Potsdam

Twenty-five stops, most of them inside a single World Heritage site: the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin, listed since 1990, 2,064 hectares – Sanssouci, the Neues Palais, Charlottenhof, the Orangery, the Marble Palace, Babelsberg, Glienicke. Plus St. Nicholas' church, the Alexandrowka colony and the Barberini museum, the Telegrafenberg, and the Babelsberg film lot, shooting since 12 February 1912.

Sanssouci is small. A single-storey summer house of twelve rooms, only five of which Frederick II used himself; the palace built for show was the Neues Palais, put up after the Seven Years' War. He wanted to be buried beside his dogs on the top vineyard terrace – a wish carried out only on 17 August 1991.

Cecilienhof, built 1913–17 in Tudor style for the crown prince, hosted the Potsdam Conference from 17 July to 2 August 1945: Truman, Stalin and Churchill, replaced by Clement Attlee on 28 July after the British election. On the Glienicke Bridge the two blocs exchanged Rudolf Abel for Francis Gary Powers on 10 February 1962 and Anatoly Shcharansky in 1986; it reopened on 10 November 1989. Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower of 1922 still measures the redshift in the solar spectrum, and the tower of the garrison church – site of the Day of Potsdam on 21 March 1933, blown up in 1968 – stands again since 2024.