IF A Martian arrived in Berlin’s main train station today, wheeling her Martian suitcase out the southern entrance, she would immediately conclude that the country Germany considers the most powerful and important in the world is ...

… Switzerland.

That is because, right across the Spree river from the main station, the Hauptbahnhof, (completed in 2006 for the football World Cup hosted in Germany that year), the white cross of Switzerland flutters above a classical gray building that is the Swiss embassy.

Diagonally to the left (east) sprawls Germany’s parliament, a group of buildings around the historic parliament, the Reichstag. To the right (west) is the chancellery at present inhabited by Europe’s most powerful head of government, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. If the Swiss embassy had an equivalent location in Washington, DC, it would be right between the White House and Congress, with nothing else obstructing the view in either direction. This Martian would not be the first tourist or commuter to ponder how those wily Swiss could have pulled off such a spectacular coup of diplomacy and real-estate investing. The explanation, it turns out, amounts to a crash course in Germany history. In the Berlin of Prussian kings, the area within this bend of the Spree river was just outside the western gate (the famous Brandenburger Tor) that marked the city limits. It was used as a sandy parade ground for soldiers. But during the 19th century, it became a suburb for Berlin’s glitterati and was renamed the Alsenviertel. Around the time of German unification in 1871, a famous doctor, Friedrich Theodor Frerichs, built what was in effect a palace. (Even Fyodor Dostoyevsky once made the trip from Russia to be treated here.) This building still serves as the skeleton of today’s embassy. Mr Frerichs sold the mansion in 1907, and by 1910 it was in the hands of Erich Kunheim, a chemicals tycoon. But Mr Kunheim lost his wealth in World War I, and the building was again up for sale in 1919. It was an unlikely time for a foreign investor to take an interest in the spot. Germany was defeated and in a state of revolutionary chaos. On November 9th 1918, two competing republics, one of them Marxist-socialist, had been announced on the same day. One was proclaimed on the balcony of the Reichstag, easily viewed from the windows of the gray mansion.

As it happened, however, Switzerland was just then deciding to stop renting its accommodations in major capitals and to start buying property. A federation even more decentralised than the United States today, Switzerland had little money to fund its federal government, so the Swiss were above all looking for a good deal. For 1.7m Reichsmark, a sum considered low by everyone at a time of high inflation, the building thus became Swiss. It started functioning as the embassy in 1920.

It must have been a good place from which to observe the unfolding drama of the Weimar Republic, nestled into the river bend with several other embassies in what became a diplomatic quarter. Then Adolf Hitler seized power. By 1936, he and his architect, Albert Speer, cooked up megalomaniacal plans to raze central Berlin and erect a new “world capital” to be named Germania. Its centre piece was to be a dome of truly otherworldly proportions, squatting on the entire area around the Swiss embassy. Construction began in 1938.

Hitler duly explained to the resident foreign missions that they had to move, and all except one did. The Swiss, however, were at this time represented by one Hans Frölicher, who sympathised with, and was close to, the Nazis. Mr Frölicher was able to slow down the negotiations and to secure a good new location for the Swiss. Then Hitler started a world war.

In one of the first British bombing raids, the building intended as the new embassy of Switzerland was destroyed. So the move was on hold. As the bombings grew worse, plans for Germania were shelved. The Swiss thus stayed in their mansion throughout the war, witnessing the destruction of the city around them. As though by a miracle, bombs flattened all the surrounding structures except that of the Swiss embassy. One bomb did fall into it, but was a dud.

One of the last battles of the war was the Soviet attack on the Reichstag next door. The Russians swept in mainly from the east, but one cohort came across the river where today’s Hauptbahnhof is located, and seized the Swiss embassy as their redoubt. Switzerland at this time had not recognised the Soviet Union, so the young Russians, if they even cared, had few qualms. About 300 of them locked the remaining handful of Swiss into the cellar, then started shooting out the windows at the Reichstag (the bullet holes are still visible in the Reichstag today) before attacking and taking the building.

With the war over, there was no longer a country called Germany. The Swiss still had their building but it was no longer an embassy. It became instead a “delegation”, tasked with ferrying the remaining Swiss citizens in Germany out and home. In 1949, when West Germany was founded with a new capital, sleepy Rhenish Bonn, the Swiss opened a new embassy there. (Switzerland did not recognise East Germany until 1973.) But they still kept their Berlin property. The following years had a surreal quality. In the post-war devastation, Germans used the surrounding acres, partially turning into wilderness, to grow potatoes and to picnic. Otherwise, the district became a dead zone, tucked into a nook of the Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall was built just behind the Reichstag, in full view of the Swiss. They now owned property in a place that felt like the end of the world. In a moment of weakness, the Swiss tried to sell the building in the 1970s. By now, however, nobody wanted it, neither private investors nor the city of Berlin. Through dumb luck (the latest instance of many), the Swiss retained ownership yet again. And then the calendar turned to 1989. The wall, one athletic stone throw away, fell. Within a year, Germany was once again (as when the original palace was first built) being united. In 1991, the German parliament voted to move the capital back to Berlin. In 1999, the Bundestag (lower house of parliament) moved physically into the old Reichstag building, by then refitted by Sir Norman Foster with an elegantly transparent interior. Right across, the new chancellery was built. Germany had even grander plans for the area, and politely inquired once again whether the Swiss might consider moving. The Swiss, tapping into a national trait, stayed stubborn and said No.