From walled city to world city
The East Side Gallery is the longest surviving section of the Berlin Wall. In 1990, more than 100 artists from over 20 countries decorated this stretch of the hinterland wall with their art works. The most famous is undoubtedly the work known as the “Fraternal Kiss”, depicting a kiss between Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany’s SED Party Chairman Erich Honecker.
But Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate are also key sites in the history of the Berlin Wall. It’s easy to buy tickets for our ‘Wall Memories’ tour online at visitberlin.de – where you can find the right tickets in just three minutes!
Berlin was a divided city for nearly thirty years – a city with a wall running through its very heart. From 13 August 1961 until 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall divided the city into East and West Berlin. Today, all across the city you can find traces of the Wall, its remains and memorial sites – the East Side Gallery, the Berlin Wall Memorial in Bernauer Strasse, the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, a former Stasi remand prison, and the green Mauerpark. The route of the Berlin Wall is even marked along some of Berlin’s streets by a double row of cobblestones.
The Berlin Wall Cycle Route also offers a great way to trace the route of the Wall by bike. The route crosses the city following the path of the Berlin Wall. The entire cycle route covers over 160 kilometres along the former GDR border encircling West Berlin.
The East Side Gallery is the longest surviving section of the Berlin Wall.
In 1990, more than 100 artists from over 20 countries decorated this stretch of the hinterland wall with their art works. The most famous is undoubtedly the work known as the “Fraternal Kiss”, depicting a kiss between Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany’s SED Party Chairman Erich Honecker.
But Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate are also key sites in the history of the Berlin Wall. It’s easy to buy tickets for our ‘Wall Memories’ tour online at visitberlin.de – where you can find the right tickets in just three minutes!
Discover the greatest places to visit from other visitors! Here, you can find tickets for the sights and attractions that our Berlin visitors love!
Our travel service offers the ideal way to enjoy a stress-free holiday in Berlin. Buy your tickets for the Berlin Wall tour, the GDR Museum and the Brandenburg Gate Museum easily and conveniently online here. And it’s fast – so you can find the right ticket in just three minutes!
On the evening of 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. It was a night when innumerable East and West Berliners made history. They climbed over the concrete walls, crowded through the narrow border crossing points, went at the Berlin Wall with hammers, and retook their city in its entirety. The images of this historical event were shown around the world.
Today, over 25 years on, Berlin is no longer a walled city, but a world city. Since those days, millions of visitors have come to Berlin, Germany’s capital city, to see this change for themselves. What have the Berliners made of their city since 1989? A creative location, a lifestyle metropolis and a place where history happened. The fall of the Wall left unused spaces in the urban landscape. Residents and visitors adopted these abandoned areas as creative spaces – from the art scene in Brunnenstraße to the Berlin start-ups at Moritzplatz – or simply enjoyed the new access to the River Spree.
In the night from 12 to 13 August 1961, the East German army began sealing off the streets and railway lines providing access to West Berlin. Then the East German regime erected a wall along the sector border.
The border encircling West Berlin was 167.8 kilometres long. In the years of the Berlin Wall, present research shows that between 136 and 206 people died trying to cross from East to West. The Berlin Wall finally fell on 9 November 1989. The city recalls the victims of the division of Germany at many Berlin Wall sites, museums and memorial sites, such as the Tränenpalast (Palace of Tears), the Berlin Wall Memorial in Bernauer Strasse, and the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, a former Stasi remand prison.
