Orientation
CHARLOTTENBURG
Should you forget that Berlin is an old European capital, venture into Charlottenburg. Originally a separate town founded around the grounds of Friedrich I’s palace, it became an affluent cultural center during the Weimar years and the Berlin Wall era thanks to Anglo-American support. The neighborhood retains its original old-world opulence, from the upscale Beaux-Arts apartments to the shamelessly extravagant Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s main shopping strip. Ku’damm, as the locals call it, runs from east to west through southern Charlottenburg. It’s home to Europe’s largest department store, KaDeWe, which comprises five massive floors that keep patrons expertly dressed and lavishly fed with gourmet delicacies. Close to central Charlottenburg is the elephantine Bahnhof Zoo, a favorite among families, cute animal enthusiasts, and taxidermists (R.I.P., Knut). Along with the zoo, the Ku’damm, and its never-ending flow of teenagers darting in and out of H and M, is one of the youngest and liveliest areas in Charlottenburg. Other popular sights include the Spree River in the northwest and the absurdly splendiferous Schloβ Charlottenburg to the north. Otherwise, the neighborhood’s high rents keep out most young people and students, so the Charlottenburg crowd tends to be old and quiet, and prefers the sidewalk seating of an expensive Ku’Damm restaurant to crazy ragers in one of the area’s few clubs.
SCHÖNEBERG AND WILMERSDORF
South of Ku’damm, Schöneberg and Wilmersdorf are primarily quiet residential neighborhoods, remarkable for their world class cafe culture, bistro tables, relaxed diners, and coffee shops spilling onto virtually every cobblestone street. There’s a reason that no Starbucks has popped up in Schöneberg: thecoffee here is delicious, cheap, and sometimes made with so much love that a heart appears in the foam. Also, nowhere else in Berlin, and perhaps in all of Germany, is the GLBT community quite as spectacularly ready to party as in the area immediately surrounding Nollendorfplatz. Here, the gay nightlife scene varies from chill to crazy, and the various bars scattered across the northern part of Schöneberg are often packed beyond capacity. To the west lies one of Berlin’s most convenient outdoor getaways: Grunewald rustles with city dwellers trading their daily commute for peaceful strolls with the family dog among the pines. But if you don’t have the time for the 20min. bus or tram ride—or a palm reader once predicted that you would be mauled by dogs in a German forest—then Schöneberg and Wilmersdorf offer a gracious handful of shady parks scattered among their apartment facades where you can sit back in the grass and kick back the cups of joe.
MITTE
True to its name (“center” in English), Mitte is without a doubt Berlin’s political, historical, cultural, and tourist-ical center. Boasting the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Jewish Memorial, the Rotes Rathaus, the Victory Column, and the Berliner Dom, Mitte is crawling with tourists wearing the names ofother cities on their T-shirts, passing through to get a glimpse of some of the world’s worthiest sights. The area also has Berlin’s best cultural institutions; Museum Island piles some of the world’s most awe-inspiring museums practically on top of each other, with the too-well-preserved-to-be-true Pergamon Museum atop the heap. Some of the world’s most famous performance halls, including the Berlin Philharmonic and the Deutscher Staatsoper, grace this cultural capital with their cultural capital. Then, of course, there’s the forest-like Tiergarten at the center of Mitte, which shelters sunbathers, barbecuers, pensive wanderers, and probably several breeds of magical creatures. The main street cutting through the Tiergarten, Straße des 17 Juni, serves as a popular gathering place where carnivals, markets, protests, and public viewings of the World Cup take precedent over constant traffic.
What’s perhaps most fun about Mitte is tracing the history of Berlin down its streets and through its buildings. One of the most common phrases in relation to every Mitte sight is “heavily damaged in WWII,” and constructions and reconstructions are often difficult to distinguish. The Berlin Wall once ran directly through Mitte, and, though the signs of the divide fade with every passing year, there are still many remnants of a more fragmented Berlin, like the DDR-built Fernsehturm, which, for better or worse, is Mitte’s most incessantly visible landmark. One of the longest still-standing stretches of wall deteriorates in the south, an unsightly sign of unsettling recent times.
But Mitte ain’t just about the capital-S Sights: it also burns brightly from night until morning with some of Berlin’s most prized techno clubs, many of which are named after baked goods for whatever reason (e.g. Cookies). Plus, with shopping centers both ritzy (Friedrichstraße) and intimidatingly hip (Hackescher Markt), Mitte can serve as a pricey place to replace your threads with something more flannel or form-fitting; that way, entry into the sometimes exclusive nightlife options is only a flashy strut away.
