Karl-Marx-Allee stretches through the former East Berlin as a broad, ceremonial avenue. Built on an ambitious scale, it showcases the city’s postwar vision with sweeping boulevards, generous sidewalks, and long sightlines that frame its monumental architecture.
The avenue is lined with neoclassical East German buildings, often called “wedding-cake” style for their layered facades and decorative details. Uniform blocks with stone cladding, arches, and colonnades give the street a stately rhythm. Ground floors were designed for everyday life, with shops, cafés, and services set beneath apartments, reflecting an ideal of a complete urban neighborhood.
Wide lanes and symmetrical layouts emphasize order and scale. The spacing between buildings allows light to reach the street, while recurring motifs—pilasters, cornices, and patterned tiles—create a cohesive look from one block to the next.
Public squares punctuate the avenue, offering places to pause between long stretches of roadway. Fountains provide focal points, especially in warmer months when water softens the hard lines of stone and concrete. Small lakes and landscaped patches underline the mix of grand planning with moments of leisure, where benches, trees, and open plazas invite people to linger.
Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Allee
The charming Baroque water palace of the Hohenzollern electors surrounded by the Dahme river and an English garden.
Arguably the most beautiful bridge in Berlin and the only connection between Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg. As signage on the bridge indicates, it was built twice - once in the 1890s and once in the 1990s. Before reunification the border ran where the bridge now is.
Features many objects and even whole rooms in Wilhelminian style. Only accessible by guided tour (English tours can be arranged).
This heritage-protected 120-m-long pedestrian tunnel below the river Spree was the first ferro-concrete tunnel in Germany that has been built using pneumatic caissons. Two beaches can be accessed via the tunnel which are not far from its south entrance.
With an impressive, circus-tent-like roof over its courtyard and remains of the pre-war Hotel Esplanade incorporated into the modern structure.
Closed for renovations; the temporary Bauhaus-Archiv is at Knesebeckstraße 1-2 in Charlottenburg. Building designed by Walter Gropius. Inside a museum, library, cafe and shop.
Experience the Stasi Secret Police Prison first-hand. Tours are compulsory. Some of the tours are done by former inmates.
Oderberger Straße is known for its beautiful and generous Gründerzeit architecture, as well as its cafés and restaurants. Since before Germany's reunification the street has been the desired place for alternative folks and avant-gardists, but the area has seen continual gentrification since the early 2000s.
With the Kreuzberg, a hill in Kreuzberg 61, the Prussian National Monument by Schinkel and a waterfall. Superb panoramic views across south Berlin.
A man-made hill of about 120 m in the Grunewald, created after the Second World War from debris of the city. On top is the Field Station Berlin, a former US listening station. Inside the building complex you can see lots of graffiti art. The hill can be accessed without any restrictions and is free; however, the building complex is surrounded by fences and requires a ticket (tours are available as well).
More than 30 million objects in the scientific collection and a fascinating exhibition in one of the most significant institutions of its kind in the world. Some parts still under construction.