself left damaged and empty in the shadow of the death strip for decades before Norman Foster’s glass dome, completed in 1999, gave the reunified Bundestag a transparent new seat directly above the old plenary chamber. Museum Island’s grand nineteenth-century houses suffered a similarly hard road: heavily damaged in the war and left to decay under East German neglect, the Neues Museum did not reopen until 2009, seventy years after its wartime closure, and the Pergamon Museum — the island’s single most-visited house — remains closed today for a renovation still under way. The small, boxy Trabant, East Germany’s only mass-produced car for three decades, has meanwhile been reborn as an affectionate tourist icon rather than a symbol of shortage, a measure of how thoroughly the divided city’s recent past has been folded into its present one.