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
150-200 m along the Wiener Straße (bypassing the fire house and the public swimming pool) from U-Bahn Görlitzer Bahnhof, the park is famous for the Turkish families barbecuing on summer weekends, failed contemporary art and relaxed atmosphere of students. It does have a reputation of being full of pickpockets and drug dealers though and the police makes regular visits to this place to check on the situation.
Exhibition of digital interactive entertainment culture. You can actually play almost all of the exhibits making it a more "hands on" museum than most.
In this house the surrender of Germany was signed on May 9th, 1945, ending WWII in Europe. This museum describes the history of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945 and the GDR/German-Russian relationship ever since. Historic rooms, permanent exhibition and special exhibits.
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.
A museum dedicated to everyday life in communist East Germany. The museum has very relaxed rules and you are allowed to touch and examine almost every object, which adds greatly to the experience.
Berlin's oldest church (1230) is a 3-nave hall church. It is in the centre of an area destroyed by bombs in the war which was then turned into a faux "old town" by the East German authorities called Nikolaiviertel. The area is more a hodge-podge of relocated buildings than an authentic reproduction, and the newly-built 1988 apartments that attempt to "harmonize" with the older buildings are embarrassing. The church is one of the only structures that was renovated rather than rebuilt. It is best known for a sandstone sculpture called the Spandauer Madonna (1290), but there are other interesting pieces here. When the church was destroyed in 1938 and rebuilt in the 1970s, the communist officials intended to use it as a museum, which did not open until 1987. The museum includes sacred textiles and religious sculpture from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The Nikolaikirche is the showplace of the Nikolaiviertel, which isn't saying much.
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.
With an impressive, circus-tent-like roof over its courtyard and remains of the pre-war Hotel Esplanade incorporated into the modern structure.
The main floor houses the antiquities collection in an ongoing exhibit called "Neue Antike im Alten Museum" (New Antiquities in the Old Museum). Directly through the front door, entering from the Lustgarten (Pleasure Garden, now under reconstruction), there is a domed rotunda with red and white cameos, Greek-style, with statues of the gods. To reach the Hildesheim silver collection, go to the back of the rotunda, turn left, walk through the long gallery and turn left into a small room at the end.
Spectacular building by Mies van der Rohe contains its own collection and temporary exhibitions.
The oldest museum of its kind in Germany which, despite great losses during the World War II, still possesses one of the world's primary collections of European applied art. There are two sections to the collection: one located at the Kulturforum in Tiergarten, the other at Köpenick Palace.
The large square in front of the Brandenburg Gate contains the French and American embassies, the rebuilt Hotel Adlon, and the new building of the Academy of Arts.
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.
Built 1859-1866 this is one of the most architecturally stunning synagogues in Germany to survive both the Nazi era and the war.