When we travel, it is often the past that attracts us as much as the present. Hip hotels or fashionable restaurants might be part of what we look for in a city-break. But we also want to see cathedrals and palaces, monuments and relics which speak of the history of the place - whether that’s the Granada of the Moors or the Manhattan of the Algonquin set.

Berlin, with a buzzing present and an extraordinary, and let’s say it, often awful past, clearly has both claims to our attention. For me, however, the history wins hands down - an interest fed by movies and books like Isherwood’s tales of life in the city between the wars, or more obscurely, Missie Vassiltchikov’s fascinating Berlin Diaries, 1940-45, not to mention war movies, culminating in Downfall, last year’s powerful recreation of the last days of the Third Reich.

But the book which got me hankering to visit Berlin this year is essentially a photography book: Berlin: Portrait of a City, just published by Taschen, a company renowned for producing excellent books.

Even by its standards, Berlin, edited by Hans Christian Adam, is outstanding, packed with photographs chronicling life (and of course, sometimes death) in this extraordinary city for the last hundred years, backed up with essays and quotations from sometime Berlin residents like David Bowie and Jeffrey Eugenides.

If this is a book which makes you want to visit Germany’s capital, it’s maybe not something you’d want to pack and take with you. For it is built on an appropriately heroic scale, a tome of a book which “just kept on getting bigger,” as someone at Taschen has said, “when we kept on finding more photographs.”

And what photographs.

We see the bustling, belle epoque city of the early 1900s, and the patriotic crowds celebrating the start of World War I: a mirror image of their British counterparts, who were also expecting to be home by Christmas. There are flappers and cabaret artistes from what Berliners called the Golden Twenties; then the League of German Maidens, waving swastika flags to welcome a triumphant Hitler back from Vienna after the Anschluss; fur-clad ladies trudging past burning buildings after an air-raid in 1945; and the chains of women working to clear the rubble, brick by brick, a year later.

Looking through, some individuals stand out from the crowd. You find yourself asking what happened to the handsome young man in a flat cap photographed on the Unter der Linden in 1907. Or what became of the Bohemian girls sunbathing on a roof one balmy afternoon in the Twenties - or what happened to the photographer? (In the case of Erich Salomon, who took fine pictures throughout the 20s and 30s, we know: he died in one of the camps.)

And walking around the city, you find yourself asking what happened here?, a question that comes to mind wherever you are in Berlin, from the old Luftwaffe HQ, now the Finance Ministry, to a leafy street in Schoneberg.

Indeed, the first time I visited, to interview the author Jeffrey Eugenides, he told me that it had taken at least a year to stop wondering precisely that question, every time he entered a building old enough to have been around during the Third Reich.

In fact some buildings are almost like characters in Berlin’s saga. In the Taschen book, the Brandenburg Gate crops often: with snipers on its roof during the revolution of 1919, playing a starring role in one of the Nazis’ parades, guarded by Russian troops when it marked the border between East and West Berlin, and finally surrounded the jubilant crowds celebrating New Year’s Eve in 1990, when the Wall had come down.

And then last month, I saw the Gate marking the end of a different kind of parade: an exuberant Gay Pride march, complete with drag queens, men in muscle chaps and lesbians dressed as sailors. Lovely. Hitler, needless to say, would not have approved.

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