Berlin's T.V. Tower

If you can’t get into the restaurant at the top of Berlin’s TV tower the viewing platform just below is a good second best. What first caught my eye was the River Spree: jolly Berliners well fuelled on pleasure boats with beer and pretzels gave us the phrase 'going on a spree'. There are boat trips westwards to the many-islanded Wannsee and beyond, though my favourite outing is by train to Wannsee then by bus (No 218 or 316) to Peacock Island. It’s a 100 yard ferry crossing to a never-crowded rural hideaway slumbering in bosky calm – except for the sound of peacocks.


Strandbad at Wannsee

The TV tower (Fernsehturm) was East Germany's 'two-fingers' to The West. It was their ‘anything-you-can-do-we-can-do-better'. It came close to being dismantled at the height of post-Wall reconstruction fever, but has been reprieved. Seemingly in touching distance of the circular viewing platform, the Nikolaiviertel, named after the church of St Nicholas, is a skilful pastiche of Old Berlin created by the Communist regime to celebrate the city’s 750th anniversary in 1987.


The Reichstag

Further away you should spot the prancing chariot horses above the Brandenburg Gate, the sparkling glass dome of the Reichstag, and the statue at the top of the Victory Column known as ‘golden Lizzy’. Also look out for the opulently restored synagogue in the Oranienburgstrasse, the powerful statement by the obsessive Karl Friedrich Schinkel that is the massive cathedral and the arrow-straight Karl-Marx-Allee, pointing towards Moscow.

I could go on and on and you could go round and round. Better to take ’the hundred bus’, a yellow double decker (usually) that stops or starts right by the Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz, known to Berliners as 'Alex', and goes to the Zoo via a good number of Berlin’s must-sees. Plus others that are not quite on the route but a short distance away.

Whisked down from the top of the tower by super-fast lift I found myself in the path of a clattering tram and was yanked out of harm’s way by one of the uniformed transport officials who spot disorientated tourists and, usually, direct them to bus No 100. ‘Take more care!’ she admonished very firmly indeed – this being Berlin, where a sharp tongue even has its own nickname. It’s ‘Berlin-Schnautze’, often followed by unexpected kindnesses.


Inside the Pergamon Museum

You’re quickly at ‘Museum Island’, created mainly by a bend in the Spree. People rate the Pergamon Museum’s incomparable ancient Greek relics, but I especially like the Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery) for its 19th century German and French landscapes.

Traffic by-passes the Brandenburg Gate: you have to walk a short way. It survived both bombing and being in no man’s land during the days of The Wall, and is the only survivor of several former city gates. Being near the Brandenburg Gate makes a good excuse to pop in for morning coffee or afternoon tea and cakes to the Adlon Hotel, a luxurious cocoon amid the hurly burly of the city. They’re much too sophisticated however to serve ‘Berliners’, doughnuts with jam, cream or chocolate, made world famous when on 26 June 1963 in front of ten thousand people in Berlin President J F Kennedy announced ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’: I am a doughnut’. He needed only to have dropped the definite article to avoid becoming the butt of much amusement: ‘Ich bin Berliner: I am a Berliner.’ Actually, he wouldn’t have blushed so red if he’d known that Berlin is the only place in Germany where this cake isn’t known as a ‘Berliner’.


Checkpoint Charlie

The Brandenburg Gate is a good point from which to get to the Berlin-Wall Museum at what was Checkpoint Charlie. This was the only official vehicle crossing between west and east Berlin, and the museum commemorates some of the desperately brave escapes from the prison that the GDR effectively became. On display are hot-air balloons, a small submarine, a half hollowed-out petrol tank big enough to hide a small person. The GDR/DDR Museum in Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse has more intimate and domestic reminders of everyday life in that ‘other world’, and features the good as well as the grim times.

In easy walking distance of the Mauermuseum is the celebrated Jewish Museum and the adjacent Garden of Exile and Holocaust Tower, covering 2000 years of Jewish triumph and tragedy. These are a hard act to follow: tour guides often make them the last visit of the day.

Via the Reichstag – book tours in advance – lie the gold-topped Victory Column repositioned by the Nazis in expectation of more military victories than they ever actually won – and the Tiergarten, loved for the cool glades and half-hidden lakes on those summer days that can see temperatures of up to 37 degrees C.


Elephant Gates to Berlin Zoo

About four miles from Alexanderplatz, ‘Zoo’ is much more than a zoo, though it’s famous for the first allied air raid on Berlin, in 1943, that killed the only elephant, and for sad Knut, the polar bear cub abandoned by his mother and cared for here until his death in March 2011. It's a brash and noisy meeting place at a major road and rail junction near the eastern end of what was Berlin’s most glitzy boulevard, Kurfürstendamm (just say ‘Ku’damm’). Among souvenir stalls are lots of little Knuts – though he didn’t stay little for long. Also, even after 20 years of reunification, pocket-sized baby-blue replicas of ‘Trabis’, or Trabants, the flimsy plastic puttering two-stroke car that may yet be the most abiding symbol of the GDR. It’s the butt of many a joke. (‘How do you double the value of a Trabi? Fill the petrol tank’...’I don’t need a speedometer – at 30 mph the door rattles, at 60 my fillings fall out’...).


‘Trabis’ or Trabants in limo format.

The windswept square beyond the railway station is dominated by the church called the Gedächtniskirche, three quarters destroyed in air raids and left and restored as a memorial to very dark days indeed Berliners call it ‘der hohler Zahn’ (the broken tooth). Zoo station looks tired and in need of TLC, though you can get a decent Bratwurst and potato salad. You can get a ‘Berliner’ too, but it’s only three minutes’ walk to the elegant department store known as ‘Ka De We’ (Kaufhaus des Westens) and an exalted food hall whose patisserie groans with strudels, rhum babas, baklavas and – yes – Black Forest Gateaux. But don’t spoil your supper, for you might have a booking at a restaurant or pub such as the historic Zur letzten Instanz, near Alexanderplatz, the characterful Das Marinehaus, on the banks of the Spree, or Cafe Einstein, on Unter den Linden, a well-known hangout for artists and media types.


Inside ‘Ka De We’

Perhaps you’ll also have tickets for the Berlin Philharmonic under Britain's Simon Rattle. Or a high-kicking spectacular with feather boas at the Friedrichstadtpalast, or even for Das Varieté in the Wintergarten. They often present the old fashioned sort of show that’s still a big thing in Berlin: jugglers, mime artists, conjurors and magicians.

Not, on reflection, that Berlin needs a darkened auditorium in which to work its magic.