Germany

A capital that a wall cut in two and that turned its own scar into the most honest memorial landscape in the world, a Bavarian city the monks named that perfected the art of drinking beer under chestnut trees, and a free port of merchants who bowed to no king and raised a district of red-brick warehouses on oak piles over the tide. Three cities that carry the weight of the twentieth century and the pleasures of the everyday in the same streets.