Berlin isn’t the prettiest city in Europe.

It doesn’t have Paris’s architectural consistency, Rome’s ancient beauty or Madrid’s grand boulevards.

But few European cities are more interesting.

Within a relatively short walk through central Berlin, you can move between the remnants of Imperial Germany, the rise and collapse of the Third Reich, the Holocaust, World War II and the Cold War.

History here doesn’t feel confined to museums.

You’re standing on top of it.

During my visit, I joined a free walking tour through central Berlin that ended up being one of the best introductions to a European city I’ve experienced.

Later, I saw another side of German culture by attending a Hertha Berlin Bundesliga match at the Olympiastadion.

What I didn’t fully appreciate before arriving was how closely those two experiences would connect.

The Best Way to Understand Berlin: Walk

Berlin is particularly well suited to a historical walking tour because so many places that shaped the 20th century remain surprisingly close together.

Our route took us past the Brandenburg Gate, Bebelplatz, Checkpoint Charlie, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and, perhaps most strangely, an ordinary parking lot.

Each stop represented a completely different chapter of Berlin’s history.

And having a guide explain how those chapters fit together made an enormous difference.

Brandenburg Gate

Few landmarks have witnessed as many versions of Germany as the Brandenburg Gate.

Built in the 18th century, it predates modern Germany itself.

It survived Napoleon, Imperial Germany, the Nazis and World War II. Then, during the Cold War, the Berlin Wall effectively stranded it within the restricted border zone separating East and West Berlin.

Images of the gate subsequently became synonymous with Germany’s division.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the meaning changed again.

Today, the Brandenburg Gate represents German reunification and is probably Berlin’s most recognizable landmark.

Standing beneath it after hearing that history, you realize you’re looking at much more than a photogenic entrance to a city.

Bebelplatz: Einstein, Humboldt University & the Empty Library

One of the most interesting stops was Bebelplatz, a beautiful square surrounded by institutions associated with German culture and intellectual life.

On one side is the historic Old Library. Nearby is Humboldt University, whose extraordinary academic history includes names such as Albert Einstein.

Einstein moved to Berlin in 1914 after accepting an appointment to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He spent much of the next two decades conducting research in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis drove him from Germany in 1933.

He ultimately settled in Princeton.

That alone would make the area historically interesting.

But walk into the center of Bebelplatz and look down.

Beneath a pane of glass is a room filled with empty white bookshelves.

It commemorates something much darker.

On May 10, 1933, Nazi students and supporters gathered here and burned approximately 20,000 books deemed contrary to Nazi ideology.

Works by Jewish writers, political opponents and intellectuals—including Karl Marx, Erich Kästner, Heinrich Mann and others—were thrown into the flames.

The memorial doesn’t recreate the fire.

It shows what’s missing.

Empty shelves.

It’s remarkably simple and remarkably effective.

Checkpoint Charlie

From there, the tour moved forward several decades into the Cold War.

Checkpoint Charlie was the most famous crossing between East and West Berlin.

Today it’s surrounded by tourists, souvenir shops and recreated imagery from the Cold War, making it easy to dismiss as overly commercial.

But understanding what happened here changes the experience.

After construction of the Berlin Wall began in 1961, Checkpoint Charlie became one of the principal crossing points between the American and Soviet sectors.

At one point in October 1961, American and Soviet tanks faced one another here during a confrontation that threatened to escalate dramatically.

Standing there today, surrounded by cafés and people taking photographs, it’s difficult to reconcile the modern street with a time when this represented one of the literal dividing lines between two nuclear superpowers.

That’s Berlin.

The extraordinary repeatedly sits beside the ordinary.

The Holocaust Memorial

Near the Brandenburg Gate is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

The memorial consists of 2,711 concrete slabs arranged across an enormous field.

From the perimeter, they initially appear relatively uniform.

Then you walk inside.

The ground begins to fall away beneath you while the concrete blocks rise increasingly high overhead. Straight paths continue in every direction, but your view of the surrounding city disappears.

People appear and vanish between the rows.

There’s no single prescribed interpretation of what the memorial is supposed to make you feel.

I think that’s part of its power.

Rather than attempting to explain the Holocaust with another statue or inscription, the memorial creates a physical experience—disorientation, isolation, uncertainty.

It’s uncomfortable.

It should be.

Hitler’s Bunker

Then our guide walked us to one of the strangest historical sites I’ve ever visited.

A parking lot.

There is almost nothing remarkable about it.

Cars are parked beside ordinary apartment buildings. People walk past without stopping.

Beneath this area, however, are the remains of the Führerbunker.

