The city is full of symbols; buildings and monuments that remind us of who we are, what our history is and whom we should honour. Yet these objects are far less stable than they appear. In this guided walk, artist Esper Postma approaches Berlin’s landmarks as divided beings, each shadowed by a second self. Beginning at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and leading through Berlin’s political centre, the walk introduces the motif of the doppelgänger as a way of reading architecture. Originated in Romantic literature, the doppelgänger describes the complex psychology of people, usually serving as the manifestation of a repressed part of the psyche, such as a youth trauma or a secret drive to violence. This repressed quality is embodied in the form of a human or ghostly double who typically looks like the protagonist. The doppelgänger is effectively an uncontrollable alter ego that starts haunting the ‘original’, derailing and disrupting their daily life. 

Postma in turn uses the notion as an interpretive tool for reading the city. Long before the digital twin, buildings and monuments already existed in doubled form: as material structure and projected identities. Each site holds tensions between past and present, function and symbol, official narrative and suppressed histories. The Reichstag has lived multiple lives; the Brandenburg Gate is continually reoriented; Wilhelmstrasse is an entity composed of seemingly incompatible parts. Drawing on Romantic and Gothic literature, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Mary Shelley, the walk treats architecture not as inert matter but as a site of repression, projection, and return. The city emerges as a field of doubles in which buildings split, mutate, and turn against their own histories, opening up to the polysemic realities that tug at their seemingly rigid infrastructures of visible and invisible data. How much becomes legible in Berlin’s digital double—and should it ever be pursued?