Eastern Germany is the country's most interesting half for a backpacker: the history is heavier, the cities are cheaper, the nightlife is better, and an hour beyond Dresden there's a national park of sandstone towers that most visitors never hear about. Everything below runs on regional trains covered by the €58 Deutschlandticket.
Berlin: four days, minimum
Berlin doesn't have sights so much as wounds and scenes, and both take time. Walk the East Side Gallery early before the crowds, then do the Wall properly at the Bernauer Strasse memorial, where a preserved section of death strip — raked sand, watchtower, silence — explains the city faster than any museum. The Reichstag dome is free with advance booking; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is always open; Tempelhof, the abandoned airport turned park, is Berliners rollerblading down a runway at sunset and is somehow the most Berlin thing of all. Eat cheap and well: döner (€5–7, invented here), currywurst, Vietnamese in Prenzlauer Berg. Nightlife runs Friday night to Monday morning; about clubs, the honest advice is dress down, go in a small group or alone, know who's playing, and treat a Berghain rejection as a rite of passage — Sisyphos and about a hundred smaller doors will take you in. Dorms €25–35.
Potsdam: an afternoon of empire
Forty minutes on the S-Bahn, Potsdam is Prussia showing off: Sanssouci palace on its terraced vineyard (park free, palace €14), the Dutch Quarter's red-brick lanes, and Cecilienhof, the mock-Tudor manor where Truman, Stalin and Churchill carved up the postwar world in 1945. Rent a bike at the station (€12) — the palaces are scattered and the parks are made for it. Cross back via the Glienicke Bridge, the actual bridge of spies, and try not to walk it slowly. You will walk it slowly.
Dresden: the phoenix act
Two hours south by regional train, Dresden's baroque center — obliterated in the February 1945 firestorm — has been rebuilt stone by numbered stone. The Frauenkirche is the emblem: look for the charred original blocks set deliberately dark among the pale new sandstone, like scar tissue the city chose to keep. The Zwinger's Old Masters gallery (€14) holds Raphael's Sistine Madonna and its two famously bored cherubs; the Neustadt across the river holds the actual life — the Kunsthofpassage's courtyard of buildings that play music when it rains, €3 beers, and Dresden's late nights. Two nights is right.
Saxon Switzerland: the Bastei and beyond
The S-Bahn along the Elbe (40 minutes, covered by the pass) delivers you into Saxon Switzerland National Park, a landscape of eroded sandstone towers and table mountains above a looping river. The famous shot is the Bastei bridge, a 19th-century stone span threaded between pinnacles 190 meters above the Elbe — go before 9am from the village of Rathen (passenger ferry across the river, €2.50) and you'll share it with photographers and swifts. Then escape the day-trippers entirely: the Schwedenlöcher gorge stairs, the Amselsee, or the full-day Malerweg (Painters' Way) sections that inspired Caspar David Friedrich. Base in Rathen or Bad Schandau (guesthouses €40–60 a double; the region is oddly hostel-poor, so consider day-tripping from Dresden). Climbers note: this is the birthplace of free climbing, with 1,100 towers and strict, beautiful traditional ethics — no chalk, knotted slings, since 1910.
Leipzig to finish
Ninety minutes northwest, Leipzig is what Berlin's artists say Berlin used to be: the vast cotton-mill-turned-gallery complex of the Spinnerei, canals through forest, Bach's own Thomaskirche (motets Fridays and Saturdays, €3), and the staggering Monument to the Battle of the Nations. The Stasi Museum in the Runde Ecke, preserved as it was abandoned in 1989 — bag sealer, smell samples in jars, endless files — is the east's final word on the century. Dorms €22–28, dinners €10, and trains home in every direction.
May, June and September are ideal; December adds Dresden's Striezelmarkt, Germany's oldest Christmas market. Budget €55–75 a day, less if Berlin doesn't keep you out late. It will.