Berlin's top 10 sights

Unmissable in scale and impact, Berlin's great sights are scattered over the city, conjuring up inspiring views and deep-felt stories. This whistle-stop tour is a first step into an intense and complex past.

For many Berliners the events of the 20th century are within living memory and the city’s architecture is saturated with historical significance; every nook or grand vista has its ghosts and stories, adding to the city’s unique atmosphere. Memorials here take many forms, and whether famous landmarks, functioning offices, postmodern memorials or epic reconstructions, they are all part of the life of the place.

1. Brandenburger Tor

With its commanding vantage point over Unter den Linden, the Brandenburger Tor provides a spectacular gateway to Berlin and its history. The classical arch was constructed in 1791 to celebrate the city’s status as Prussia’s capital and although initially known as the Friedenstor (Gate of Peace), it has had to survive stormy times. The Quadriga statue on top shows Victory driving a chariot, but fell victim to Napoleon when he conquered Berlin in 1806, holding it hostage in Paris for 12 years; come the 20th century the Quadriga was turned around to face west by the DDR. Victory was repaired after the major celebrations around the Tor when the Wall came down and now finds herself facing Mitte once again.

Brandenburger Tor, Pariser Platz 7, 10117 Berlin (030 2460 3330, www.brandenburgertor.de‎). U55 Brandenburger Tor.

2. Reichstag

The Federal German Parliament was welcomed back from Bonn in 1999 with a new glass dome, a potent symbol of political aspiration, designed by British ‘starchitect’ Norman Foster. The Reichstag was built in 1894 to house the united German parliament; the terrible fire that was started there on 27 February 1933 not only gutted the building, but was used by the Nazis as a catalyst for withdrawing basic freedoms. Foster’s renovations aim to establish a ‘dialogue between old and new’. The glass cupola materialises aims for political transparency and is open to the public for tours to the heart of government. The dome, rising like a phoenix from the flames, sheds light on the governmental workings below, thanks to energy-efficient mirrors.

Reichstag, Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin (030 3339 509m(),‎ www.berlinstadtservice.de). U55 Bundestag. Open 8am-12midnight daily.

3. Olympiastadion

Designed by Werner March, the stadium is a testimony to the ideals of fascist architecture. At the end of a straight stretch of road running directly from Brandenburger Tor through Tuergarten and on, this is a graceful oval structure in pale stone, rich with classical motifs and combining simplicity of line with regular proportions. Although intended to be the central stage for Aryan prowess in the 1936 Olympics, this stadium was instead, famously, the site for black athlete Jesse Owens’ four-gold-medal triumph. It has since survived World War II bombs and threats of demolition to get a complete refurbishment for the 2006 World Cup, including a floating roof that leaves the central area open to the elements. Come to see Berlin’s beloved underdog football team Hertha BSC, the German Cup Final or the occasional pop star.

Olympiastadion, Olympischer Platz 3, 14053 Berlin (030 3068 8100, www.olympiastadion-berlin.de). U2 Olympia-Stadion. Open 9am-7pm (on event free days).

4. Potsdamer Platz

Potsdamer Platz, once the centre of the Weimar Republic, had been a dead space until its redevelopment in the late 1990s. In the 1920s this was one of the densest traffic intersections in Europe, at the geographical and spiritual centre of a major world city. But that all changed in the early hours of 13 August 1961, when units of the People’s Police began to drag bales of barbed wire across Potsdamer Platz, sealing off West Berlin within 24 hours. The city’s centre of gravity shifted as the Wall cut off the historic centre from the West, dividing Potsdamer Platz in two, thus rendering it a wasteland for nearly 30 years. Today, post redevelopment, soaring walls of glass and steel-spun towers mark the soldering of the East-West divide with shiny atriums and cinema complexes. Its regeneration was contrived to provide the city with a new centre, only to find other centres of energy and gentrification emerging more organically: Potsdamer Platz remains a vision of what the future might have been.

Potsdamer Platz, 10785 Berlin. U2 Potsdamer Platz.
   

5. Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas

From Potsdamer Platz, it is a short walk down to the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe). This field of concrete slabs takes up the entire area of a city block, arranged in rows but rising to various heights on uneven ground – echoing the crowded headstones in Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery. Conceived in 1993, the controversial project was not opened until 2005, and just as there is no one single way of marking shared memory, nor is there any single view point to Peter Eisenmann’s winning design; to engage with the memorial you need to walk into it and experience its shifts in perspective, and the shifting effects of light, distance, isolation and claustrophobia.

Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, Georgenstraße 23, 10117 Berlin (030 2639 4311, www.stiftung-denkmal.de). U2 Mohrenstraße. Open (Field of Stelae) 24/7; Information centre 10am-8pm Tue-Sun (Apr-Sep); 10am-7pm Tue-Sun (Oct-Mar).