This was where Adolf Hitler spent the final weeks of his life as Soviet forces surrounded Berlin.

On April 30, 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide inside the bunker.

Their bodies were carried outside into the garden of the Reich Chancellery, doused with gasoline and burned. Soviet troops subsequently reached the area and recovered charred remains as Berlin fell.

The bunker itself was later partially destroyed and sealed.

Today there is no museum.

No dramatic entrance.

No enormous monument.

Just an informational sign near an ordinary parking area.

And I actually found that appropriate.

Berlin remembers the victims of the Nazi regime with enormous, deliberate memorials.

The place where Hitler died gets a parking lot.

There is something powerful about that contrast.

A Bundesliga Match at Olympiastadion

Later in the trip, I attended a Hertha Berlin Bundesliga match at Olympiastadion.

As a soccer fan, attending a Bundesliga match was something I wanted to experience regardless of the stadium.

But Olympiastadion isn’t simply a soccer stadium.

It is another historical site.

And walking through the surrounding complex is a complicated experience.

The 1936 Olympics

Berlin had originally been awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics in 1931, before Hitler came to power.

After the Nazis took control of Germany in 1933, however, the regime recognized an enormous opportunity.

The Olympics could become a global advertisement for Nazi Germany.

Hitler personally became involved in plans for the enormous Reichssportfeld, with Olympiastadion at its center.

The architecture was deliberately monumental.

Massive stone structures, broad avenues, parade grounds and imposing sightlines projected exactly the image the Nazi regime wanted the world to see: strength, permanence and national power.

The Olympics became a propaganda exercise.

For a few weeks, the regime attempted to conceal some of the persecution already occurring within Germany and present the country to international visitors as peaceful, modern and unified.

Then Jesse Owens arrived.

Jesse Owens

One of history’s great ironies unfolded inside this stadium.

American track star Jesse Owens, a Black man competing before a regime obsessed with supposed Aryan racial superiority, became the most successful athlete of the 1936 Olympics.

He won four gold medals:

100 meters.

200 meters.

Long jump.

4 × 100-meter relay.

The performances made Owens one of the defining figures of the Games.

Standing inside Olympiastadion decades later watching a Bundesliga match, I kept thinking about that.

This wasn’t a replica.

This wasn’t a museum reconstruction.

I was sitting inside the stadium where Jesse Owens actually competed.

The Nazi Architecture Is Still There

The most unsettling part of visiting Olympiastadion isn’t necessarily inside the stadium.

It’s walking around the surrounding complex.

Much of the monumental architecture remains.

The scale, symmetry and enormous stone structures still communicate the authoritarian aesthetic the Nazis intended.

There are also remnants and historical markers that force you to confront the original purpose of the complex rather than pretending it was simply an old Olympic venue.

At first, I found that uncomfortable.

Why preserve any of it?

But Berlin repeatedly forces you to consider a difficult question:

What should a society do with the physical remains of its darkest history?

Destroying everything removes the symbols.

It can also erase the evidence.

Berlin has largely chosen another approach.

Contextualize it.

Explain it.

Remember what happened there.

And then reclaim the space.

From Nazi Propaganda to a Bundesliga Match

That makes attending a Hertha Berlin match here particularly interesting.

The stadium constructed as part of the Nazi regime’s propaganda showcase eventually became a place where tens of thousands of ordinary Berliners gather to watch soccer.

Children wear Hertha scarves.

Supporters drink beer.

Fans sing.

Someone complains about the referee.

Life goes on inside a building originally intended to project the power and permanence of a dictatorship that ultimately collapsed.

I found something reassuring about that.

The architecture survived.

The ideology didn’t.

Berlin Doesn’t Let You Ignore Its History

That was my biggest takeaway from the weekend.

Berlin doesn’t hide what happened here.

Sometimes the reminders are enormous, like the Holocaust Memorial.

Sometimes they’re subtle, like the empty bookshelves beneath Bebelplatz.

Sometimes they’re uncomfortable, like the surviving architecture around Olympiastadion.

And sometimes they’re almost aggressively ordinary.

Like a parking lot sitting above Hitler’s bunker.

You can walk through several centuries of German history in a single afternoon.

Then you can get on a train, head to a soccer match and unknowingly sit in the same stadium where Jesse Owens won four Olympic gold medals in front of the Nazi regime.

Few cities I’ve visited make history feel so physically present.

And perhaps that’s Berlin’s greatest lesson.

Travel isn’t always about finding somewhere beautiful.

Sometimes it’s about standing somewhere complicated.

Learning what happened there.

Understanding how people remember it.

And leaving with a better understanding of the world than you had when you arrived.

For me, that’s exactly why we travel.