Berlin Priority Spots: East Side Beyond Mitte

The East Side Gallery is 1.3 kilometers of preserved Berlin Wall along the Spree, painted by 118 artists in 1990. It is famous, it is on every itinerary, and most visitors spend fifteen minutes taking a photo of the Bruderkuss and leaving. This is a waste. The paintings are individually strong. Walk the whole thing from west to east, cross the Oberbaumbruecke bridge, and drop into Kreuzberg on the other side.

Best done in the morning to avoid the low sun in the eyes on the way back. Combine with a coffee at the RAW-Gelaende, the industrial complex just north of the bridge.

One S-Bahn stop east of the East Side Gallery is Treptower Park. It is a large park along the Spree, full of families on weekends, and it contains the Soviet War Memorial, one of the more affecting single sites in Berlin. Twelve enormous carved stone panels, a mound, and a 30 meter tall statue of a Soviet soldier holding a child and standing on a broken swastika. This is a serious place. Give it 45 minutes.

The park itself is worth another hour. In summer, rent a paddle boat on the small lake, the Karpfenteich. In winter, the park is quiet, snow covered, and beautiful.

Kreuzberg is the neighborhood south of the East Side Gallery and Mitte. It has two personalities, roughly divided by the Landwehrkanal. Kreuzberg 61 in the west is gentrified, cafe filled, and pleasant. Kreuzberg 36 in the east is louder, more Turkish, and more punk than it was but still recognizably itself.

Walk along the Landwehrkanal from Kottbusser Tor east to Schlesisches Tor. On a Tuesday and Friday there is a Turkish market at Maybachufer that is worth an hour. Have doner at Mustafa's Gemuese Kebap in the afternoon rather than lunchtime. The queue is shorter.

Karl-Marx-Allee is a two kilometer wide boulevard in the eastern district of Friedrichshain, built between 1952 and 1960 as East Germany's showcase street. The architecture is Stalinist wedding cake on both sides, and walking down it is time travel in a way that almost nothing else in Berlin still delivers.

Get off at Frankfurter Tor U-Bahn and walk west toward Alexanderplatz. About 45 minutes. Cinema International, at the eastern end, is a preserved 1963 East German cinema that still shows films most evenings.

Prenzlauer Berg, in the northeast of the city, is now a solidly middle class neighborhood of restored 19th century apartment buildings. It is easy to walk aimlessly. Start at Kollwitzplatz on a Saturday morning for the farmers market. Wander west into Kollwitzstrasse and then north to Helmholtzplatz. Stop at Anna Blume for coffee and cake, the way the neighborhood actually does breakfast.

Add the Kulturbrauerei, a preserved 19th century brewery complex that now houses a small cinema, a museum of everyday life in the GDR, and a courtyard of bars and restaurants.

Berghain is the famous nightclub in a former power station, and you do not need to go inside to understand why it matters. The building itself, an East German heating plant converted with almost no external change, is one of the striking pieces of industrial architecture in Berlin. Walk past it in daylight. Read the plaque. Continue north into Friedrichshain proper.

If you are curious enough to try to get in, arrive after 04:00 on a Saturday night. Do not photograph the door. Do not speak English in the queue. Odds are still bad. Locals accept this.

Tempelhof was Berlin's central airport until 2008. The runways and the terminal are still there. The airfield in the middle has been converted into an enormous public park, and it is one of the most unusual open spaces in any European city. Six kilometers of runway are used by cyclists, kite flyers, and roller skaters. On a summer Sunday it looks like Berlin at rest, all in one place.

The terminal building is enormous and open on some weekends for tours. The area around Columbiadamm at the eastern edge of the field has small allotment gardens and street food. This is a proper half day.

The DDR Museum, next to the Berlin Cathedral, is an interactive museum of daily life in East Germany. It is very busy but it works as a family visit. Ninety minutes.

The Palace of Tears, the Trainenpalast, is the preserved pavilion at Friedrichstrasse station where East and West Germans said goodbye to each other. It is small, free, and one of the more emotionally direct exhibits in the city. Thirty minutes.

The correct place to understand the Berlin Wall is not Checkpoint Charlie and not the East Side Gallery. It is the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse, in the north of the city, where a full section of the border strip has been preserved: outer wall, guard tower, death strip, inner wall. There is a documentation center, an observation tower, and a small chapel on the site of a church that was demolished by the East Germans because it stood in the way of the border.

This is a serious, ninety minute visit. Free entry. If you only see one Wall site in Berlin, choose this one.