Berlin is the rare city where the route itself tells the story. Stand at the Brandenburg Gate and almost everything on Day 1 – the Reichstag, the Holocaust Memorial, the line of the vanished Wall — sits within a few hundred metres, because this single patch of ground was the seam where empire, dictatorship, division, and reunification all pressed against each other.

The thread that surprised me most is how often the city chose to keep its wounds visible instead of tidying them away. The Kaiser Wilhelm Church was left deliberately broken; the Topography of Terror is an exhibition on an empty lot where a building was erased on purpose; the East Side Gallery turned the instrument of division into the longest open-air painting on earth. Three stops, three different decades, the same instinct — remember in public.

And then Day 7 is the deliberate exhale. Frederick the Great named his Potsdam retreat Sans Souci — "without care" — and after four days of weighty history, taking the train out to a rococo palace above the vineyards feels exactly like the break he intended it to be.