Berlin Cathedral

This guide to Berlin Cathedral turns on the night of May 24, 1944, when a firebomb slipped through a lantern window atop the dome and fell through the roof into the crypt below, smashing open coffins of Hohenzollern princes and electors buried there since the 1500s. You'll hear how the wound in the dome stayed open to the sky for nearly a decade, and how restoration dragged on for decades more, with Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the pews when the nave was finally reconsecrated in 1993. Stand beneath the dome's simplified postwar curve, built to replace Raschdorff's original design.