Berlin-Mitte: A Guide to the Heart of Berlin

The Brandenburg Gate. (Photo: Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Mitte means "middle", short for Stadtmitte, the city centre, and it is the historic heart of Berlin, where most of the famous sights are. Since 2001 the name covers both a large district (Bezirk) and the smaller locality (Ortsteil) inside it that was the old district; Berliners usually mean the smaller one. This guide covers the old Mitte and its neighbour Tiergarten, named after the great park that fills most of it.

Understand

Before reunification Mitte was part of East Berlin, and the Berlin Wall ran straight through the historic city here. Afterwards the old districts were kept for a decade, and in 2001 Mitte was merged with Tiergarten and Wedding, two districts of the former West Berlin. Its main areas:

• Unter den Linden, the grand boulevard from Museum Island to the Brandenburg Gate, crossed halfway by Friedrichstraße, the main shopping street.
• Museum Island (Museumsinsel) and the Lustgarten, the square in front of the Altes Museum beside the cathedral.
• The Nikolaiviertel near Alexanderplatz, an "old town" built by the East German government.
• The Spandauer Vorstadt, north of the Spree around Hackescher Markt. Its eastern part, the Scheunenviertel ("barn quarter"), is named for the hay barns the Great Elector moved out of the fire-prone centre in 1672; in the late 19th century it became a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in Russia and Poland, and the centre of Jewish life in Berlin.
• Potsdamer Platz and the Spreebogen, the bend of the Spree where the federal government sits.

Getting there and around

Since June 2006 nearly all long-distance trains have used the glass-and-steel Hauptbahnhof; Friedrichstraße and Alexanderplatz are the other big stations, and S-Bahn, U-Bahn and tram lines reach every sight. The cheapest tour is an ordinary double-decker bus: lines 100 and 200 run from Alexanderplatz along Unter den Linden and through the Tiergarten, for the price of a normal ticket.

Hackescher Markt S-Bahn station. (Photo: Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Unter den Linden

The Brandenburg Gate, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans in 1791 after the Acropolis in Athens, is the only one of Berlin's city gates to survive. It stood between East and West for decades and now stands for reunification. Heading east:

• The Russian Embassy, a monumental Stalinist building of 1949–1951, meant to show Soviet dominance over East Germany.
• Bebelplatz, where on 10 May 1933 the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had 20,000 books burned, among them works by Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Zweig, Kurt Tucholsky and Sigmund Freud. The memorial is easy to miss: set into the middle of the square, a glass pane looks down into a white room of empty shelves, enough for the books that burned.
• The Neue Wache, a guardhouse of 1818 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, since 1993 the Federal Republic's central war memorial. It is empty but for Käthe Kollwitz's sculpture of a mother cradling her dead child, under an opening in the roof that lets in rain and snow.
• The German Historical Museum in the old arsenal (Zeughaus), and St. Hedwig's Cathedral, Berlin's oldest Catholic church.

By Friedrichstraße station, the Tränenpalast ("palace of tears"), where people leaving East Berlin by train said their goodbyes, is now a free museum of the divided city.

Gendarmenmarkt and the memorials

South of Unter den Linden, the Gendarmenmarkt is framed by the Konzerthaus and two churches: the Deutscher Dom, built in 1708, which holds the Bundestag's exhibition on Germany's parliamentary history, and the Französischer Dom, with a museum of the Huguenots who fled France for Berlin.

Near the Brandenburg Gate is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman and opened in 2005: a whole block of concrete slabs that rise as the ground sinks toward the middle, with an information centre underneath. Across the road, in the Tiergarten, is the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism.

