Five days in Berlin: History Written in Concrete

Book the Reichstag dome before you fly. Entry is free, it is open until midnight, and it fills up: you register online, name everybody in the party, and bring the confirmation and passports. Slots go weeks ahead in summer, and the late ones are the best of them.

Start at the gate in the late afternoon. It is the last of eighteen city gates, finished in 1791 by Carl Gotthard Langhans and modelled on the entrance to the Athenian Acropolis, and it spent twenty eight years stranded in the death strip with nobody able to walk through it. Reagan made his speech about tearing down the wall from the western side in 1987.

The Holocaust memorial is one block south: 2,711 concrete slabs on undulating ground, no inscription, no explanation above ground. The information centre underneath is free and is not an afterthought. Then walk north to the river for the dome after dark, when the city is lit and the chamber below is empty.

Five museums on one sandbank in the Spree, built between 1830 and 1930 to put Prussia in the same sentence as London and Paris. The Neues Museum is the one to start with: bombed to a shell, left as a ruin for sixty years, and rebuilt by David Chipperfield in a way that leaves the damage visible, so scorched brick meets new concrete without pretending the war did not happen.

Inside it is the Egyptian collection and Nefertiti, carved around 1345 BC, alone in a domed room with her own rules about photography. Give the building two hours and the bust ten minutes of them.

Afternoon, go up twice. The cathedral was finished in 1905 as the Hohenzollerns' answer to St Peter's, and the gallery running round the outside of its dome is several hundred steps up with the whole island under you. Then the Humboldt Forum across the road, the reconstructed royal palace that replaced the East German parliament building on the same footprint, whose roof terrace stays open into the evening for nothing.

The Wall went up overnight on 13 August 1961 and came down on 9 November 1989, and the only place that shows you what it actually was is Bernauer Strasse. A full block of the border strip has been kept: the outer wall, the raked sand, the lamps, a watchtower, and the inner wall on the far side. Buildings here stood directly on the line, and people jumped from their windows into the west in the first days before the flats were bricked up and demolished.

It is free, outdoors and runs for well over a kilometre, with an observation deck opposite that shows you the layout from above. An hour and a half, longer if you read the panels, and it is where the number of people killed at this border stops being an abstraction.

Afternoon, south to the other half of the story. The Topography of Terror sits on the excavated cellars of the Gestapo and SS headquarters, with a long stretch of the Wall still standing along the street outside it. Free again, and unsparing. Checkpoint Charlie is ten minutes further on, and is now a replica hut in traffic with souvenir stands around it: go, look for five minutes, understand why it mattered, and do not pay anybody in a uniform for a photograph.

Kreuzberg in the morning. Daniel Libeskind's zinc-clad extension to the Jewish Museum opened in 2001 and the building is half the exhibition: slashed windows, floors that slope, and three corridors that cross at nothing. Two of them lead to dead ends, one to a garden of concrete columns planted on a tilt that is designed to make you unsteady. The permanent display covers two thousand years of Jewish life in German-speaking Europe, not only its end.

Then lunch standing up. Currywurst is sliced sausage under tomato sauce and curry powder, first sold in this city in 1949, and arguing about the best stand is a local sport with no resolution. The queue at Mehringdamm moves faster than it looks.

In the afternoon cross the river to the East Side Gallery, about 1.3 kilometres of the inner wall left standing along the Spree and painted by artists from all over the world in 1990. The two everybody photographs are the Trabant coming through the concrete and Brezhnev kissing Honecker. Walk it east to west and finish at the brick double-decker bridge at the end of it, which was itself a border crossing, then stay in Friedrichshain for the evening.

Keep the last morning close to the centre. The Hackesche Hofe are eight linked courtyards behind an art nouveau tiled facade, built in 1906 as flats, workshops and a theatre in one block, and restored in the 1990s. It takes twenty minutes to walk through and there are cafes, a cinema and small shops on the way.

The lanes immediately north and east of it are the last unrenovated corner of this part of Mitte, with street art up the walls and courtyards you can walk into. Then the S-Bahn from Hackescher Markt runs to the Hauptbahnhof in about ten minutes, and the airport train leaves from there.