A history buff’s guide to Berlin in 48 hours

There’s no better city for the history buff than Berlin. Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler’s armies have marched through. Albert Einstein taught in the city. Karl Marx studied there. Lenin journeyed across the city on his way to change Russia – and the world. The Brothers Grimm dreamed up their stories there. Mankind’s worst genocide was hatched in the city. And the world nearly ended there when Russian tanks faced off against the Americans during the height of the Cold War. The city carries the ‘stigmata of Prussian militarism, Weimar decadence, Nazi evil, Stalinist oppression and tawdry capitalist excess,’ as Jan Morris put it. For the first-time visitor to Berlin, things can be a little overwhelming: having encountered the city in the pages of books for years, it’s hard to know where to start. The bad news is that you’ll never ‘do’ Berlin in 48 hours. But with a bit of planning ahead, it’s possible to get a good flavour of Berlin’s history in a weekend.