6. The Soviet War Memorial, Treptower Park

This memorial and military cemetery lies quietly in the wings of Berlin’s beautiful eastern Treptower Park. Architect Yakov Belopolsky’s design was unveiled just four years after World War II ended, on 8 May 1949, and its epic scale and brawny symbolism made it a war memorial for all East Germany. On entering you are greeted by two kneeling soldiers, and the view unfolds across a geometrical expanse flanked by 16 stone sarcophagi, which mark the burial of 5,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the final Battle of Berlin in spring 1945. The endpoint is a 12-metre tall statue of a Soviet soldier holding a German child aloft. It’s an arresting image, whether surrounded by foliage in summer, or bleak snow in winter.

The Soviet War Memorial, Treptower Park, 12435 Berlin (030 9013 93000, www.berlin.de, www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de). S-bahn Treptower Park.

7. Fernsehturm

Rebuilding the east in the 1960s went ahead along totalitarian lines and rising up out of Alexanderplatz, the 368 metre-high Fernsehturm (‘Television Tower’) marked the centre of a new capital. As the fourth highest freestanding structure in Europe, on a clear day you can see as far as 42 kilometres form its top, while from the ground the ball-on-spike makes an excellent, if bizarre, compass point. It started life as a symbol of Communist ideals, looming high above the wall into the West – an icon straight out of the pages of science fiction novel. But political statement was marred by iffy engineering: only after construction was completed, did it transpire that the sun was reflected in a cross-shape across the stainless-steel dome, earning it the title of ‘the Pope’s revenge’. For a truly high-end experience, dine in the rotating restaurant at the top of the ball, which turns a complete revolution every half hour.

Fernsehturm, Panoramastrasse 1A, 10178 Berlin (030 2475 750, www.tv-turm.de). U2, U5, U8 Alexanderplatz. Open 9am-midnight daily (Mar-Oct); 10am-midnight daily (Nov-Feb).

8. Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche

The crown of the teeming ‘Ku’damm’ shopping boulevard, an artery through the former West, this church is a funny-peculiar landmark: its nickname, the ‘Broken Tooth’, is pointed. First built in 1895 as a memorial to Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia, whose troops invaded France, Austria and Denmark and forged modern Germany, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche was seriously damaged in an air raid in 1943. Rebuilding the church (1959–63) was a morale-boosting statement for newly sealed-off West Berlin. The new church, comprising a glass-clad tower and squat bunker, and studded with coloured glass was nicknamed Lippenstift und Puderdose (the lipstick and the powder box). Meanwhile the jagged old tower remains a poignant symbol for Berlin; it clings on in true Berliner spirit.

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Breitscheidplatz, 10789 Berlin. U1 Kurfürstendamm. Open 9am-7pm daily.

9. Museumsinsel

In 1841, Frederick the Great dedicated the island in the centre of Berlin to ‘art and science’. At that time it was just a residential area, but underlying it was the site of Berlin’s twin 12th-century settlement, Cölln. It has a fairytale charm, surrounded by high banks and deep channels of water. The collection of museums built there were confined to East Berlin during the DDR period, and their restoration had been long awaited. Go to top of the Alte Nationalgalerie for a room of paintings by Caspar David Friedrich that is nothing short of sublime. In the Pergamonmuseum you can walk though a sequence of ancient structures, from the Pergamon Altar (170–159 BC) to the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, dating from the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar (605–563 BC). The Neues Museum contains Egyptian and Prehistory and Early History collections, but is equally fascinating in its own right: battered in World War II, the building was resurrected under the direction of British architect David Chipperfield. it reopened in 2009, preserving the original carcass within a new space.

Museumsinsel, Bodestraße 1-3, 10178 Berlin. Various sites.

10. The Berlin Wall East Side Gallery

The Berlin Wall, put up in a single night in 1961, introduced a new and cruel reality: anyone trying to flee to the West risked being shot. The concrete part of the 160-kilometre Berlin Wall ran to 112 kilometres, of which the East Side Gallery is a 1.3-kilometre-long section on the Friedrichshain side of the River Spree. Over 100 artists from all over the world painted images on the Wall in the wake of its declassification, and in a city bursting with graffiti, this stretch is an oddity, being officially sanctioned. A colourful memorial to freedom and the outburst of jubilation of that period, it is fading fast, from weather or vandalism, and controversy reigns as to its restoration, with certain artists objecting to copies being painted over their originals. This memorial is a focus for the new tensions that have emerged in the post-Wall era, between ideas of ownership, officialdom and memory.

East Side Gallery, Mühlenstraße 1, 10243 Berlin (030 2517 159, www.eastsidegallery-berlin.com). U1 Warschaer Straße.