8 ideal things to do in Berlin

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked December 12, 2025

Walk a runway on Tempelhofer Feld
Tempelhof, between Neukölln and KreuzbergLate afternoon; the field closes at dusk, which in December is early
Three hundred hectares of decommissioned airport that Berliners voted, in a referendum, to leave almost entirely alone. You walk down an actual runway past kitesurfers on skateboards, allotment plots built out of pallets, and a man teaching his daughter to cycle along the centreline markings. Nothing is finished. Nothing is scheduled to be. Watching Split sell its own waterfront off in slices, I found the stubbornness of this place close to enviable.
The Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Straße
Bernauer Straße, on the Mitte–Prenzlauer Berg lineFirst thing in the morning, before the school groups arrive
Fourteen hundred metres of the actual border, kept where it stood: the death strip, a watchtower, the Chapel of Reconciliation built on the footprint of a church the GDR dynamited in 1985. The Window of Remembrance carries photographs of the people who died trying to cross. On my first Berlin trip I went to the East Side Gallery first, which was the wrong order — the painted section is a souvenir, this is the document. Free, open air, and quiet enough to hear the S-Bahn going past.
Nefertiti at the Neues Museum
Museumsinsel, MitteWeekday morning. The Pergamonmuseum next door stays shut until at least mid-2027
Pergamon has been closed since October 2023 and its north wing is not due back until mid-2027, so the Ishtar Gate is out of reach for years yet. Go next door instead. The bust sits alone in a domed room, one eye never finished, and the crowd manages the rare trick of falling silent without being asked to. David Chipperfield's reconstruction of the bombed-out building around her deserves as much of your attention as she does: he left the shell damage visible rather than smoothing it over, which is the most Berlin decision an architect has ever taken.
Teufelsberg listening station
Grunewald, west of the city; walk up through the forestA dry afternoon — the hill is exposed and the wind up there is a real factor
An American signals-intelligence post built on top of a hill made from the rubble of the bombed city, planted with trees so that it now reads as landscape. The radomes are torn open and every surface carries several layers of paint. Stand under the biggest dome and say something out loud: your own voice comes back at you half a beat late, an acoustic accident nobody designed and nobody has fixed. It is a ticketed site with proper guided tours now. The fence-hopping era is over, and honestly the guides are better than the fence was.
Strandbad Wannsee
Wannsee, about forty minutes from Mitte on the S-BahnJune to August
Sand — 1,275 metres of it, trucked in — with a New Objectivity bathing complex behind it finished in 1930 and still running on the same premise: that a working city needs somewhere to lie down. Berliners bring the hooded wicker Strandkörbe and an unreasonable volume of sausage. As a Dalmatian I turned up fully prepared to be superior about swimming in a lake, and I was, for about ten minutes.
Street Food Thursday at Markthalle Neun
Eisenbahnstraße, KreuzbergThursday evenings; arrive early or accept the queue
Every Thursday since 2013, an 1891 market hall in Kreuzberg hands its floor over to cooks who don't have restaurants — Peruvian ceviche, Nigerian fufu, Korean buns, Allgäu mac and cheese, all under the same iron roof. Bring some cash; a few stalls still treat card readers as a rumour. The hall's other trading days are calmer and better for actually buying food to cook, but Thursday is the one where you eat standing up among strangers, which is Berlin's default social arrangement anyway.
Sachsenhausen Memorial at Oranienburg
Oranienburg, 35 km north; the S1 runs the whole wayGive it a full day, and put nothing else in that day
Oranienburg is forty-five minutes north on the S1, then a twenty-minute walk through an ordinary commuter town to the gates of a camp the SS built in 1936 as the model for the ones that followed. Entry is free. There is no version of this that is a pleasant morning, and the memorial makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. I have been twice and both times took the train back without speaking to anybody. Go early, allow the whole day, and do not book dinner.
The Humboldthain flak tower with Berliner Unterwelten
Volkspark Humboldthain, GesundbrunnenApril to October only — bats hibernate inside for the rest of the year
Bats have the run of the place from November, which is why the tours only go underground between spring and autumn. Volunteers shifted more than 1,400 cubic metres of rubble by hand to open three of the tower's seven floors, and standing inside a half-demolished anti-aircraft fortress in the middle of a municipal park does more to explain what the war did to this city's masonry than any museum caption. Afterwards, climb the outside to the ruined gun platform. The whole northern skyline, for nothing.

The long version

Berlin keeps becoming itself: a guide to a city that won't sit still

Berlin is the only major European capital that has been multiple cities within a single lifetime — divided, reunited, gentrified, bohemian, exhausted, reborn — and that experience of being remade is still, somehow, the city's most reliable trait.

Read the full essay →