🇩🇪 Germany · Berlin and the East
Few cities in the world carry as much twentieth-century history as Berlin, and few turn it into as much creative energy. The German capital is an enormous, green, open metropolis crossed by the river Spree, where the evidence of a dramatic past — Nazism, the war, the division, the Wall — lives alongside one of the most vibrant cultural, artistic and nightlife scenes in Europe. Walking Berlin means reading layers of history: a line of plaques in the ground marks where the Wall ran, a bullet-scarred building recalls the war, and across the street a café hums with young people from all over the planet.
Berlin is the Brandenburg Gate and the glass dome of the Reichstag; it is Museum Island, a World Heritage Site, with its treasures from antiquity; it is the East Side Gallery, the longest surviving stretch of the Wall turned into an open-air art gallery; and it is the moving Holocaust Memorial, right in the centre. But it is also Kreuzberg and its multicultural mix, Prenzlauer Berg with its cafés and courtyards, the summer beer gardens, the lakes where Berliners swim and a set of legendary electronic music clubs. The city looks its darkest history straight in the eye and, at the same time, keeps reinventing itself.
This guide walks through the essentials of Berlin with a practical, warm eye: how to see the big historical landmarks without burning out, which museums to choose, how to move around a giant city with excellent public transport, which neighbourhoods to spend time in and how to plan your days. Berlin is not a pretty, compact postcard city like other European capitals; it is big, sometimes rough, deeply honest about its past, and precisely for that reason one of the most fascinating you can visit.
Berlin was born around the thirteenth century as two small trading settlements — Berlin and Cölln — on the banks of the Spree, in a region of marshes and woodland. Over time it became the seat of the electors of Brandenburg and then of the kings of Prussia, who made it the capital of their kingdom and dressed it up with palaces, avenues and the Brandenburg Gate, inaugurated in 1791. In 1871, after the German unification driven by Bismarck, Berlin became the capital of the new German Empire and grew at dizzying speed into a great industrial and cultural metropolis. The twenties of the Weimar Republic turned it into an artistic and bohemian hotbed, until the rise of Nazism in 1933 made it the heart of the Third Reich and, during the Second World War, the scene of bombing raids and the final battle of 1945. With Germany defeated, the city was divided into sectors among the victorious powers and, in the thick of the Cold War, split in two: West Berlin, tied to the Federal Republic, and East Berlin, capital of the communist German Democratic Republic. In 1961 the Eastern regime raised the Berlin Wall, which separated families and neighbourhoods for 28 years and became the worldwide symbol of the divide between the capitalist and communist blocs. The fall of the Wall on 9 November 1989 was one of the most stirring moments of the century, and it came just before German reunification in 1990. Berlin became once again the capital of a united Germany, and since then it has rebuilt and reinvented itself as one of the most dynamic and creative cities in Europe. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Prussian heart of Germany: Berlin, capital of the Reich and of the Republic; Potsdam and the Hohenzollern palaces; Dresden, the Florence on the Elbe flattened in 1945; and Leipzig, birthplace of the peaceful demonstrations that helped bring down the Wall in 1989.
Read the history of Berlin and the East →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Berlin's history begins, like that of so many northern European cities, beside a river and a ford. In the thirteenth century there were in fact two twin settlements on either bank of the river Spree: Cölln, on an island in the river (today's Museum Island), and Berlin, on the opposite bank. The first documentary mention of Cölln dates from 1237 and that of Berlin from 1244, so 1237 is conventionally taken as the 'birth' date of the city. Both places lived off river and overland trade, in a marshy, sandy region of the March of Brandenburg.
The name 'Berlin' has nothing to do with the bear (Bär) on its coat of arms, despite the popular belief: linguists link it to a Slavic root ('berl-' or 'birl-') meaning 'swamp' or 'dry land in a wet area', a trace of the Slavic peoples who lived in the region before German colonisation. The bear on the shield is rather a canting heraldic emblem adopted centuries later.
In 1307, Berlin and Cölln formally joined in an alliance to defend common interests, the first step in a long merger. Through the Middle Ages the city grew modestly as a trading centre in Brandenburg, and for a time it belonged to the Hanseatic League. Its great leap came when a powerful dynasty chose it as the seat of its power: the Hohenzollern.
In 1415 the Holy Roman Emperor granted the March of Brandenburg to the House of Hohenzollern, which made Berlin-Cölln its residence. From then on the city's fortunes were tied to those of the dynasty, which gradually turned it from a modest merchant town into the capital of an increasingly powerful state. The Protestant Reformation reached Brandenburg in the sixteenth century, and the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) hit the city hard, costing it much of its population.
Recovery came through the so-called 'Great Elector', Frederick William, who after 1648 repopulated Berlin, fortified the city and, above all, took in thousands of French Protestant Huguenots expelled from France in 1685: those refugees brought trades, commerce and culture, and left a lasting mark. In 1701 his son crowned himself Frederick I, first king 'in' Prussia, and Berlin became a royal capital. Through the eighteenth century, under Frederick William I and above all under Frederick II 'the Great', Prussia became a major European power and Berlin a capital of the Enlightenment, with academies, palaces and boulevards such as Unter den Linden.
