A new centre for a city still divided

Berlin has not quite finished growing together, though it's well on the way to being rebuilt, with the near-completion of the Potsdamer Platz project.

Before its total destruction at the end of World War II, the Potsdamer Platz was an almost mythical place in the minds of many Germans. It was the centre of the booming, jazzy Berlin of the roaring twenties, the sort of place where pickpocket met millionaire. It was a place every Berliner passed through, because the square was the traffic hub of the city, and caught glimpses of the crowds enjoying themselves in the dozens of bars and hotels.

The Potsdamer Platz then spent much of its post-war existence as a wasteland in the dead zone of the divided Berlin - between the double wall - and came back into the city's consciousness after German reunification in 1990.