Berlin

My hotel is just around the corner from the famous Checkpoint Charlie sign "You are leaving the American Sector," reminding me that I'm no longer in the USA. There are few other signs of the former division between East and West Berlin. All that remains of the wall is one forlorn 200-metre stretch, now preserved as a historic relic.

During my first visit in 1994 Potsdamer Plat was a desolate wasteland. Seven years later it had been transformed into a hypermodern shopping complex. Now, another seven years later, the construction boom is over and the city seems to be trying to come to terms with its grim past. Between elegant Potsdamer Platz and touristy Brandenburg Gate there's a controversial new Holocaust Memorial: a vast forest of stone slabs of varying heights laid out in a strict symmetrical grid pattern. A similar stack of slabs at the new Jewish Museum is set at a slight angle from the vertical, intended to disorient visitors or at least make them feel slightly queasy. These monuments are impressive examples of urban landscape design, but I find them rather impersonal. You get more emotional impact at Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam.

Tourists love the 3000-year-old bust of Nefertiti in the Altes Museum here. In spite of having a chipped right ear and missing the pupil from her left eye she's incredibly lifelike. My favourite artworks are the neoclassical sculptures, particularly a wonderful double portrait of Princesses Luise and Frederike, proving that realism and romanticism can coexist in the hands of a skilled sculptor working from beautiful models.

Germans have a particular love for musical theatre. The other evening I saw a performance of the popular hit "Elisabeth", the story of the last empress of Austria. I've come across her in my travels before, having visited her bedroom in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna (complete with nineteenth-century exercise equipment to keep her figure trim) and the site where she was stabbed to death by a maniac in Geneva.