Visiting Berlin: Museum Island, the places of memory and the city that rebuilt itself (updated 2026)

There are a few things to bear in mind about visiting Berlin, and the first is that it resembles no other European capital.

There are no medieval lanes, no great Baroque square, no picture-postcard old town. Much of the city was flattened by bombing and rebuilt from the 1950s onwards, then cut in two by a wall for twenty-eight years, and then stitched back together in a hurry in the 1990s. Everything you see carries the mark of those three stages.

To be honest, my first impression was of one endless suburb. Then I started going into the museums, and I understood that Berlin is probably the densest city in Europe for art and history: it has an entire island of archaeological museums, the finest old master gallery in Germany, and a series of memorial sites no other city has had the courage to build on top of itself.

In this post I’ll tell you what to see, in what order, and above all what is open and what is not, because Berlin’s building sites are enormous and old guides will send you to closed doors.

Let’s go!

1 – Why Berlin has no centre

This is not a piece of trivia, it is the key to finding your way: Berlin has no historic centre, it has several, and the reason is political.

The city is old. It began growing as a trading post in the 13th century on the banks of the Spree (its birth certificate is the merging of the two villages of Berlin and Cölln), became the capital of Brandenburg, then of the kingdom of Prussia, then of the German Empire and finally of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945.

In 1945, at the end of the war, the victors divided Berlin into four occupation sectors: American, British, French and Soviet. Careful here, because the article I wrote years ago got this muddled and I am correcting it: the Wall did not separate the four sectors. The sectors were administrative divisions and could be crossed. The Wall came only on 13 August 1961, sixteen years later, and it separated the three western sectors (which formed West Berlin) from the Soviet sector and the GDR all around. It stood until 9 November 1989, and Germany was reunified on 3 October 1990.

The result of forty years of double administration is that each half built its own centre: the West around the Kurfürstendamm and Zoo, the East around Alexanderplatz and Unter den Linden. Two overlapping cities are still visible today, and that is why, walking around, you always feel you are in between rather than in the middle.

One detail says it all: the central station, the Hauptbahnhof, only opened in 2006. Before that there was none, because a divided city does not have a central station.

2 – The landmark monuments

The monument walk follows the Unter den Linden-Tiergarten axis, and it is almost all free.

The Brandenburg Gate (1788-1791, by Carl Gotthard Langhans) is the symbol of the city and a neoclassical monument inspired by the propylaea of the Acropolis. On top is the quadriga of Victory, which has an eventful biography: Napoleon took it to Paris as booty in 1806 and it only came back in 1814. For twenty-eight years the gate stood in the no man’s land between the two walls, out of reach to everybody: which is why the images of the crowd walking through it in November 1989 became the icon of the fall.

A little further on is the Reichstag, the German parliament, with Norman Foster’s glass dome from which you look down into the chamber: the visit is free but must be booked in advance and places are limited. I wrote a dedicated post about it.

Then, in no particular order: the Victory Column in the middle of the Tiergarten, which you can climb for the view; the Berliner Dom with its enormous cupola; the Rotes Rathaus, the red town hall; the Fernsehturm on Alexanderplatz, which at 368 metres is the tallest building in Germany and a GDR manifesto.

Among the twentieth-century monuments do not miss the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, the Memorial Church: bombed in 1943, the people of Berlin decided to leave it mutilated and to build a new church beside it. I devoted a post to that one too, because it is one of the most intelligent things I have seen done with a ruin.

And on Potsdamer Platz, which in 1989 was a vast empty field crossed by the Wall and is now a whole district, look at the glass and steel tent of the Sony Center by Helmut Jahn: like it or not, it is the monument to the speed at which this city rebuilt itself.

3 – Museum Island (and what is closed)

The Museumsinsel, Museum Island, is an island in the Spree with five state museums built between 1830 and 1930, and it has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1999. It is the reason to come to Berlin.

• the Neues Museum, rebuilt by David Chipperfield in 2009 in a famous intervention (the war’s wounds were left visible rather than erased), holds the Egyptian collection with the bust of Nefertiti, which is the main reason to go in;
• the Altes Museum, with Greek and Etruscan antiquities;
• the Bode-Museum, a journey through sculpture from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century;
• the Alte Nationalgalerie, with nineteenth-century art, German and otherwise (Caspar David Friedrich is here);
• the Pergamonmuseum, the most famous of them all.

