Mid-range · 6-hour walk · Berlin
Divided Berlin in six hours
The Wall, the checkpoint, the terror headquarters and the museum of everyday life on the other side.
The three-hour route walks Mitte's monuments. This one is about the forty years that made the city famous, and it is deliberately spread out — the Wall ran for 155 kilometres and the surviving pieces are nowhere near each other, so two legs here are U-Bahn rides rather than walks. Bernauer Strasse first, because it is the only place the whole death-strip layout is still legible and the only one that is genuinely sobering.
The route, stop by stop
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Berlin Wall Memorial
The one preserved section with both walls and the strip between them. The documentation centre is free and the tower at the end shows you the layout from above.
60 min here Walk here → -
DDR Museum
Arrive by metro from the previous stop
Hands-on to the point of being a bit much — you sit in the Trabant and open the kitchen cupboards. Busy; go late.
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Checkpoint Charlie
Arrive by metro from the previous stop
Frankly a tourist trap with actors in uniform, and worth twenty minutes only because the photographs of what stood here are posted on the spot. The museum beside it is overpriced.
20 min here Walk here → -
Topography of Terror
Built on the excavated cellars of the Gestapo and SS headquarters. Free, outdoors and indoors, and the most unflinching history museum in the city.
50 min here Walk here → -
Potsdamer Platz
Busiest square in pre-war Europe, then an empty minefield for thirty years, then rebuilt from nothing in the 1990s. A few Wall segments stand by the station entrance.
25 min here Walk here → -
East Side Gallery
Arrive by metro from the previous stop
The longest surviving stretch, 1.3 km of it, painted by 118 artists in 1990 and repainted since. Walk the river side; the fraternal kiss is about two-thirds along.
More in Berlin
Every walking route in Berlin, or the full Berlin guide for where to stay and what a day costs.