Berlin's visible history

No other city in the world physically conveys the historical dramas of the 20th Century like Berlin.

Walking along a particular block in Wilhelm Strasse, one can visit where the Gestapo and SS Headquarters once stood; see the surviving Fascist bulk of Goering's Reich Aviation Ministry; pause at the place where Russian tanks crushed East Berlin's 1953 uprising, and view a section of the Berlin Wall in-situ.

While not all streets in Berlin can compete with the historical intensity of Wilhelm Strasse, the city has an extraordinary number of places that evoke the last century's defining events, ideologies and conflicts.

Some, like the Soviet architecture of Karl Marx Allee or the American sponsored House of World Cultures, are politically conceived and strikingly monumental. Others, like the apartment buildings that still bear scars of Communist neglect or bullet hole pock marks from World War II, are more quotidian, but equally affecting.

Such is the scale of Berlin's visible history, that many remarkable sites are virtually unvisited by tourists. A case in point is a villa in Karlshorst, a quiet suburban quarter in former East Berlin. Here, on 8 May, 1945, Wehrmacht commanders met with Soviet Marshall Zhukov to sign an unconditional surrender, and end the European War. Despite its profound historical importance and its free admission, the villa's museum was virtually empty the day I visited.

Visitor numbers also seem to be puzzlingly small at the House of the Wannsee Conference (where Heydrich, Eichmann and their hatchet men conceived the Final Solution) and at the Tiergarten's German Resistance Memorial Centre. The latter houses the offices of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (leader of the 1944 Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler), and commemorates people who offered resistance to the Nazis.

Dozens of seemingly unremarkable places in Berlin also yield incredible historical stories. When reading Stasiland, (Anna Funder's moving and brilliant history from below of those who resisted the German Democratic Republic's regime), I discovered that I lived just blocks from locations ennobled by courage and ingenuity.

Funder, for example, details how in 1963 a tunnel was dug beneath the cellar of an ordinary residential block in East Berlin. From the tunnel, 30 odd people planned to crawl under the Berlin Wall and escape into the West. Sadly, their tunnel was discovered by the Stasi and they were arrested and imprisoned. A shop now fronts the building under which the tunnel was started, and ironically, it sells plumbing pipes.