The city on the marshy Spree that staged the twentieth century — the Prussian seat that became capital of a united Germany in 1871, then the command post of Nazism, the capital from which the already-begun genocide of Europe's Jews was coordinated, then the front line of the Cold War split in two by a wall from 1961 to 1989, and now the reunited capital of a democracy that lives among its own ruins and memorials.
Berlin grew up on sandy marshes far from the sea, an unlikely spot for a great capital. Yet in a single century it became the stage on which some of the worst crimes and divisions of the modern age were enacted. From Berlin the Nazis ran the German state, and in a villa on the city's Wannsee lakeshore in 1942 officials coordinated the murder of Europe's Jews. Bombed into rubble in 1945, the city was then cut in two by a wall, and people were shot trying to cross it. Today the same streets hold a democracy that has chosen, more openly than most, to keep its crimes visible rather than buried.