Explorer Berlin

The Brandenburg Gate is an 18th-century neoclassical monument in central Berlin, built between 1788 and 1791 for King Frederick William II of Prussia to a design by Carl Gotthard Langhans. Its sandstone columns support a bronze quadriga sculpted by Johann Gottfried Schadow. The gate marked the Cold War division of the city and now stands at the western end of Unter den Linden.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe commemorates the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Designed by architect Peter Eisenman and completed in 2005, it covers 1.9 hectares near the Brandenburg Gate with 2,711 concrete slabs of varying height on sloping ground. An underground exhibition lists the names of around three million victims.

The Reichstag building is the historic parliament building on Platz der Republik in Berlin, built between 1884 and 1894 to designs by Paul Wallot and now the seat of the Bundestag. Severely damaged in the 1933 Reichstag fire and in the Second World War, it was rebuilt between 1995 and 1999 by architect Norman Foster, who added the walk-in glass dome above the plenary chamber.

Checkpoint Charlie was the only Berlin Wall crossing point designated for foreign tourists, diplomats and Allied armed forces personnel, in use from 1961 to 1990. A reconstructed guard hut and sandbags now mark the site on Friedrichstraße, flanked by a sign warning drivers they are leaving the American sector.

The Tiergarten is a 210-hectare park at the centre of Berlin, founded in 1527 as a hunting ground for the Elector of Brandenburg and redesigned as an English-style landscape park in the 19th century by Peter Joseph Lenné. It stretches between the Brandenburg Gate and Berlin Zoo, crossed by footpaths and the Landwehr Canal. The Berlin Victory Column stands at its centre.

The Topography of Terror is a museum and memorial on Niederkirchnerstraße, on the former site of the SS and Gestapo headquarters during the Nazi era. Its exhibitions document the organisations behind Nazi persecution, alongside an outdoor trail beside a surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall. Excavated foundations of the former Gestapo buildings lie along an open-air trench.

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 East Side Gallery is an open-air gallery on the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall, running 1.3 km along Mühlenstraße in Friedrichshain between the Spree river and the Oberbaumbrücke. More than 100 artists painted murals on the east side of the wall in 1990, shortly after German reunification. One of its murals depicts Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker kissing.