The Konzerthaus on the Gendarmenmarkt. (Photo: Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Museum Island

Berlin's great museums share this island in the Spree. The Pergamon Museum holds the reconstructed Pergamon Altar, the Ishtar Gate of Babylon and the museums of the ancient Near East and of Islamic art. The Neues Museum has the Egyptian collection and the bust of Nefertiti, which Egypt wants returned. The Altes Museum shows classical antiquities, the Alte Nationalgalerie 19th-century painting and sculpture, and the Bode-Museum sculpture from the Middle Ages on. Beside them stand the Berliner Dom, the city's cathedral, and the Stadtschloss. The baroque palace, home to electors, kings and emperors until 1918, was badly damaged in the Second World War and razed in 1950 to make way for East Germany's modernist Palast der Republik; that was dismantled around the turn of the century, and the palace was rebuilt from 2013 as the Humboldt Forum. On the first Sunday of each month, many Berlin museums are free.

The Pergamon Altar in the Pergamon Museum. (Photo: J. Miers, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Berliner Dom. (Photo: Thomas Wolf , www.foto-tw.de, CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Alexanderplatz and the Nikolaiviertel

Alexanderplatz, once a cattle market, was named for Tsar Alexander I after his visit in 1805. Largely destroyed in the war, it was rebuilt as the centre of East Berlin, all wide open space and modern blocks. Above it rises the Fernsehturm, the television tower, completed in 1969 and 368 metres tall, the tallest structure in Berlin. Around it are the World Clock of 1969, a favourite meeting point; the Neptune Fountain; the Rotes Rathaus, the city hall, "red" for its brick, not its politics; and the Gothic Marienkirche. The Nikolaikirche is the city's oldest church, founded in 1230; East Germany rebuilt the bombed streets around it as the Nikolaiviertel, a mock old town. The DDR Museum by the river lets visitors handle almost everything from everyday life in East Germany.

The Fernsehturm. (Photo: J. Miers, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Nikolaiviertel. (Photo: Fridolin freudenfett, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Reichstag and the Tiergarten

The Reichstag, completed in 1894 for the parliament of the new German Empire and inscribed Dem Deutschen Volke ("to the German people"), was gutted by fire in 1933, a fire Hitler blamed on the Communists and exploited; there is good evidence his own followers set it. Today it houses the Bundestag under a glass dome by Norman Foster, completed in 1999. Visiting the dome needs a booking, with photo ID, but is much easier to arrange than a seat at a debate. Nearby are the Federal Chancellery and the House of the Cultures of the World. West of the Brandenburg Gate the Tiergarten park stretches toward the zoo, with the Victory Column (Siegessäule) on its great roundabout. The column was built to celebrate Prussia's victories over Denmark, Austria and France and was moved there by the Nazis. The park also holds a Soviet War Memorial and Bellevue Palace, the president's official residence.

The Reichstag and its dome. (Photo: Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Siegessäule. (Photo: Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Potsdamer Platz and the Kulturforum

Rebuilt from no man's land after reunification, Potsdamer Platz was one of Europe's biggest building sites around 2000. The Sony Center spreads a tent-like roof over a courtyard that keeps remains of the pre-war Hotel Esplanade. Just west is the Kulturforum, the cultural centre West Berlin built beside the Wall because the old institutions were in the East. It includes the Philharmonie and chamber music hall, the State Library, the Gemäldegalerie of old master paintings, and Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie.

Inside the Sony Center. (Photo: Elgaard, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Hackescher Markt and Bernauer Straße

Around Hackescher Markt, the Hackesche Höfe are a chain of linked courtyards full of small shops, and the New Synagogue (1859–66) is one of the most striking synagogues in Germany to have survived both the Nazi era and the war. The Old Jewish Cemetery is close by.

The New Synagogue. (Photo: Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0)

To the north, the Berlin Wall Memorial runs the full 1.5 km of Bernauer Straße, where, on 13 August 1961, the border closed: the houses were in the East, the pavement in the West. Guards bricked up doors and windows so that people could not jump to freedom, while West Berlin police and firemen held out nets. The memorial marks escape attempts and tunnels, and has a documentation centre with a viewing platform. The Chapel of Reconciliation stands where a church on the "death strip" was blown up in 1985.

Sources

• "Berlin/Mitte" from Wikivoyage, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changed: rewritten in hubnx's own words and condensed; listings, addresses, prices, opening hours and phone numbers, and the sections on eating, drinking and sleeping, left out; each photo under its own licence, credited in its caption. This page is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.