Germany Guide
Berlin
The suburbs
Exploring Berlin's suburbs not only completes a picture of the city but also reveals a few surprises, many in quaint and bucolic spots but all well under an hour's journey by public transport from Mitte. Yet exploring Greater Berlin is not always attractive as this is where many of the city's blandest Cold War building projects have survived. Particularly in the east, old socialist silo-like apartment blocks and soulless shopping precincts appear more desperate-looking in comparison to flashy new post-Wende buildings – though the west has its high-rise ghettos too. The sprawling working-class district Lichtenberg, a mid-1970s model neighbourhood, and Marzahn, with its high-rises, high unemployment and reputation for mindless, often racially motivated, violence are two of the most notorious and least attractive eastern suburbs, and really only worth exploring for a sense of what constitutes everyday life for thousands of Berliners. However, Lichtenberg is also home to two sights of vital importance to anyone with an interest in oppression in the GDR, particularly by its secret police, the Stasi. Their headquarters at Normannenstrasse and prison at Hohenschönhausen are both preserved as haunting monuments.
All the other particularly worthwhile suburban destinations lie in attractive former small towns and villages that Berlin has gobbled up over time, but which retain something of their small-town feel, a sense heightened by the backdrop of lakes and woods that surround the city. The largest of these is the Grunewald forest and adjacent Havel lake in the southwestern corner of Berlin, where you will also find the Allied Museum, home to the original Checkpoint Charlie booth. The Wannsee, the largest bay in the Havel, is famed for its summertime bathing but also as the location of the Wannsee villa, where a Nazi conference sealed the fate of millions of Jews.