My first visit to Berlin was a quarter-century ago, the final stop on a whirlwind, whistle-stop Eurail pass tour of Europe. After devouring tapas and swimming the beaches of Barcelona, winding through the back lanes of Montmartre, seeing the Seine and the sweep of the city from the steps of Sacre Coeur in Paris, and riding the vaporetto down the Grand Canal in Venice, Germany’s capital just seemed ... underwhelming. Weird, actually.
I was traveling with my best friend, and we asked each other, “What is this place?” Yes, we understood that the city sustained heavy bombing during the Second World War and had been essentially rebuilt from the ground up. But a hollow-tooth church? Modern buildings that lacked that historical patina of Notre Dame or Saint Mark’s Basilica? All of it under the gaze of the strange (ugly) TV Tower? Well, we didn’t like it.