Many of the symbols of historic Berlin date from that monarchical era: the Unter den Linden avenue, the Brandenburg Gate (finished in 1791 as a gateway into the city), Museum Island and the great neoclassical buildings. The royal, Prussian city laid the foundations for the metropolis to come.
On 18 January 1871, after the Prussian victory over France, the German Empire was proclaimed and the Prussian king William I was crowned emperor (Kaiser). Berlin became the capital of a unified Germany, and with that it went through one of its greatest transformations. Over the following decades the city grew at a dizzying pace: industrialisation drew hundreds of thousands of workers, railways were laid, factories went up (Siemens, AEG) and the population multiplied until Berlin was one of the largest cities in the world.
In 1894 the Reichstag opened, seat of the imperial parliament and symbol of the new power. The city acquired trams, modern sewers, department stores, an intense cultural and scientific life, and extremely dense working-class districts. In 1920, 'Greater Berlin' (Groß-Berlin) absorbed numerous neighbouring municipalities and villages, multiplying its area and its population to more than four million inhabitants, which made it the third largest city in the world.
Defeat in the First World War and the Kaiser's abdication in 1918 opened the way to the Weimar Republic, proclaimed in Berlin. The twenties turned the city into a cultural hotbed — the 'Golden Years' — a capital of cinema, cabaret, the artistic avant-garde, Brecht's theatre and Einstein's science. But that ferment lived alongside enormous political and social tension that would end in tragedy.
In January 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor, and Berlin, capital of the Reich, became the centre of Nazi power. The regime marked the city with its propaganda, its parades and its crimes: the Reichstag fire in 1933 served as a pretext for suspending civil liberties; in 1936 the Olympic Games were meant to show the world a facade of splendour; and in November 1938 the 'Night of Broken Glass' (Kristallnacht) unleashed open violence against the Jewish population. Berlin, which had had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, was the scene of persecution, deportation and extermination, a wound the city remembers today through many memorials.
During the Second World War, Berlin was the target of heavy Allied bombing that destroyed whole districts. The end came with the Battle of Berlin, in April and May 1945: the Soviet Red Army encircled and took the city in ferocious street-by-street fighting. Hitler killed himself in his bunker on 30 April 1945, and on 2 May the garrison surrendered. A few days later, on 8 May, Germany capitulated.
The Berlin that emerged from the war was a sea of rubble. Much of its historic fabric had been flattened, its population had collapsed and the city faced hunger and cold. Over that devastated landscape a new fracture would immediately be drawn, this time geopolitical, and it would define the second half of the twentieth century: the division of the world into two blocs.
After the Nazi defeat, the victorious powers divided Germany and Berlin into four occupation sectors (American, British, French and Soviet). The city ended up in an extraordinary position: although it sat deep inside the Soviet zone, its western half was under Western Allied control. Tensions broke out early: in 1948-1949 the Soviet Union blockaded the land routes into West Berlin, and the Allies answered with the legendary 'airlift' that supplied the city from the air for almost a year.
With the founding of the two Germanys in 1949, East Berlin became the capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, communist) and West Berlin an enclave of the Federal Republic (FRG), surrounded by Eastern territory. For years, thousands of people fled from East to West through Berlin. To stop the bleeding, in the early hours of 13 August 1961 the GDR regime began raising the Berlin Wall, which split the city in two for 28 years. The Wall, with its 'death strip', its watchtowers and its fatal victims, became the most visible symbol of the Cold War and of a divided world.
The fall of the Wall on 9 November 1989 was one of the most stirring events of the twentieth century. Pushed by peaceful protests in the East and the crisis of the Soviet bloc, the regime announced that night that the borders were open, and thousands of Berliners climbed and tore down the Wall amid tears and celebration. That moment opened the road to German reunification.
On 3 October 1990, less than a year after the fall of the Wall, Germany was formally reunified and Berlin was named capital of the united country once again. In 1991 the Bundestag (parliament) decided to move the seat of government and parliament from Bonn to Berlin, a process that was completed at the end of the 1990s with the parliament's return to the refurbished Reichstag, crowned by architect Norman Foster's famous glass dome, opened in 1999.
The following three decades turned Berlin into one of the most dynamic and creative cities in Europe. The Wall's former 'death strip' became boulevards, parks and neighbourhoods; Potsdamer Platz, which had been no man's land between the two blocs, was reborn as a modern high-rise district; and the city filled with museums, galleries, alternative spaces, nightlife and a vibrant cultural scene that drew artists and young people from all over the world. Memorials such as the Holocaust Memorial, the East Side Gallery (the stretch of Wall painted by artists) and Checkpoint Charlie made the city's own history part of its identity and of what it offers visitors.
Today Berlin is the capital of Germany and of its largest city-state, a metropolis of more than three and a half million inhabitants, multicultural, open and in perpetual reinvention. Few cities wear their history so close to the skin: you walk between the scars of the twentieth century and the energy of a city that turned its divided past into a reason for remembrance, freedom and creativity.