Explorer Berlin

Berlin Cathedral is a Protestant church on Museum Island, built between 1894 and 1905 for Emperor William II to designs by Julius Raschdorff in Renaissance and Baroque Revival styles. It is the largest Protestant church in Germany and houses the Hohenzollern dynastic crypt. Visitors can climb to the dome gallery for views over central Berlin.

The DDR Museum is an interactive museum on the River Spree in central Berlin, opposite Berlin Cathedral. Its exhibits recreate everyday life in East Germany, including a furnished prefabricated apartment and a Trabant driving simulator, drawing on a collection of more than 360,000 objects.

The Humboldt Forum is a museum of human history and culture inside the reconstructed Berlin Palace on Museum Island. It opened to the public in 2021 and houses the non-European collections of the Berlin State Museums, including the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art. The building reconstructs three Baroque facades of the historic palace around a modern interior.

The Kunstgewerbemuseum, or Museum of Decorative Arts, is part of the Berlin State Museums and shows European applied arts from the Middle Ages to today, including furniture, fashion, glass, porcelain and jewellery. Its main collection is displayed at the Kulturforum building, with a second branch at Köpenick Palace.

A museum in Mitte opened in 2022, built around the private collection of Peter Janssen. Across 1,500 square metres it shows more than 900 objects, including around 40 full suits of samurai armour, 200 helmets and 160 swords, spanning the Kofun period to the Edo era. The museum also has a traditional tea house and a Noh theatre stage.

The Kupferstichkabinett at the Kulturforum is Germany's largest museum of prints and drawings, holding more than 500,000 prints and around 110,000 individual works on paper, including drawings, watercolours and pastels. Changing selections from the collection are shown in rotating exhibitions, since the works are too light-sensitive for permanent display.

The Berlin Dungeon is an indoor, actor-led walk-through attraction near Alexanderplatz that dramatises episodes from the city's dark history, from plague and torture to a river raft ride and a free-fall drop. Shows run in German and English. It belongs to the Dungeons chain, alongside sister sites in London and Hamburg.

Hamburger Bahnhof is a contemporary art museum in Berlin's Moabit district, housed in the former terminus of the Berlin–Hamburg railway. Part of the Berlin National Gallery, it shows post-1960s art, including large-scale installations, in its converted railway halls.

The Neue Nationalgalerie is a modern art museum at the Kulturforum, built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1968. Its glass-and-steel pavilion houses the Berlin National Gallery's 20th-century collection, including Expressionist, Bauhaus and post-war works. The building was renovated by David Chipperfield and reopened in 2021.

The Gemäldegalerie at the Kulturforum displays the Berlin State Museums' collection of European Old Master paintings from the 13th to 18th centuries. First opened in 1830, it moved into its current building in 1998. Highlights include works by Dürer, van Eyck, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt and Vermeer.

A museum of plastinated human bodies in the base of Berlin's television tower, opened in 2015 with around 20 full-body specimens and up to 200 anatomical exhibits. The bodies are preserved by Plastination, a technique the anatomist Gunther von Hagens developed in the 1970s, and were donated for medical education to show organ systems and common diseases.

The Jewish Museum Berlin opened in 2001 and is the largest Jewish museum in Europe, covering 3,500 square metres. It presents the history of Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present, across a baroque former courthouse and Daniel Libeskind's zinc-clad extension, whose zigzag plan and slit windows give the building its distinctive form.

Feuerle Puig House, formerly The Feuerle Collection, is a private art collection in a former World War II telecommunications bunker in Kreuzberg, renovated by architect John Pawson. Founded in 2016 by Désiré Feuerle and Sara Puig, it pairs antique Khmer sculpture and Chinese imperial furniture with contemporary art. Visits are guided and must be booked in advance.

The Fernsehturm is a 368-metre telecommunications tower in central Berlin, built by the East German government between 1965 and 1969. It is the tallest structure in Germany. A lift rises to an observation deck and a revolving restaurant inside the steel sphere, with views over the city from near Alexanderplatz.

The Berlin Victory Column stands at the centre of the Großer Stern roundabout in Tiergarten park. Designed by Heinrich Strack and inaugurated in 1873 to commemorate Prussian military victories, it is topped by a gilded bronze statue of Victoria by Friedrich Drake and stands 67 metres tall. A viewing platform near the top looks out over Tiergarten toward the Brandenburg Gate.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stands on Breitscheidplatz in central Berlin. Built between 1891 and 1895 to honour Emperor Wilhelm I, its spire was left as a ruin after Allied bombing in 1943 and now stands beside a modern octagonal church built in the 1960s. The ruin houses a memorial hall documenting the building's history.

The Museum of Photography sits beside Berlin's Zoologischer Garten station, in a former Landwehr officers' mess built in 1909. Opened as a museum in 2004, it is part of the Berlin State Museums and houses the Helmut Newton Foundation, with the permanent exhibition 'Helmut Newton's Private Property' alongside changing photography shows.

Hard Rock Cafe Berlin occupies a corner building on Kurfürstendamm near Breitscheidplatz, part of the international Hard Rock Cafe chain. The restaurant serves an American-style menu alongside a music-memorabilia collection and an attached merchandise shop. A table-seating skip-the-line package combined with a set menu is sold as a separate ticketed product.

The Computer Games Museum (Computerspielemuseum) on Karl-Marx-Allee in Friedrichshain traces the history of video games from early arcade machines to modern consoles. First opened in 1997, it reopened at this address in 2011 with a permanent exhibition of consoles, computers and playable historic games.

A private museum in a former grain warehouse on the Spree in Friedrichshain, next to the East Side Gallery, whose roof once served as a Cold War border watchtower. Opened in 2016, its thirteen rooms trace the Berlin Wall's history from 1961 to 1990 through eyewitness testimony and artefacts, including items from the 1989 fall of the Wall.