PRENZLAUER BERG
Like the history of all things trendy, the history of Prenzlauer Berg in the 20th century is reversal after reversal after reversal. When the Wall fell, Prenzlauer Berg was in ruins. Though it had suffered little damage from Allied bombs compared to its neighbors during WWII, its early DDR days were as filled with neglect as Hansel and Gretel: buildings fell into piles of graffitied bread crumbs, and it wasn’t until the ’70s that people started sweeping up the mess. But as any home-owner with a neighbor who doesn’t mow their lawn knows, neglect means lower rents, and lower rents draw students and the younger in years. By the current millennium, Prenzlauer Berg had become the hippest of the hippest, populated by dreadlock-laden grungesters shopping at secondhand clothing stores, tight-jeaned post-teens drinking cheap black coffee from sidewalk cafe tables, and enough flannel to make a lumberjack chuckle. But hip, by definition, never lasts, and as the noughts progressed, Prenzlauer Berg steadily began to gentrify: students became parents, hippies gave way to yuppies, and parks became playgrounds. Today, Prenzlauer Berg is overrun with toddlers and has one of the highest birth rates in the country. Jungle gyms, strollers, and daycares share the streets with the vestiges of a younger, edgier age, like the tiny, pricey fashion and secondhand stores that line Kastanienallee and the countless cafes spilling onto every sidewalk around Helmholtzplatz. Though it’s changed, Prenzlauer Berg hasn’t completely lost its cool: with the best bar scene of any of the neighborhoods, includinga wine place where you choose how much to pay, a ping-pong bar, and more vintage sofas than Mad Men, P’Berg can still be pretty unbelievable. One recommendation for maximizing your time here: rent a bike. With only about four Metro stations, this Berg is most accessible on two wheels.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
Friedrichshain’s low rents and DDR edge draw a crowd of punks and metal-heads ever eastward. From the longest still-standing remnant of the Berlin Wall, which runs along the Spree, to the stark, towering architecture of the neighborhood’s central axis, Frankfurter Allee, the ghost of the former Soviet Union still haunts the ’Hain. Fortunately, this ghost only seems to scare the population out into the night, when any crumbling factory, any cobwebbed train station, and any complex of graffiti and grime is fair game for F’Hain’s sublimely edgy nightlife. Some locals complain that gentrification hasfound its way even here, as traditional residential buildings pop up, clubs become tame and touristy, and chic 20-somethings set up shop on the cafe-ridden Simon-Dach-Strasse and Boxhagenerplatz. Nonetheless, Friedrichshain is still wonderfully inexpensive and unique. Travelers should keep a lookoutat night, though, because Friedrichshain’s often desolate infrastructure can hide shady characters.
KREUZBERG
If Mitte is Manhattan, Kreuzberg is Brooklyn. Graffiti adorns everything, and the younger population skulks around while chowing down on street food fit for a last supper. The parties start later, go later, and sometimes never stop. Kreuzberg was spawned during the 1860s, when industrialization crammed the previously unpopulated area to Berlin’s southeast with dense, low-income housing and brick factories, many of which still stand today. During its 20th-century teens, Kreuzberg ruled as the center of punkdom and counterculture in Berlin. Its old warehouses and factories housed Hausbesetzer (squatters) in the 1970s, until a conservative city government forcibly evicted them in the early ’80s. Riots ensued, and, during Reagan’s 1985 visit to the city, authorities so feared protests in Kreuzberg that they locked down the entire district. While time has tamed Kreuzberg, the neighborhood’s alternative soul sticks around like anespecially persistent squatter. Underground clubs in abandoned basements, burned-out apartment buildings, and oppressive warehouse complexes shake off their dust when the sun disappears and rage until well after it reappears; the clubs that party the hardest, the latest, and the best in Berlin allfind shelter in Kreuzberg. Kreuzberg is also home to most of Berlin’s enormous Turkish population (hence the nickname “Little Istanbul”). Döner kebabs, the salty scraps cut from those gigantic meaty beehives in every other storefront, go for €2-3 all across this district, and the Turkish Market along the southern bank of the Landwehrkanal is one of the most exciting, raucous, cheap, and authentic markets in Western Europe. If you want to learn about Berlin, head to Mitte. If you want to not remember what you learned, come to Kreuzberg.