(English) On the Reichenberger Straße

(English) Berlin’s Best Rail Escapes

Brian Melican highlights some of the best train travel options from Berlin... One of the great things about rail travel in Europe has got to be the sheer sense of possibility that descends when you enter a big station in any major city. The UK is different - at London termini (with the exception of St. Pancras) every destination on the Departures board is somewhere in the United Kingdom; often, all of the destinations are even in the same region. After several years of frequent rail travel all [...]

(English) P-Berg to Prenzlau: A Cycling Trip

Paul Sullivan finds a curious mix of derelict buildings and pretty lakes and forests on a 100km bike ride through the former East Germany...       About The Author Paul Sullivan is a Berlin-based writer & travel photographer and the founder of Slow Travel Berlin. You can check out his personal website here and some of his photography galleries here. Paul Sullivan finds a curious mix of derelict buildings and pretty [...]

(English) Cycling The Berlin Wall

  Jenna Makowski cycles along the remains of the Berlin wall... I imagined the Wall long before I arrived in Berlin to cycle part of the trail. Barely old enough to remember (much less grasp) the events of 1989, my perceptions of the Berlin Wall had come from pictures in American-authored history books and post-Cold War History Channel specials. I’d collected a few of those impressions in my mind: a clip broadcasting Reagan’s keynote speech, the pulsating crowds storming the wall [...]

(English) Onkel Toms Hütte

Natalie Holmes unearths the intriguing story behind Zehlendorf's most singular housing estate... Imagine this: in 1925, 70,000 Berliners lived in basements and about 600,000 people inhabited rooms shared with three others. Many apartments had little or no heating and the lack of running water made for appalling sanitary conditions. In winter the apartments were damp and icy. In summer they were unbearably hot. Times were tough, so in order to survive, women and children frequently [...]

(English) Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin: A Walking Tour

“For Christopher, Berlin meant boys,” goes a memorable line in Christopher Isherwood’s memoir. It is the starting point for Brendan Nash’s walking tour of the area around Nollendorfplatz in Schöneberg, one of Berlin’s oldest gay neighborhoods. Isherwood, whose portrayal of Berlin between the late 1920s and early 1930s gave us the images many of us still associate with this period, lived here during his third visit to the city. While still a student in Cambridge, Isherwood and [...]

(English) In Prenzlauer Berg

Philosopher Justin E. H. Smith takes a stroll around Prenzlauer Berg and ruminates on its (mostly hidden)  past... Among the grimmer thoughts one has to contend with on any visit to Berlin is this: that one could very well be staying not only in the logistical nerve center of the Final Solution, but in the very building, and perhaps in the very same room, in which a Holocaust victim once lived. This possibility rose to 50%, in fact, when I was in Berlin a few days ago, and stayed in a [...]

(English) In Photos: Treptow Crematorium

Treptow Crematorium Kiefholzstr. 221, 12437 Berlin T 030 63958121 Open M-F 9-15  

Museumswohnung

Grashina Gabelmann visits an East German home that's been preserved as a museum... Whether it’s through movies such as Goodbye Lenin, books like Anna Funder’s Stasiland, Berlin institutions like the Stasi Museum or Hohenschoenhausen, or one of the city’s many themed walking tours, you’ll probably know something about the GDR (German Democratic Republic). But unless you’re one of the rare people who actually lived in East Germany between 1949-1990, you probably won’t know [...]

(English) Hidden Path [Street Art Tour]

Grashina Gabelmann takes an alternative street art tour through Berlin's Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain... There are lots of tours on offer in Berlin that describe themselves as alternative and promise to take you on the “path less trodden” -- but something about The Hidden Path's beautiful website, with its hand drawn elements, made its declaration seem more authentic. The starting point of the tour was in front of 'Casino 36', a grimy and dodgy looking building covered in graffiti [...]