The DividedBerlin.

The documentation centre built on the excavated foundations of the Gestapo and SS headquarters — the administrative nerve centre of the Nazi terror apparatus. The outdoor exhibition runs along the last surviving section of the inner Wall beside the excavated cellar foundations where prisoners were held and interrogated. The indoor exhibition is the most rigorously documented account of Nazi crimes available in Berlin. Free, always. The contrast between the bureaucratic ordinariness of the documentation and the scale of what it describes is the exhibition's central argument.

The course of the Berlin Wall is marked throughout the city with a double row of cobblestones set into the pavement — a thin line of granite running through roads, across squares, through buildings (sometimes literally, where the Wall cut through structures that were subsequently demolished). Most visitors walk across it without noticing. The line runs 155km in total. Notably: through the middle of Potsdamer Platz (once a death strip, now the city's most developed commercial quarter), across Bernauer Straße (where people jumped from apartment windows into the West in 1961), and past the Brandenburg Gate where the gate stood in the no-man's-land between East and West.

The Neues Museum, rebuilt by David Chipperfield (2009) after wartime destruction — the architect preserved the ruin and built within it, leaving bomb damage visible in the plasterwork and inserting new material in direct dialogue with the old. The star object is the Bust of Nefertiti (1345 BC, found at Tell el-Amarna in 1912) — a polychrome limestone portrait of such perfection that it spent 10 years in a German salt mine to hide it from Allied occupation. Egypt has requested its return every decade since 1924. Germany has declined every request.