Berlin is not a beautiful city. At least not in the classic sense of, say, Paris, Florence or Oxford. The 20th century took that as its due. Gone are the grandiloquent boulevards and much of the resplendent architecture of a proud European capital. There is a facsimile of past greatness to be found in walking from the Brandenburg Gate, past the reconstructed neoclassical buildings and the temple of the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden. This latter was built to eulogise Prussia’s fallen
