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Sections of the Berlin Wall can be found all over the city. Sometimes you’ll come across a stray segment of the Wall on a side street, in a garden or outside a key spot like Potsdamer Platz. But there are lots of ways to learn about the Berlin Wall and what it was like to live in the divided city during the Cold War.
We spent a good chunk of our time in Berlin following the line of the Wall, by bike and on foot. If you’re new to the city, start with our self-guided Berlin walking tour, which passes Wall sections at Potsdamer Platz and Checkpoint Charlie. Then come back to this guide for a deeper dive.
Here are four Wall-related ideas to explore on a Berlin city break. Visit the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße, take a Berlin Wall bike tour, stroll the East Side Gallery and stop at the Mauermuseum at Checkpoint Charlie.
The Berlin Wall was put up by the East German authorities in 1961 to stop the exodus of their citizens to the West, which had become an enormous brain drain after the Second World War, and to help them keep control of the communist system.
While West Germany slowly picked itself up after the war and became prosperous again, life was very different in East Germany. The Stasi (secret police) spied on residents and classed them as ‘politically reliable’ or ‘unreliable’. You wouldn’t know which list you were on, but you might be able to work it out if, for example, you were turned down for new jobs. Even the actions of a relative could affect your status, making you unreliable by association.
If the Stasi found you disloyal, you could be pressured into informing for them against your will, or locked up in prison, or worse.
Because of the sinister atmosphere in the East, and because families had been split up by the Wall, many people tried to escape to the West. As a result, the Wall and the border strip around it were made more and more heavily fortified over the years (see the Invalidenfriedhof below).
The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989.
The Berlin Wall Memorial is an outdoor exhibition along Bernauer Straße, on what was the East Berlin side of the former border strip. It’s now a place of remembrance that gives a moving insight into the division of Berlin. Parts of the Berlin Wall Memorial include:
A good place to start, as it explains what you’ll see around the memorial site and shows a short film about the Berlin Wall to set the scene.
Running along Bernauer Straße, this section of wall is partly intact and partly marked by rows of rusty steel rods that trace where it once stood.
Around 5,000 people escaped across the Berlin Wall, but at least 140 died at the Wall in Berlin. The Window of Remembrance is an outdoor memorial with photographs of the people who died.
Home to a permanent exhibition about the division of the city and an observation tower that looks down over a preserved stretch of the border strip.
A round chapel made of clay and wood, standing on the site of the old Church of Reconciliation, which the East German government blew up in 1985. The church had stood in the ‘death strip’ between East and West Berlin, out of reach of both sides of the city during the Cold War.
When the Wall went up here in August 1961, it ran directly in front of a row of houses in East Berlin, whose front doors opened onto the West. Some residents decided to flee at the last minute, climbing out of their windows on ropes or jumping, while West Berlin firefighters held out nets below to catch them. Other residents were forced to move out, and the windows of their flats were bricked up so no one else could escape that way.
Look out for the photograph of East German soldier Conrad Schumann leaping from East to West over the barbed wire just two days after the border was sealed. The photo, shown on the side of one of the buildings, is known as ‘The Leap into Freedom’ and has become one of the most famous images of the Cold War.
Over the Cold War years, people dug a number of escape tunnels under Bernauer Straße. Markings in the ground show where the tunnels ran, and information panels tell the stories of who made it through and who didn’t.
Another great way to explore the Wall on a Berlin city break is by bike. We booked the Berlin Wall bike tour with Fat Tire Tours, which started at Alexanderplatz beneath the Fernsehturm, the East German-era TV tower. If you arrive early, you could pop up the Fernsehturm for amazing views of the city.
If you’d rather a broader introduction to the city by bike, Fat Tire’s Berlin Highlights: 3-Hour Bike Tour is on GetYourGuide. We haven’t done that one ourselves, so it’s on our list for next time.
