What is left of the Wall, and why my tour does not go there

The question I am asked most often is about the one thing my tour does not show you.

What is actually left of the Wall?

It comes up on nearly every walk, usually somewhere around Museum Island, while we are talking about a much older version of Berlin. I have started to think the question is the most interesting one visitors ask, precisely because of where it arrives.

The short answer

More than you would expect, and almost none of it where you are looking.

Bernauer Straße is the clearest answer I know. The memorial there shows the border as a system rather than as a single wall: the barriers, the strip between them, the patrol road, a watchtower, and the traces of buildings that once stood along the line. The border ran directly in front of apartment buildings, and some of the best-known early escapes took place through their windows.

Allow at least an hour if you want to read and walk it properly. The open-air grounds are free. If you see one Wall site, this is the one I would choose.

The East Side Gallery is worth your time for a different reason, and it helps to know which reason. The paintings were made in 1990 on a surviving section of the barrier after the border had opened. I think of it less as an explanation of how the Wall worked and more as a monument to its ending. Go for the art and for the particular mood of that moment.

The line in the ground. A double row of cobblestones marks the course of the Wall across the city. Once you can recognise it, Berlin rearranges itself around you. You start seeing it under your feet on streets you have already walked three times.

Why it is not on my walk

Because it is on everyone else's.

Berlin tourism has an enormous gravitational pull towards the twentieth century, and specifically towards its last four decades. There are excellent guides in this city who do the Wall properly, and there are more of them than there are guides doing anything else. If you want that tour, it exists, and I will tell you where to find it.

My route does something the others mostly do not. It starts at Alexanderplatz, moves through the oldest quarter of the city, past a church that survived the bombing when almost nothing around it did, along the Spree to Museum Island, and it is about the eight hundred years that came before the part everyone knows. Medieval town, Prussian ambition, imperial display, GDR symbolism, and then whatever it is we are doing now.

You cannot fit that and the Wall into two hours. Something has to be left out, and I would rather leave out the thing that half the city is already covering than leave out the part that explains why any of this is here.

What the question is actually about

I do not think people are asking for directions. Berlin has done a genuinely unusual thing: it has made the evidence of its own worst decades into the thing visitors come to see. So when someone asks what is left of the Wall, what they often mean is how much of this can I still touch, and how much has been tidied away.

That is a good question, and the honest answer is that most of it was destroyed at speed by people who had extremely good reasons to want it gone, and that the preservation happened late and by argument.

The same is true of the city I do show you. What surprises visitors most on my walk is not what is there. It is how much of old Berlin is simply gone, and how often that disappearance involved a decision about what should replace it. The Wall is one chapter of that. It is just not the first one.

So: go

Bernauer Straße for the border system. The East Side Gallery for the art and for 1990. And watch for the cobblestones.

Then, if you want to understand why the city they cut in half looked the way it did before anyone cut it, come and walk the other tour.

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My regular walk tells the chapters that came before the Wall. The practical details are on the tour page.