On a recent sunny day in Berlin, I peered at one of the city’s famous landmarks through a tiny, blurry viewfinder. A young couple had just bundled their camera into my hands and asked that I frame them at the forefront of the Brandenburg Gate. From every angle, tourists clustered in groups before the 18th century neoclassical monument, while lone travellers obscured by their iPhones snapped photos and swiftly moved along.

Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Ronald Reagan’s famous demand for it to be torn down, the Gate has become a national symbol of peace. Knowing this, and being confronted by so many others making the same pilgrimage, made my and my brother’s experience all the more confusing. Where we had expected to be struck by a sense of awe, we found it entirely underwhelming.

Julia Carr-Catzel with her brother in Germany.

Initially, I thought the fatigue of travel might be to blame. But a cursory look online reassured me I wasn’t alone in this insouciance. Philosopher Agnes Callard characterises this experience of hopping from one tourist hot spot or must-see attraction to another as “locomotion”. This kind of holiday,........

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