⚠️ And here comes the big news, because it changes your trip: the Pergamonmuseum is closed. It closed completely on 23 October 2023 for the Museum Island masterplan works, and this is not a short closure.

• The north wing and the central building will reopen on 4 June 2027, and with them the Hellenistic architectural ensembles and, above all, the great Pergamon Altar, unseen for years.
• The south wing, which houses the Museum of the Ancient Near East, will reopen much later: the projected date is around 2037. That means the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, one of the most staggering objects in Europe, cannot be seen and will not be for a good while.

If you have read older guides (including the first version of this post, which spoke of “much of the museum under renovation”), update your plans.

Second correction, and this one is a matter of history. In the first version I wrote that the Neues Museum holds Priam’s Treasure, the gold Schliemann carried off from Troy. It does not: that gold was acquired by the Berlin museums in 1881, but in 1945 it was taken to Moscow as war booty and it is in the Pushkin Museum, which only admitted holding it in 1994. What remains in Berlin is a small part of the Trojan material. If you are coming for the gold of Troy, you are in the wrong city.

4 – The museums off the island (and the two big reopenings)

Away from the Museumsinsel there are three more places that are worth the trip for me, and two of them were not in the first version of this post because they did not yet exist in their present form.

The Gemäldegalerie, at the Kulturforum near Potsdamer Platz, is the old master gallery: Botticelli, Raphael, Rembrandt, Van Eyck, Rubens, Caravaggio, Vermeer. It is the museum I liked most in Berlin and I gave it a whole post. (In the first version of this article the link pointed to Wikipedia instead of my own post: fixed.)

The Neue Nationalgalerie, a couple of minutes away, is the last work by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: a box of glass and steel that is a manifesto of modernism. It had been closed for years and reopened on 22 August 2021 after six years of restoration led by David Chipperfield, with an Alexander Calder exhibition. Inside is twentieth-century art: expressionism, Bauhaus, New Objectivity.

The Humboldt Forum is the city’s most debated novelty. It sits inside the rebuilt Berliner Schloss, the royal palace the GDR demolished in 1950 and which has been reconstructed from scratch: it opened to the public on 20 July 2021 and houses the non-European collections of the state museums, that is, the ethnographic and Asian art collections. It is a place that provokes argument both for the pastiche reconstruction and for the colonial provenance of many of its collections, and that is exactly why it is worth visiting: the museum itself puts the question at the centre.

If you love contemporary art, add the Hamburger Bahnhof, a former station turned museum of the contemporary.

5 – The museums of memory

Then there are museums in Berlin that contain no art but history, and they are the reason this city stays with you. They are not beautiful, they are hard. But that is the point, and the decision to build them in the middle of the city instead of hiding them is the bravest thing Germany has done.

• the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz: 2,711 concrete stelae of varying heights on undulating ground, by Peter Eisenman, inaugurated in 2005. You walk in among them and at a certain point the level rises above your head and you cannot see anyone any more. Underneath is the Ort der Information, the documentation centre, with the stories of individual families. Free entry;
• the Topography of Terror, laid out where the Gestapo and SS headquarters stood before being demolished: an indoor and outdoor exhibition tracing the regime’s machinery of persecution. Free;
• the Jewish Museum, the largest in Europe, in Daniel Libeskind’s building, where the architecture itself (the sloping corridors, the Holocaust Tower, the “voids”) is part of the account of two thousand years of Jewish history in Germany;
• the Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen, visited with guides who are often former inmates: the toughest visit of all;
• the Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt, tiny and extraordinary: the brush factory where Otto Weidt employed and hid Jewish families, saving them from deportation.

⚠️ And here a practical clarification that matters, because “the Wall museum” in Berlin is two different things and in the first version of this post I confused them:

• the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer, the Wall memorial on Bernauer Straße, is the free one: a stretch of border preserved in full with the death strip, the watchtower, the documentation centre with its viewing platform and the Window of Remembrance. This is where you actually understand how the Wall was built;
• the Mauermuseum at the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie is instead a private, ticketed museum (around 17-18 €), full of escape memorabilia. Interesting, but not free and not to be confused with the other.

