Berlin

Few cities let students stand inside the machinery of twentieth-century politics as directly as Berlin, where a divided city was reunited within living memory and the consequences are still visible on the pavement. For a Politics group from Dubai, it offers the rare combination of a working parliament, a preserved dictatorship-era security apparatus and a Cold War frontier, all within a few U-Bahn stops of one another.

The Reichstag, with its Norman Foster glass dome open above the debating chamber, is the natural centre of a Berlin politics itinerary, and registered school groups can arrange a visit to the Bundestag with a briefing in the plenary chamber. The Topography of Terror on the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters, the Stasi Museum in the former Ministry for State Security at Normannenstraße in Lichtenberg, and the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße give students primary evidence of how states monitor and control populations. Add the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the DDR Museum on the Spree and the East Side Gallery, and the city becomes a sequence of arguments about power, memory and accountability.