Our guide on the Berlin Wall bike tour was excellent and really informative. Our stops included:
A small park with a larger-than-life sculpture of the fathers of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The site of a building that housed the Volkskammer, the East German parliament, from 1976 to 1990. The huge building also held a range of entertainment (art galleries, a theatre, restaurants, a bowling alley, a disco and more) as well as a post office and a police station with cells.
After reunification it was closed because of asbestos and later demolished, and the rebuilt Berlin Palace, now home to the Humboldt Forum museums, stands in its place.
The Tränenpalast (‘Palace of Tears’) was the departure hall at Friedrichstraße station for people leaving East Berlin to travel to the West by S-Bahn or U-Bahn. It was built in 1962, soon after the Wall went up. Police carried out passport checks and customs officers searched luggage, and the farewells here gave it its name. Today it’s a free museum.
Near the Reichstag, a row of white crosses remembers people who died trying to cross from East to West, some of them in the river.
This old cemetery was cut through by the border strip, and you can still see the line of the inner and outer walls. Our guide explained how the strip was fortified, with alarms, raked sand to show footprints, spike mats, ditches, guard dogs and armed guards with orders to shoot.
The ‘death strip’ varied in width from a few metres to a few hundred metres. The cemetery was also the original resting place of the Red Baron.
Hundreds of watchtowers lined the border, and only a handful survive in Berlin today. Our guide told us that guards were often brought in from outside Berlin so they’d be less likely to know anyone trying to escape.
A former ‘ghost station’. Some U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines from West Berlin passed under East Berlin, and the trains rolled through sealed stations without stopping. Passengers would see empty platforms watched by armed guards. There’s a small exhibition at the station.
See above for more details.
We loved the Berlin Wall bike tour for the information our guide gave us and for the places we visited that we might not have found on our own. But we didn't have time on the tour to visit the exhibition at Nordbahnhof or the Documentation Centre at the Berlin Wall Memorial, so you might want to go back to these under your own steam and spend more time there.
On your Berlin city break, make time for a stroll along Mühlenstraße to see the East Side Gallery, a 1.3-kilometre stretch of the Berlin Wall covered in murals (rather than graffiti). It’s the longest surviving section of the Wall and billed as the longest open-air gallery in the world!
In 1990, 118 artists from 21 countries painted more than 100 murals along the Wall, and it’s now a protected monument. The murals are a mixed bag, with lots of doves and other symbols or words of peace. Look out for the two most famous murals on the Wall. One is Dmitri Vrubel’s ‘Fraternal Kiss’ (officially titled ‘My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love’), showing Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker locked in a kiss. The other is Birgit Kinder’s Trabant car bursting through the Wall.
The East Side Gallery is open to everyone and free to visit. On the other side of the Wall is the River Spree, perfect for a peaceful stroll when you’ve finished at the gallery.
We visited the East Side Gallery under our own steam. If you’d like a guide, the Berlin Wall and East Side Gallery Walking Tour on GetYourGuide covers the murals and the stories behind them. You can find out a lot about the murals online, but a guide makes sure you don’t miss a thing! It’s also a good one to pair with a Trabi Safari, as the Trabi convoy drives past the gallery (see our Trabi Safari and Teufelsberg guide).
As I mention in my Berlin walking tour, you’ll find the Mauermuseum (Wall Museum) at Checkpoint Charlie. It’s an interesting indoor museum telling the history of the Wall and the stories of the people who tried to escape, including some of their inventive escape methods and a car converted to smuggle people out. It’s not very big, but there’s a lot of information to take in, and because of its location it’s likely to be busy.
Just a minute away is an open-air exhibition about the Checkpoint Charlie crossing and the people who tried to escape across the border.
In closing
You won't need to do all of the above on your Berlin city break to understand the Wall and the divided city. My advice would be to pick the East Side Gallery plus either the Mauermuseum or the Berlin Wall Memorial. That said, the bike tour was fantastic, so try to fit that in too.
If this is your first time in Berlin, pair this guide with our self-guided Berlin walking tour for the main sights, and if you've a spare half day, drive a Trabi past the East Side Gallery or head out to Teufelsberg.
The bike tour is still a family favourite.
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