The above video footage was taken by an allied plane after the Battle of Berlin in 1945. That's the Tiergarten its flying over at the start, and you will no doubt recognise the Brandenburg gate. The main road is the Unter Den Linden. Something to keep in mind as we begin today’s walk.
Berlin has an excellent public transport system, and you will no doubt end up at the Alexanderplatz, as it is a transport hub, and a shopping district with the major department stores. You can't miss it, because it has this weird looking tower.
Its a convenient place to start a walk as the Brandenburg gate is about an half hour walk, and you will visit many of the main sites on the way.
This area of Germany is mainly Protestant, because Prussia was the first country to break away from the Roman Catholic Church. Berlin was the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, and it was the Prussians who united Germany, which was then an assorted variety of principalities. Prussians were fiercely Protestant, and Bismarck (who finally united all the States into Germany) waged a Kulturekampf (Culture War) against the Catholic church dramatically reducing its influence. You might find that a strange thing to do when half of Germany is Roman Catholic, but Bismark didn't want unification so much, as he wanted to impose Prussian authority and values onto the newly formed country. He succeeded - Prussian Virtues have heavily influenced German culture. What outsiders stereotype as typically German characteristics like efficiency, austerity, and discipline are Prussian Virtues. Its a mix of the ethical code of the Prussian army, and Lutheranism and Calvinism.
The first stop on the walk is St.Marienkirche.
You will probably recognise it as a Protestant church from the interior.
If you don't the statue of the famous German, Martin Luther, who began the Protestant movement in 1517, will give it away. If you don't know history, the impact of Protestantism on Northern Europe, and the world, won't feel significant.
"The attractions of loosening the tie with Rome, keeping the money in-house, controlling one's own church, and parcelling up all that ecclesiastical land were as obvious to the German princes as Henry the 8th of England."
Prussia (1525), and England (1534) were some of the first countries to break way from Rome, but most of Northern Europe including Scandinavia eventually followed.
The next stop is the Berlin Cathedral. The city's Protestant cathedral and the burial place of the Prussian Kings (the Kaisers).
The Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is a devout Lutheran, who publicly stated that Germany suffers not from "too much Islam" but "too little Christianity." Nobody really knows why she made the decision to accept millions of refugees to Europe, whether it is to boost the economy to address Germany and Europe as a whole declining population (in Australia migrants contribute half our economic growth of 3% - one of the highest in the OECD), or to address Germany's war guilt, but perhaps she was acting out of her deep Christian faith to help the poor and unfortunate.
This is the Unter Den Linden (under the Linden trees), the main boulevard to the Brandenburg gate, which the plane in the video flew over.
You probably can easily recognise the Brandenburg Gate from television footage of major news events in Europe. Much of the 20th Century was about trying to stop German hegemony over Europe, and which ideology would dominate.
Now, in 2018 the big decisions are still getting decided in Berlin, as Angela Merkel fights for her political survival, based largely on her decision to allow millions of migrants into Europe, and the real problems in integrating them.
I think Berlin will continue making history, and the big decisions concerning Europe will still be made here. Remarkably, as early as 1942, key industrialists and economists, realising the war was lost, were already planning Europe's future, because they knew the allies would need Germany to run Europe.
