10 curated walks, written to be listened to on foot. Open one and the guide talks as you walk — where to go, what you are looking at, and why it is there. Each one runs between two stations, so you can start from either end.
14 stops · 1 h 15 min · 1 km
Walk the last place where the whole Berlin Wall system survives — 14 stops along Bernauer Straße, between Conrad Schumann's leap over the wire and the pastor who saved the Wall from Berlin itself. About 90 minutes, with time to look, climb, and reflect. There's a station at each end, so it walks from either one.
5 stops · 40 min · 1 km
The longest piece of the Berlin Wall still standing survived for one reason: somebody painted it. Five murals along Mühlenstraße: a crowd pouring through on the night it opened, a Trabant its artist renamed in protest, the heads of a man who once painted the Wall illegally from the other side, the kiss everyone photographs (a 2009 copy), and a flag defaced and repainted more than sixty times. About forty minutes, from either end.
4 stops · 1 h · 2.1 km
The last kilometre of the Second World War in Berlin, walked along the line the Red Army took. A bridge built to celebrate Prussia's wars and crossed under fire on 28 April 1945. The one house left standing in a quarter Hitler had demolished, beside the ministry Soviet soldiers cleared room by room. The open square in front of the Reichstag, and the flag on its roof — and the famous photograph, taken two days later. Then the ordinary corner where, that same afternoon, Hitler shot himself underground. Four stops, about fifty minutes, from either end.
11 stops · 1 h 55 min · 3.8 km
East Berlin's showpiece boulevard, built twice: the prefab second street of the 1960s, then the wedding-cake Stalinallee it corrected, the uprising that began on its building sites, and the plain blocks the regime abandoned first. About two and a quarter hours, with the U5 under your feet all the way.
5 stops · 45 min · 1.1 km
One hill, and the building inside it. Five stops over the Großer Bunkerberg: the gun tower poured in six months of 1941, the cracked concrete where the 1946 demolition broke it and gave up, the summit where the heaviest anti-aircraft guns in Germany stood — and where Berliners now come to run, watch the sunset and, now and then, dance — and the spiral path the rubble railway climbed to bury it. About half an hour, from either end.
13 stops · 1 h 55 min · 3.2 km
From Museum Island to Alexanderplatz — 13 stops, about an hour and three quarters, station to station. Where Berlin actually began, and how little of it is left: a pleasure garden that spent most of its life as a parade ground, a medieval town cleared for a socialist centre, a replica old quarter built out of prefabricated panels by the state that cleared it, and a square still waiting to be replaced. Walkable from either end.
3 stops · 25 min · 558 m
Here the Berlin Wall was a river. Three stops across the Spree and along its Kreuzberg bank: a bridge named after a spiked log that once closed the river at night, then a crossing only West Berliners could use on foot; the stone for the people who drowned in water that belonged to the other side, among them five children who fell in while playing; and a U-Bahn line that stopped dead at the bridge for 34 years. About half an hour, from either end.
19 stops · 2 h 40 min · 5.4 km
Cross the whole of Sanssouci — 19 stops, about two and a half hours, station to station. A king's ten-room bungalow and the vast palace he built to prove a point, a grotto that never ran, a legend about a miller that never happened, and a park full of things pretending to be other things. Walkable from either end.
15 stops · 2 h 50 min · 5.8 km
Walk Berlin's ceremonial axis end to end — 15 stops, about two and a quarter hours, station to station. One street that six different states have inherited and rewritten in turn: a goddess who changed sides twice, a king exiled to Potsdam and brought back, a guardhouse rededicated five times, and a palace that was blown up and then rebuilt as a copy of itself. Walkable from either end.
4 stops · 45 min · 414 m
One hill, one building. Four stops over the buried command tower that aimed the guns of Friedrichshain's flak tower: the sirens and the queues for the shelter; how radar, range-finders and a room of mechanical computers found a bomber and sent the guns their aim; the strongroom where 434 paintings from Berlin's Gemäldegalerie — three Caravaggios, ten Rubens, canvases five metres wide — were kept because nothing in the city was harder to destroy, and burned anyway after the war ended, while some of the sculpture surfaced decades later in Moscow; and the last fortnight of the war, told across the road from the street blown up to clear the tower's field of fire. About 45 minutes, from either end.