Why go
Read this before visiting Berlin's memorials or the older cities of the former German states. It puts the Holy Roman Empire, the 1848 parliament in Frankfurt, the German Empire, and the Berlin Wall on one timeline without treating today's borders as timeless.
The full story
The Frankish realm expanded under Charlemagne, but the eastern kingdom that emerged after its division was not yet a modern German nation. From the tenth century, much of the region belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, a changing group of territories with powerful local rulers. The empire ended in 1806 during the Napoleonic era. A loose German Confederation followed in 1815. Reformers met in Frankfurt in 1848–49 to seek a national parliament, but their attempt failed. Prussia eventually led unification in 1871. Defeat in the First World War ended the empire and brought the parliamentary Weimar Republic. The Nazis destroyed that democracy in 1933. Their racist dictatorship persecuted and murdered its opponents and Europe's Jews, started the Second World War, and ended with Germany's surrender in 1945. The Allies divided Germany and Berlin into occupation zones. Separate eastern and western states formed in 1949. Peaceful protests in the German Democratic Republic helped bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989; the two states reunited in 1990. Each period left a different physical trace, from old imperial towns to Cold War border sites.