A VISIT to Berlin means facing some of Europe’s most turbulent times. Its history, especially in the last hundred years, has seen it at the centre of three of the continent's catastrophes.

The rise of the Nazis, persecution of minorities, invasion and slaughter in Eastern Europe and the holocaust - all stemmed from here.

And so any visit to the German capital is haunted by these events, and those of more recent horrors of the Cold War, especially the Berlin Wall.

A walk along the city's eastern boulevard, Unter den Linden takes in many of the city's waymarks, from its rumblings of Prussian greatness, through war, defeat, Nazi power and Soviet occupation.

I start at a building whose very existence is still charged with the potency of history - the Reichstag.

The German parliament building was built in 1894 and housed the German parliament until 1933. The building's mysterious torching was used as an excuse by the Nazis to seize power in 1933. Its charred and bullet-riddled carcass was the site of a defining image of the Second World War as a Red Army soldier raised the Soviet flag from its battered roof.

300,000 Berliners gathered here in 1948 to protest against the Soviet blockade of the city, which was relieved only by a massive airlift from the West.

It is now the parliament of a unified Germany. A move not without controversy, its dark interior is now illuminated by Sir Norman Foster's glass dome atop the building. The new light somehow giving hope to the idea of scrubbing this tainted building clean.

Looking like it should be the most triumphant of all triumphal arches, the Brandenburg Gate has seen the Kaiser's troops march through in 1914, and home again defeated and angry four years later. Those angry veterans, now goose-stepping under the swastika, marched past its pillars into power in the thirties and to war again in 1939.

Six years later, the Red Army came through on their way to hurl captured Nazi standards at the feet of their victorious general Zhukov.

As the Cold War had Europe in its icy grip, it was in Berlin where the bite was most felt. After playing grandstand to the march of time, this area between zones of occupation became the 'Todesstreifen' or death strip, where unauthorised people were liable to be shot on sight.

The death strip is now full of life and souvenir sellers hawk their cold war knick knacks to teenagers unborn when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

From the Brandenburg gate’s classical pillars to the right, down Wilhelm Strasse is the Holocaust Memorial. This stark and very modern monument is made of 2,711 concrete slabs. The grey pillars create a maze arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field and it forms a fascinating yet disturbing reminder of this great crime which was directed from this city.

Designed by Peter Eisenman its construction told of the impossibility of disentangling the city's troubled past from its present. The firm which made the paint used on the slabs is a subsidiary of the company which made Zyklon B, the chemical used in the gas chambers and part of Goebbels' bomb shelter lies beneath a corner of the memorial.

No area expresses the Janus-like faces of Berlin, looking both forward and back, like the Museum island in the heart of Berlin.

What is on display here is central to Germany’s story, and the island in the River Spree and its canal houses some of Germany's finest museums.

Miraculously standing after heavy wartime bombing, these classical buildings house collections from all over the world and are currently being expensively renovated.

Among the museums is the Deutches Historiches Museum (German Historical Museum). Its home is the neo-classical Zeughaus or armoury, but has spawned a strikingly modern extension designed by IM Pei.

The Pergamon museum houses artefacts from the Middle East, including the vast 47-feet high Ishtar Gate which 2,500 years ago, guarded one of the entrances to Babylon, now in modern Iraq.

I made a bee-line for a much more modern museum telling the story of a recent chapter of German history, life in the DDR, or East Germany.

Although I have a great interest in the sweep of German history, the story of Cold War life resonates with me. Like many who grew up in the seventies and eighties, the iron curtain and living with the threat of nuclear war was as much a part of childhood as Swap Shop and Spangles.

This museum tells both parts of this story – of the DDR’s socialist purpose and military stance, but also the tale of domestic life in the workers’ state.

In the popular imagination, East Germany meant shortages, Trabants and shoddy consumer goods. What I hadn’t anticipated was a great feeling of sympathy and nostalgia for their simple television programmes, like the stop-motion Das Sandmännchen, a kind of bed-time Paddington Bear. There were lurid coloured sweets and uncomfortable nylon clothes. It seemed their story was not so different to ours.

Of course, in some ways we were poles apart. Not least with the lack of political freedom and infiltration of every level of society by the infamous Stasi secret police.

The dark side of life in East Germany hasn’t stopped many in the former East yearning for the days before unification. It even has its own name - ‘Ostalgie’ – a nostalgia for the east.

Ostalgie is personified in the distinctive Ampelmännchen, the symbol shown on pedestrian signals in the DDR. The little red or green man wearing a hat has survived the demise of the Democratic Republic to become a symbol of East Germany. So popular is the little man, he has his own shop just past museum island.

Further down, onto Karl Liebknecht Strasse was the ‘Ostpaket’, another shop devoted solely to the kind of goods that East Germans today clearly get misty-eyed about. There was beer, shampoo, robust wooden toys and models of Mig fighter jets. A more menacing age has been made cuddly by the passing of time.

As you leave the grey 1980s shopping centre, you are confronted by the city’s ultimate symbol of its socialist past. The great TV Tower, nicknamed "Telespargel" (television-asparagus) it dwarfs all around with its 368 metre height. From its immense concrete base to its spherical restaurant on top, it is the ultimate socialist symbol. Vast, brutal and a bit pointless.

And so, at the end of this walk through history, you can take the S-bahn, or urban train at Alexander Platz in the shadow of the TV tower. Even here, although run by the West German DeutscheBahn, their famed efficiency runs up against the slightly slower, eastern way of doing things. The trains were seldom on time, and the stations we stopped at all had slightly more weeds, graffiti and cracked concrete than their counterparts in the West.

Even in these small ways, Berlin’s history was still making its presence felt.