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A city on the cutting-edge, Berlin has often been in the spotlight on the world stage over the past 100 years. This is a city where constant change is a given.
Berlin is a city with two centres the cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops around the Memorial Church, a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town; and the self-conscious civic centre of buildings around the Unter den Linden, carefully arranged.
Sure, the Wall isn't there any more, but Berlin is still very much divided: in the centre of the city, there's a pretty neat segue from the wealthy glitz of the west to newly developed central east Berlin. This area was quickly colonised by the trendy caf�-bar set in the early 1990s and swift rebuilding has erased nearly all trace of the wall.
It's the suburbs of East Berlin with their grey and decaying apartment blocks, cardboard cars and paucity of telephones that make it apparent that the Wall was up to protect a utilitarian East from a decadent West.
Before it came down, the Wall was the most enduring icon of a nation's disharmony. But it's not as if the city hadn't seen it all before. From the civic turmoil of the Thirty Years War, to the devastating impact of the fire-bombing during WWII, Berlin has constantly been under siege or in a post-siege rebuilding phase.
Even in the middle of trouble and strife, though, Berliners have continued to live it up. This is the city where cabaret and techno were born. There's an edgy out-there quality to the nightlife - think Sally Bowles and her divine decadence through to the contemporary cool of Blixa Bargeld and Nick Cave's tortured noise poetry - that is both intimidating and exciting. Whichever way you spell it, Berlin means groove.
Although never a conventionally beautiful city, Berlin has much fine architecture, as well as an extraordinary spread of museums which collectively rank among the very richest on the planet. It also has a wide range of bars and restaurants, a vibrant nightlife and strong traditions in the performing arts. Because it occupies a vast geographical area, one interrupted by a plethora of parks, forests and lakes, Berlin is not a place that is appreciated easily or quickly.
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