Napoleon carted the chariot off the top of the Brandenburg Gate to Paris after conquering Prussia, and Berlin waited eight years to get it back. The gate itself was built as a symbol of peace, commissioned by King Frederick William II and finished in 1791. It was designed to be the grand entrance to the city, where the road to Brandenburg began. After Napoleon’s defeat, the quadriga returned, and the goddess driving it was given an Iron Cross to mark the victory. That statue has now watched over the gate through most of modern German history.
Audio guide Berlin
Tella is a free audio guide for any place on Earth. Here are 30 places in Berlin worth a story. Open one on the map and hear it read aloud in English, or take the Android app on a walk and let it narrate whatever you pass.
Places worth a story
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
public research university in Berlin, Germany
Photo: VitVit · CC BY-SA 4.0
Reichstag
seat of the German Bundestag and, before 1945, the eponymous parliament of the Weimar Republic
The bullet holes are still there, pocking the stonework inside the Reichstag. Soviet soldiers left them in 1945, when the building became the final prize of the Battle of Berlin and the Red Army raised its flag over the ruined shell. Today the Bundestag sits beneath Norman Foster’s glass dome, which was added during the building’s reconstruction in the 1990s — a transparent parliament for a reunified Germany. It also now hosts the Federal Convention, which elects the German president.
Photo: Mfield , Matthew Field, http://www.photography.mattfield.com ; edit by Waugsber… · GFDL 1.2
Pergamon Museum
museum building in Berlin, part of the Museumsinsel, presents the Vorderasiatisches Museum, the Museum für Islamische Kunst and parts of the Antikensammlung
Fernsehturm Berlin
television tower in Berlin
Photo: Christian Wolf ( www.c-w-design.de ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Berlin Cathedral
main lutheran church in Berlin
Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted his Protestant answer to St. Peter’s in Rome, and he got it — the largest Protestant church in Germany, built between 1894 and 1905. Nearly the entire basement is a dynastic tomb for the Hohenzollerns, with around ninety sarcophagi resting below the pews. The East German government demolished the Memorial Church section on the north side in 1975, and the scar of that removal still shapes the building today. Allied bombs damaged the interior during World War II, and restoration work continued until 2002.
Photo: Ansgar Koreng · CC BY 3.0 de
Technische Universität Berlin
public research university in Berlin, Germany
Photo: TU Berlin/Pressestelle/Ulrich Dahl · Copyrighted free use
Unter den Linden
street in Berlin, Germany
Alexanderplatz
square in Berlin, Germany
Photo: ProtoplasmaKid, shoots and edition / music by Chris Zabriskie , “ The Temperatu… · CC BY-SA 3.0
Berlin Palace
former residence of the Prussian kings, seat of the Humboldt Forum
In 1950, East Germany blew up the Berlin Palace—one of Prussia's grandest baroque buildings—to prove it had no use for kings. Then it raised the Palace of the Republic on the same ground, an ashtray-shaped modernist block where parliament sat, people got married, and famously dined at thirteen restaurants under one roof. After reunification, Berlin tore that down too and rebuilt the old palace's shell from scratch. The Humboldt Forum now fills it, with one baroque courtyard and one brutally plain side facing the Spree.
Photo: A.Savin · FAL
Altes Museum
antiquities museum in Berlin, Germany
Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed the Altes Museum with a rotunda modeled on the Roman Pantheon, a deliberate echo meant to make Berlin feel like a new Athens. The building opened in 1830 as Prussia’s first public museum — before that, royal collections were seen by invitation only. Its name, “Old Museum,” only came later, when the Neues Museum opened next door in 1855. Today it holds the Antikensammlung, one of the world’s finest collections of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities. Since 1999, the whole of Museum Island has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Memorial in Berlin for the Jews murdered under the National Socialist regime
The 2,711 concrete slabs of this memorial were originally meant to be almost 4,000, until a recalculation showed what could legally fit. Peter Eisenman's field of grey stelae rises and falls with the sloping ground, from ankle height to over four and a half metres, pulling you into a maze where the city fades and only the narrow sky remains. Underground, the Place of Information holds the names of some three million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, gathered from Yad Vashem in Israel. It opened in May 2005, sixty years after the war in Europe ended.
Bellevue Palace
official residence in Berlin for the President of the Federal Republic of Germany
Photo: Tobiasi0 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Stories are written by an AI from public map and encyclopaedia data and may contain mistakes.