Archenhold Observatory

Heritage listed Art Nouveau railway station and charming surrounding city square.

Huge technical museum, on a former railroad depot, featuring from ancient water and wind mills to computer pioneer Konrad Zuse's inventions, a collection of old to new vehicles of all types -bicycles, boats, trains, etc - and the interactive Spectrum science center with various hands-on experiments. There's an actual C-17 "Candy Bomber" airplane hanging on its façade. The railroad and aeronautical sections are hard to beat.

A street full of shops, cafes and restaurants

The Schöneweide forced labor camp (GBI-Lager 75/76) on Britzer Straße is a complete ensemble, which makes it a rather unusual site in Berlin. Of the original thirteen housing barracks erected between 1943 and 1945, eleven are still standing today. Six barracks on the western part of the former camp grounds belong to the Documentation Center on Nazi Forced Labor.

German historical museum covering everything from pre-history up to the present day. One can spend many, many hours here! The building from 1695/1730 was the Zeughaus (Arsenal) until 1876.

This abandoned amusement park with its iconic large Ferris wheel opened in the German Democratic Republic in 1969. After its closing in 2002 the rotting theme park and its apocalyptic atmosphere became a target of international media coverage, amongst others by the New York Times. In 2016 it was announced that the venue will be restored and reopened as an art and culture park.

This chapel was built on the site of a church built in 1894 which sat on the "death strip" and was thus blown up by the GDR authorities in 1985. The chapel is the site of occasional memorial services for victims of the wall.

This is the number-one bathing and recreation spot in western Berlin, with several beaches, the large Strandbad Wannsee open-air lido and several historic landmarks nearby.

Features many objects and even whole rooms in Wilhelminian style. Only accessible by guided tour (English tours can be arranged).

Inside you can find a large and well-established Chinese garden, a Korean garden, a small Bali garden/glasshouse, an Oriental garden with nice fountains and a cloister and a Japanese garden which is a project by the city partnership of Berlin and Tokyo. The latter has been built by Zen priests. Although quite crowded at times, there are not that many tourists so here's a chance to brush up on your German skills. As the journey to this park will be around an hour from the city center, don't miss this opportunity to complete your picture of Berlin by seeing some of Berlin's clean and quiet suburbs.

at the Rüdesheimer Platz

This castle is one of Berlin's oldest castles and where Prince Carl used to reside. Be sure to check out Glienicke Bridge, the bridge that became renowned for the exchange of Western and Eastern secret agents. You can also visit Glienicke Park.

In the very southeast of Schöneberg, there are daily shows for children and grown-ups alike. Projection is into a drawn Berlin skyline. Several guided tours to the obervatory daily with sky observation, conditions permitting.

It is the only hemp museum in Germany; you can see the history of hemp, the culture and use of it. You can see hemp grow. There is a cafe downstairs, with an open WiFi access. Everything going on here is legal - including the hemp growing under artificial light (a low THC strain grown with a special permit) - but they do not refrain from political commentary on the legal situation of cannabis in their exhibits.

A small castle in late classical style. It was built 1868 by Martin Gropius (uncle of the Bauhaus-founder and other architects, the von Siemens family changed the castle a bit around 1900 and they enlarged the dimensions of the park, which is today renovated and nice to wander around when the sun is shining. Located within a few minutes' walking distance from Biesdorf station (take the S5 from the city centre) or Elsterwerdaer Platz station (U5).

The memorial site stretches along the full 1.5-km length of Bernauer Straße. The listing marker points to the visitor centre. Various monuments can be found along the entire length of the street, documenting nearby escape attempts and tunnels; captions are in German and English. The documentation centre across the street on Bernauer Straße/Ackerstraße is excellent (although most of the documentation is in German). The viewing platform next to the documentation centre gives you a tiny hint of the true scale of the Wall and how terrifying the "no man's land" between the two sections of walls must have been. The monument (that you can see from the platform) is a complete section of 4th generation wall - both inside and outside sections, and you can peer through from the east side to see the remains of the electric fence and anti-tank devices in the death strip. It really helps you understand what an incredible feat it was to get from one side to the other -- and why so many died doing it. The memorial site is often missed by tourists but an absolute must for anyone interested in this part of the city's history. It's a memorial to those who died crossing, so you won't, fortunately, get the tackiness of the Checkpoint Charlie area; instead you will be left with a haunting feeling of what life with the wall may have been really like.Bernauer Straße is a street with a great deal of Wall history: it came to tragic prominence on August 13, 1961 when East German authorities closed the border and the street (with houses in the East but the street in the West). Border guards walled the doors and windows shut to keep Easterners from escaping by jumping out the window while Westerners (including police and fire brigades who brought life nets to help catch refugees) looked on in horror. The first recorded Wall-related death - the notorious Peter Fechter case (he bled to death in the "no-man's-land" with both sides unwilling or unable to help him) - was here, as was one of the famous tunnels and the famous photograph of the GDR border guard leaping over the barbed wire.

The octagonal square right east of Potsdamer Platz was recreated to resemble its pre-war layout, but the buildings are modern rather than historic replicas and much taller than their counterparts from before the war. There is a diverse mix of uses among the buildings, which include the Embassy of Canada.

There are three huge collections housed within this grand building: the Collection of Classical Antiquities, the Museum of Near Eastern Antiquities and the Museum of Islamic Art. The Pergamon Museum was the last museum built on Museumsinsel (Museum Island) and was intended to house the great acquisitions brought to Germany by archaeologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The museum's best-known attraction is the Pergamonsaal. The Pergamon Altar (165 BC), from the eponymous Asia Minor city-state, is three stories high and served as the entrance gate to an entire complex. It is astounding both because of its size and extremely precise detail, especially in a frieze which shows the gods battling giants. The entire room is the same colour as the building's stone, making the details on the frieze section stand out even more. Facing the stairs, on the left hand side of the room there is a small-scale model of the altar which allows the viewer to see where the frieze segments would have been mounted. A 1:300 scale model of Pergamon city is on the right side of the room. The monumental market door of Milet has just been restored.Every first Sunday of the month, many museums in Berlin are free of charge. Sometimes a reservation is necessary in advance. For more information, see Museums Sonntag Booking.Since 2018 there is also a huge 360° panorama of Pergamon in another museum building, which is included in the Pergamon-only ticket.

Take a stroll for a few kilometers along this canal which runs right through the heart of Kreuzberg. It's peaceful and mostly traffic-free, but full of life in summer. Some parts are lined with bars and restaurants with terraces. Sit on a bench or terrace and watch the world go by on a summer evening.