Tours in Germany

Start with the way Germans talk about their own country: never as one thing. Ask someone from Munich about Berlin and you'll get a shrug, maybe a joke about the weather or the manners. Ask in Hamburg about Bavaria and the shrug comes back the other way. That's the real shape of Germany, a loose federation of cities and regions that each think they're the proper version of the place, and the fun of travelling here is working out which one you agree with.

Berlin earns the attention it gets, but not for the reasons postcards suggest. It's a city that wears its scars openly rather than tidying them away, so you can stand at the Brandenburg Gate, walk the line where the Wall used to run, and feel the twentieth century pressing in from both sides within the same afternoon. Alexanderplatz and the television tower anchor the east, Unter den Linden runs past Humboldt University and the Berlin Palace toward the museums of Museumsinsel, and the whole route eventually loosens into the green of the Tiergarten. Walking it with someone who knows which building replaced which, and why, turns a pleasant stroll into something closer to a crash course in why Europe looks the way it does.

Further south the mood changes entirely. Munich trades Berlin's rawness for Bavarian order, beer halls and the Marienplatz glockenspiel, with the Alps close enough for a day trip. The Rhine valley strings together castles and vineyard slopes between Cologne and Koblenz, Dresden rebuilt itself into something that still argues with its own history, and Hamburg keeps its head down by the water, more interested in shipping than sightseeing. Smaller towns, half-timbered and quiet, sit in the gaps between the famous names and reward anyone willing to get off the train a stop early.

If you're short on time, Berlin is the city that repays a guided walk best, simply because so much of what matters happened on streets that now look unremarkable unless someone points out what stood there before.