Berlin is a modern city with an incredibly rich history very different from other European capitals. She does have her complement of fairytale charmers like the Charlottenburg Palace—but modern Berlin? It’s just not all that old. Modern Berlin begins with the Industrial Revolution as in very short order what was once little more than a crossroads exploded in size, influence, and wealth. The 19th century’s muscular spirit, with its outsized reverence for the classical world, for scholarship and for exploration, is even today vividly present in contemporary Berlin. Museum Island with its priceless treasures that include Nefertiti, the Ishtar Gate, and the Pergamon Altar is an extraordinary example of this spirit that dominated the 19th century and positioned Berlin to rush headlong into the 20th century. In 1900, Berlin was the world’s third largest city and, just as importantly, a leader in the arts and the sciences. But history is never stable or static. Germany’s dreams of glory among other factors led in the chaotic first decades of the century to the first world war. The devastation of this war and Germany’s eventual defeat created social and political tension as well as widespread economic stress in the form of high unemployment and hyperinflation throughout the country in the 1920s. Despite this—or perhaps as the result of it—in the 1920s a new spirit of tolerance was layered into Berlin’s ever-present quest for excellence and achievement. One has only to visit the marvelous Bauhaus Archive to be reminded of the exuberant, forward-looking promise of modern life then foreseen by the Bauhaus’s groundbreaking artist and designers. The 1920s in Berlin were alive with intellectual possibilities, albeit fraught with political instability, which led inexorably to the rise of the Nazis. From the Reichstag fire in 1933 to the ignoble end of the Third Reich in a bunker in Berlin in 1945, the city was the center of the Nazi Regime and of the cataclysm it wrought upon the world. The impact of those terrible 12 years are still being felt throughout the city and in recent years have come to include a sense of active reckoning some 80 years after the defeat of Nazism. There is no way to list all the ways in which the city bears witness to these crimes and to its ever-evolving search for meaningful ways to tell this unbearable story. A noteworthy recent addition is The Topography of Terror, an extensive museum documenting the tactics—more psychological than brute force—of S.S. and Gestapo through archival images. The war ended and a different, divided Berlin emerged. The perpetrator of a world war became the victim of a Cold War, as a city largely destroyed and utterly broken in spirit is literally divided for the next 45 years. Now thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the old lines of East and West are very hard to find, which makes the Die Mauer Museum and The Berlin Wall Memorial particularly valuable assets in the telling of this vitally important portion of Berlin’s story. And what of today, a few decades into reunification, with a prosperous and democratic Berlin, which functions as the de facto leader the European Union? Angela Merkel and the Christian Democratic Union party have led the government since 2005. Merkel intended to step down as Chancellor after this September’s elections. However, for now she remains in a caretaker capacity after the elections two months ago were inconclusive. Negotiations to form a new government continue. Berlin’s next chapter awaits—and with any luck we will be poised to see it unfold.