Germany Guide
Berlin
Mitte
The natural place to start exploring Berlin is at the city's most famous landmark, the Brandenburg Gate. The surrounding area is dense with heavyweight attractions: Germany's parliament, the Reichstag, is on one side, the giant Holocaust Memorial on the other, while opposite spreads the giant Tiergarten park. Stimulating contemporary architecture dots the park's fringes, the most eye-catching being the soaring buildings of Potsdamer Platz. Since the fall of the Wall this bustling entertainment quarter has slowly re-established itself as Berlin's Piccadilly Circus or Times Square, as it was in the 1930s. Neighbouring here is the Kulturforum, an agglomeration of cultural institutions that includes several high-profile art museums.
The grid of streets around Unter den Linden, which runs east from the Brandenburg Gate, includes Friedrichstrasse, a luxury shopping avenue once interrupted by Checkpoint Charlie, and the Gendarmenmarkt, a fine plaza with two elegant churches. A larger square, Bebelplatz, lies just northeast, alongside a stretch of Unter den Linden where stately Neoclassical buildings pave the way to Museum Island, housing Berlin's foremost collections of art and antiquities. Further east again is the area that formed the GDR's socialist showpiece quarter, centred around the broad concrete plaza of Alexanderplatz and the distinctive Fernsehturm television tower. The only real break from the area's modernity is the Nikolaiviertel, a rebuilt version of Berlin's historic core. Northwest of here is the Spandauer Vorstadt, once the heart of the city's Jewish community, with some fascinating reminders of those days, though today it's best known for the restaurants, bars and nightlife of Oranienburger Strasse.