Brian Melican traces three centuries of writing on Berlin’s most famous boulevard…

The most obvious way to get to know a city is to travel round it: on foot, by bike, on a bus, by train. Especially in a town as geographically flat as Berlin, this is what you might call “horizontal” exploration, covering the surface area of a city step by step, route by route.

Yet this form of discovery, however comprehensive, is incomplete without “vertical” exploration: stopping at one given point and investigating its history, digging down to previous versions of the city rather than roaming across the current one. Collating historic writing about places is one way to do this, and is often like stumbling upon a lift down to levels of a city buried under the current one.

The entry to the historical Berlin elevator is to be found somewhere along Unter den Linden, and the writing I found about Berlin allows us to get out and stroll along this promenade at several levels. The first thing that is striking, though, is that the Berlin elevator does not go particularly deep: the lowest level is Thursday, 5^th July, 1764, when we can get out and accompany James Boswell, later a biographer of Samuel Johnson, about town.

“I was struck with the Beauty of Berlin. The House are handsom and the streets wide long and strait. The Palace is grand. The Palaces of some of the Royal family are very genteel. The Opera-House is an elegant Building with this Inscription: Fridericus Rex Apollini et Musis. At night we sauntered in a sweet walk under a grove of Chestnut-trees by the side of a beautifull Canal.”

The Berlin Boswell shows us is brand new, of course, which is why this particular elevator does not go any further down. Berlin existed long before 1764, of course, but it was a provincial backwater, no destination for English-speaking travellers. By the sixteenth century, Hamburg and Heidelberg were already on the European map as the port city and the university tow…