A city that rebuilt itself around its museums, its ruins and its artists. Cheap studios made it Europe's capital of making; the history is never out of sight.
Mies van der Rohe's last building (1968): a steel roof floating over a glass hall, restored by David Chipperfield and reopened in 2021. 20th-century art downstairs.
One of the world's great collections of old-master painting, often half-empty. Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bruegel, Dürer, and two Caravaggios.
19th-century painting in a temple on Museum Island, with the best collection of Caspar David Friedrich anywhere.
David Chipperfield's restoration (2009) kept the war damage visible: bullet holes, scorched frescoes, raw brick. Home to the bust of Nefertiti.
A 19th-century railway terminus turned into the national museum of contemporary art, with long halls built for large installations.
A Renaissance-revival exhibition palace that stood next to the Wall, now a venue for big international shows.
A private contemporary collection inside a five-storey Second World War bunker, later a techno club and a fruit store. Guided tours only.
Closed since 2023. It partly reopens on 4 June 2027 with the Pergamon Altar; the Ishtar Gate wing stays closed for longer.
Rooms, ruins and curiosities: the city's other museum.
A hill made of war rubble, topped by an abandoned American listening station whose domes are now covered in graffiti.
A colossal memorial of 1949: a 12-metre Soviet soldier holding a child, standing on a broken swastika, above sarcophagi carved with Stalin's words.
The archive of the Deutscher Werkbund: thousands of everyday objects from kettles to Nazi kitsch, arranged in open cases by type, colour and shape.
Brecht, Hegel, Fichte, Heinrich Mann and the architect Schinkel, under trees beside Brecht's last house.
A GDR premiere cinema of 1963 on the great socialist boulevard, with a glass-walled lounge bar above the entrance.
A former animal-research laboratory of 1971–81 that looks like a stranded battleship, with blue pipes sticking out of its concrete flanks. Saved from demolition and protected as a monument, it is now waiting for a new use.
A 1976 tower restaurant on a concrete trunk over a motorway junction, nicknamed the 'beer brush'. It has been empty for years and painted over by street artists.
The last unrenovated courtyard in the Hackesche Höfe, covered in posters and street art. It holds the Otto Weidt workshop museum, where a blind brush-maker hid Jewish workers during the war.
Sanssouci and the Museum Barberini, 30 minutes by S-Bahn.
The Bauhaus building and the Masters' Houses, under two hours by train.
Gemäldegalerie at opening → Neue Nationalgalerie next door → walk past Potsdamer Platz to the Gropius Bau → U-Bahn to Museum Island → Neues Museum and the Alte Nationalgalerie → evening film at Kino International.