With its grand villas, alpine chalet-style houses, waterside views, and cobbled streets, Klein Glienicke is a charming village, popular with day-trippers. But for 28 years this idyllic settlement on the Potsdam border was an East German enclave separated from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall and only accessible with special permission. The quirks of Klein […]
Berlin Wall Graveyard – Teltow’s Answer to the East Side Gallery
On a building site between Oderstraße and the Teltow canal, just over the Berlin border into Brandenburg, weeds and trees grow around a collection of wall sections, like some kind of Berlin wall graveyard. In 1991, the NVA (Nationale Volksarmee) the National People’s Army of East Germany was tasked with dismantling and disposing of the […]
Berlin Airlift Memorial (Luftbrückendenkmal)
Looming over a small park on the Platz der Luftbrücke in Tempelhof, the Berlin Airlift Memorial (Luftbrückendenkmal) is dedicated to those who gave their lives to save the people of West Berlin during the Berlin Blockade. On 24 June 1948, Stalin closed off all road and rail routes to Berlin in an attempt to starve […]
Kaninchenfeld – Berlin’s Brass Rabbit Field
The brass rabbits of Karla Sachse’s Kaninchenfeld (Rabbit Field) add a touch of colour and some much needed shine to an otherwise unremarkable stretch of the Chausseestraße in Berlin. The Kaninchenfeld is one of seven artworks selected from a host of competition entries to mark the locations of Cold War Berlin’s inner city border crossing […]
17 June Memorial by Wolfgang Rüppel
The 17 June Memorial on Leipziger Strasse in Berlin recalls the events of a popular uprising of 1953 against the communist government in East Germany. Wolfgang Rüppel’s memorial, unveiled in 2000, is sunk into the floor in a square in front of the Bundesministerium der Finanzen (Federal Ministry of Finance), which was the Haus der […]
Bücherwald – The Book Forest of Berlin
Strolling along Sredzkistrasse in Prenzlauer Berg near the corner with Kollwitzstrasse you may have a bit of a Sesame Street moment because ‘one of these trees is not like the others’. The Bücherwald (book forest) isn’t in fact a tree at all. It is a collection of five logs bolted together with shelves carved into […]
Giant Ampelmann Statue
Germans* are almost obsessive about waiting for the Ampelmann (the traffic light man) to signal it’s safe to cross the road. Pedestrians in Berlin spend years of their lives standing at empty crossings praying for the little green man with his purposeful stride and jaunty hat to appear, so I suppose it’s only natural that […]
Checkpoint Alpha: The ABC of Berlin Checkpoints
To West Germans it was Kontrollpunkt Helmstedt, to East Germans, Grenzübergangsstelle Marienborn, but outside Germany, the inner German border crossing point was most commonly referred to by the name given to it by the Allied powers, Checkpoint Alpha. Note: While Checkpoint Alpha was only officially the name of the West German checkpoint at Helmstedt, for […]
Berlin Wall Watchtower on Erna-Berger-Straße near Potsdamer Platz
Tucked away on Erna-Berger-Straße, a dead-end street a stone’s throw from Potsdamer Platz in one of the most touristy corners of Berlin, a former Berlin Wall watchtower stands as a reminder of the city’s divided past. Like the wall, the watchtowers along its length were improved over the 28 years that they were used to […]
Reagan Berlin Wall at Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus
A piece of the Berlin Wall signed by Ronald Reagan is on display on the third floor of Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus on Friedrichstraße in Berlin. As well as adding his signature to the piece of wall, Reagan, the former US President, wrote a quote from his famous ‘tear down this wall’ Berlin speech. The piece […]