6 – The Wall you can still see

Little of the Wall remains, and all of it is free.

The most famous stretch is the East Side Gallery, 1.3 kilometres of wall along the Spree in Friedrichshain, painted by more than a hundred artists from 1990 onwards: it is the longest open-air gallery in the world, and it holds the famous kiss between Brezhnev and Honecker by Dmitri Vrubel. Be aware that what you see is largely a 2009 repainting, because the originals had been destroyed by weather and graffiti.

Then there is Bernauer Straße (see above), which is the place to understand, and Checkpoint Charlie, which is the most touristy and least interesting: the white hut is a reconstruction and the soldiers are actors.

One last detail I love. Look at the pedestrian lights: the one with the hat and the long stride is the Ampelmännchen, designed in 1961 for East Germany. At reunification it was to be abolished and replaced by the western model, and Berliners organised to save it. They won: today it is a symbol of the city with an entire souvenir industry behind it. In the photo below it is celebrated in giant form for the twenty-fifth anniversary of German unity.

What and where to eat in Berlin

They say German food is not good. I have been to Germany many times and I can tell you it is different from ours, not worse. And in any case, the interesting thing about Berlin is that you eat the world here.

Things to try:

• currywurst, the sausage (a real sausage, not our frankfurter) cut into pieces with curry sauce, with chips or sauerkraut: it was born in post-war Berlin and it is the city institution;
• Buletten, Berlin meatballs, to be eaten standing up;
• the döner kebab, which in the form we know across Europe was invented right here in Berlin in the 1970s by the Turkish community: here it is street food by definition;
• on cold days, a glass of Glühwein, hot spiced wine, which is compulsory at the Christmas markets.

Two market appointments worth planning your day around: the Turkish market on the Maybachufer on Tuesdays and Fridays, along the canal in Kreuzberg, which is a piece of Istanbul; and the Markthalle Neun, also in Kreuzberg, which on Thursday evenings hosts Street Food Thursday, where you eat from every continent at low prices. A Korean roll, an Arab pastry, a craft beer: that is your evening sorted.

Practical information for visiting Berlin

Getting around. Public transport is efficient and everywhere: U-Bahn, S-Bahn, tram and bus on the same ticket. Watch out for the fare zones: AB covers the whole city, ABC is only needed for Brandenburg airport and Potsdam. A single ticket is valid for 120 minutes in the same direction; if you make more than two or three journeys the day ticket is better.

The passes, and which to choose. They are two different things and it is worth understanding why:

• the Museum Pass Berlin costs 32 € (reduced 16 €) and gives access for three consecutive days to over 30 museums, Museum Island included. It is the one that pays off if you are here for the art: two and a half state museums cover it. In the first version of this post I wrote 25 €, the price a few years ago. Here you can find the Museum Pass;
• the Berlin WelcomeCard instead includes transport plus discounts (not free entry) at many attractions. It makes sense if you travel a lot and visit little.

If your itinerary is memorials, the Wall and the East Side Gallery, you need neither: that Berlin is entirely free.

When to go. May to September for the weather and the parks, which here are huge and well used. In winter it is cold and dark early, but the Christmas markets are among the best in Europe. If today’s Berlin interests you more than yesterday’s, be aware that this city’s nightlife is a world of its own, and that at the famous clubs the door is strict.

A tip about order. Do not alternate art museums and memorial sites in the same day. It is not a logistical matter, it simply does not work: give one day to Museum Island and one to the memorials, and put a walk in the Tiergarten in between.

---

Berlin is not a city you visit, it is a city you cross, and it makes you settle accounts with what you studied at school. It is not always beautiful, and I found it melancholy. But it is the most necessary city in Europe.

On the blog you will find deeper dives into the three Berlin places mentioned here: the Gemäldegalerie, the Reichstag and the Memorial Church. And if you are staying in Germany, a few hours away by train are Dusseldorf, Cologne and Aachen.

And you, are you coming to Berlin for the museums or for the history of the twentieth century?