Berlin city tour, Germany: A walk through Berlin's wild, wild West

Of all the reminders of Nazi Germany I expected to find in Berlin, an uneven cobblestone was not one of them. Yet here I am, rubbing my stubbed toe with one hand and wiping away tears with the other. Not from the pain, but from the sad story behind Berlin's "stumbling stones". "Each brick is a mini-memorial to one individual who died at the hands of the Nazis," says my guide, Heri von Reiche, pointing to the cobblestone-sized, brass brick embedded in the pavement. "They've been placed in front of the homes where the person once lived."

This particular brick commemorates Max Drucker, the inscription detailing his birthdate, deportation date, and the date and place he was killed. The one beside is for his wife. "The installations were started by an artist in the mid-90s," von Reiche says. "Today we have more than 5000 across the city."

Without von Reiche's guidance I wouldn't have noticed them, or the Hotel Adlon Kempinski​ where Marlene Dietrich enjoyed a drink, or learnt the story about Berlin's "rubble women", who, after the Allied bombings of World War II, arose from the rubble and cleared away the mess brick by brick.

Such insights are the reasons for joining a walking tour like Context Travel's The Pendulum Swings; A journey through West Berlin. In a city known for its "alternative" tours, of underground bunkers and urban art, this three-hour tour with a local cultural expert shows another side of modern Berlin.

The tour focuses on Charlottenburg, an area overlooked by tourists in recent years, but poised to become an alternative cultural centre to the more bohemian eastern districts. "After the wall came down in 1989 the East was flooded by people looking for an exotic lifestyle," von Reiche says. "But as the former East becomes more gentrified the creatives are moving back to where it all began."

Berlin's heydays were the Golden Twenties, when the city was one of the world's great cultural capitals, equally famous for its contribution to literature and science as its plays and parties. "Hemingway and Twain visited, Marlene Dietrich made films and there was a cabaret on every corner," von Reiche says.

While he points out the luxury stores along Kurfurstendamm​ Boulevard, the Champs-Elysees-like thoroughfare which is blooming again, he also makes time for the small things – memorials to the forgotten victims of the Third Reich – gypsies, political enemies and homosexuals, a plaque marking the home of Jewish poet Mascha Kaleko​, and a before and after photograph of the Synagogue Fasanenstrasse​, smashed and burned in 1938.