After a good night’s rest at our youth hostel, we woke up Wednesday to a typically-filling German breakfast buffet, Wolfgang started us out on the second phase of our pedestrian exploration of Berlin. We headed back to Potsdamer Platz, but followed the path of the former Berlin Wall in the opposite direction of our walk on Tuesday evening. This soon brought us to what had been the center of Nazi security, including the former site of Adolph Hitler’s bunker complex. Markers along the way reminded us of the variety of victims of 20th-century totalitarianisms, and we passed one of the longest remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall. Not far beyond Checkpoint Charlie, a former East-West border crossing for military and diplomatic personnel, we stepped into an exclusive store for a quick review of major Berlin monuments done in chocolate. That interlude behind us, we began to explore other facets of Berlin’s history. First, the 18th-century Gendarmenmarkt with its pair of churches and 19th-century concert house. One of the churches, known as the “French cathedral” was built to serve the Huguenots, French Protestant refugees who boosted Berlin’s population (and its skilled labor force) at the end of the 17th century. We traipsed through several late 20th-century monuments to consumerism—transparent like yesterday’s Reichstag dome, but apparently different in underlying symbolism. Emerging from the perfume of consumerism, we crossed a square that in the 1930s had been tainted by the smell of burning books. On the other side was St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, built in the late 18th century to serve Silesian immigrants to the Prussian capital. From there, on to Berlin’s memorial to the victims of war and tyranny—a former guard house now housing sculptor Käthe Kollwitz’s statue of an anguished mother with her dead son. We finished our morning tour in the early 20th-century Berlin Cathedral. A simple midday worship service contrasted with symbols of Prussian imperial power decorating the building. In the afternoon we split up to visit in several of Berlin’s museums—the Pergamon (with an amazing collection of Middle Eastern antiquities), the Jewish Museum, and the German Technical Museum. We finished our day with a sampler of Berlin entertainments: a traditional German puppet show, a rock concert, or a State Ballet performance of Tschaikowsky’s Sleeping Beauty.

Thursday morning found us back on the sidewalks of Berlin: a visit toGerman playwright Bertolt Brecht’s home and then a tour of the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof next door where Brecht and numerous other famous Berlin residents are buried. We wandered through a neighborhood that once housed many of Berlin’s Jews, looked at late 19th-century residential-industrial structures, and passed through the Nikolai quarter—Berlin’s birthplace. To finish off the morning we explored public spaces near Berlin’s “Red Town Hall”—nicknamed for its brick exterior—and ended at Alexanderplatz, a main center in eastern Berlin. During the afternoon, we again headed in smaller groups to different museums, including the German Historical Museum. At 7 p.m. we climbed on the train to return to Jena, filled with the experiences of our 3-day sojourn in this amazing city.