Unlike most major German cities, Berlin does not have many skyscrapers, either commercial or residential. That may change, as there are plans for residential towers in the vicinity of the Alexanderplatz television tower in Berlin-Mitte that still dominates the German capital city’s skyline decades after the Fall of the Berlin Wall (I have always thought it odd that it was called a television tower, when its main purpose was to prevent East Germans from watching West German television), but for now Berlin is generally a five-, six-, seven-storey building kind of place, with retail often taking the ground floor and multifamily residential housing or offices taking the rest of the space.

Berlin — with its long history, and with interweaving imperial, fascist, communist and social democratic elements in the past 100 years — is a captivatingly strange sort of city. It is Germany’s largest, as befits the capital city, but it is not the financial centre (that’s Frankfurt),