Berlin
Germany's capital, a city remade by reunification
Berlin carries its scars and its reinventions openly. A line of cobblestones traces where the Wall once split the city, and the bullet-pocked museums and the gleaming glass dome of the rebuilt Reichstag stand a short walk apart. Spread wide and low along the river Spree, Germany's capital is a sprawling, green, famously unfinished place — equal parts solemn memorial and round-the-clock creative laboratory, where techno clubs occupy former power plants and startups fill old factories. Around 3.6 million people live in the city proper.
Berlin sits on the flat, sandy plain of the North German Lowland, threaded by the Spree and Havel rivers and dotted with lakes and forests, and the Grunewald and Tegel woods bring countryside deep into the urban fabric. The terrain is almost uniformly low, around 34 metres above sea level, with the modest Müggelberge as its highest natural rise. The continental climate brings cold winters and warm summers, and the city's generous parks, canals, and tree-lined streets give it an unusually open, airy feel for a capital.
Founded as a pair of trading towns on the Spree in the thirteenth century, Berlin became the seat of the Hohenzollern dynasty, then capital of Prussia and of the unified German Empire in 1871. The twentieth century made it the capital of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and a divided Cold War flashpoint, before reunification in 1990 restored it as capital of a whole Germany. Today Berlin is the country's political center and a global byword for art, music, nightlife, and historical memory.