In 2015, I had the chance to spend two months in Berlin, studying the German language and learning about certain aspects of German history and culture. After a night on the plane from Chicago, a layover at Heathrow and a short hop to Tegel, I was in Germany for the first time in my life.

At the airport I met some fellow students and the professor who was leading the programme that summer. Familiar faces. As we hopped into a taxi outside the terminal, I still had no idea quite what to make of Berlin. I spent the ride to our accommodation staring out of the windows, no sense of direction in this totally alien environment.

As we rolled under a railway bridge, a lumbering and derelict tower stood in front of us: the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche. After half an hour of fairly anonymous sights this Memorial Church stuck in my mind, a first anchor in a foreign land. For the two months I was in Berlin, as I went to my classes, to museums, to department stores, to Wannsee, the church's burnt and broken spire pointed my way to the Bahnhof Zoo.

During those months, I began to notice and to appreciate the other buildings on the site. The original structure, dating to the 1890s, was bombed in 1943. The site was redeveloped and the remnant of the old church was preserved. The new church, designed by Egon Eiermann and constructed between 1959 and 1963, is a collection of concrete buildings inset with tiny stained glass windows. In the night, these windows twinkle in a marvelous blue.