Berlin Kreuzberg: Street Art, Punk Clubs & the Landwehrkanal

From the Brotherly Kiss on the East Side Gallery over the Oberbaumbrücke into SO36: vanished murals, a saved market hall, a squat turned institution, Turkish Berlin at Kotti and sunset on the Admiralbrücke

Berlin · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. East Side Gallery: The Wall the West Never Saw

Mühlenstraße 45, 10243 Berlin, Germany

Start at the western end of Mühlenstraße and turn so the painted concrete runs away from you towards the river bridge: slab after slab after slab, splashed with faces, slogans, cartoons and colour, for more than a kilometre. Traffic hums past on one side. On the other, behind the Wall, flows the Spree.

Here is the paradox: this is a piece of the Berlin Wall that West Berliners never saw. It was the inner wall, the so-called hinterland wall, facing East Berlin. The real border was the river behind it, and the West, Kreuzberg, lay on the far bank. So while the western face of the Wall elsewhere was covered in graffiti for decades, this side stayed grey and blank, because no one in the East was allowed near enough to paint it.

In 1990, months after the Wall opened, 118 artists from 21 countries were invited to paint it. The result was the East Side Gallery: around 1,316 metres long, the longest surviving stretch of the Wall, and often called the largest open-air gallery in the world. Exuberant, naïve, angry, funny... it is the voice of that strange year when everything suddenly seemed possible, painted by people who could hardly believe they were allowed to touch the thing at all.

Weather, exhaust fumes and souvenir hunters chipped away at it, and in 2009 most of the artists came back to repaint their works from scratch, which annoyed a few purists. In 2013 crowds gathered to protest when sections were moved to open access to a new apartment tower on the riverbank; even David Hasselhoff turned up. The Wall that once divided the city had become something Berliners fought to keep.

Walk along it slowly towards the river bridge, reading the slabs as you go, the way you would turn the pages of a book. Somewhere ahead of you, two old men are kissing, and they are the most famous couple in Berlin.
2. The Brotherly Kiss

Mühlenstraße, 10243 Berlin, Germany

There they are: two grey-haired men in dark suits, eyes shut, locked in a kiss on the mouth, painted larger than life on the concrete. Every few seconds someone poses in front of them, puckering up for a selfie.

The men are Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, and Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany. In October 1979, at the celebrations for the thirtieth anniversary of the GDR, they greeted each other with the socialist fraternal kiss, a ritual embrace between communist comrades. A French photographer, Régis Bossu, caught it at the perfect, awkward moment, and the picture went round the world.

In 1990 the Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel painted the scene here, and beneath it he wrote, in Russian and German, a line that means: My God, help me to survive this deadly love. It is a joke, and it is not a joke at all. That kiss was the image of an alliance that kept East Germany alive... and kept its people locked in. The Wall it was painted on was part of that same embrace.

Vrubel repainted his work in 2009 with the rest of the gallery; he spent his later years living in Berlin and died there in 2022. Look a little further along for another crowd favourite: a boxy white Trabant, the East German people's car, bursting straight through the Wall, painted by Birgit Kinder and titled Test the Best. In November 1989, thousands of Trabants really did putter across the border, trailing blue smoke.

Before you move on, find one of the gaps and walk round to the river side of the Wall. Here the death strip once ran down to the water; today there are lawns, beach bars and a view straight across the Spree to Kreuzberg. Then follow the Wall to its end and climb onto the red-brick bridge with the castle towers.
3. Oberbaumbrücke: The Castle Gate Over the Spree

Oberbaumbrücke, 10997 Berlin, Germany

Stand in the middle of the Oberbaumbrücke, under its brick arcade, and look around: Gothic arches, two pointed towers like a medieval city gate, and above your head yellow U-Bahn trains rattling across on their own deck. Below you the Spree runs wide and slow.

The name goes back to the old city customs line. Here, at the upper end of the river, a boom, the Oberbaum, was swung across the water at night so that no boat could slip into Berlin without paying its dues. The bridge you are standing on opened in 1896, deliberately dressed up in medieval-looking brick to play the part of a city gate. Since 1902 the elevated railway has crossed on the top deck.

In 1961 the bridge became a border. The river here belonged entirely to the East, right up to the Kreuzberg bank. Between 1972 and 1975, five children from Kreuzberg fell into the water at the Gröbenufer, just downstream, and drowned, while help from the West could not legally enter East German waters. Only after the last death, of a five-year-old boy named Çetin Mert, did the two sides sign an agreement on rescues in the border waters.

The central span had been blown up in the last days of the war, and for decades the bridge was patched and half used. When it was restored in the 1990s, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava designed the new steel middle section for the trains. And look upstream, to the south-east: three giant aluminium figures stand in the river, leaning into each other. That is the Molecule Man by Jonathan Borofsky, placed in 1999 where Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg and Treptow meet.

Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg are now one borough, and for years their rivals settled the score with a mock battle on this very bridge, armed with water, flour and rotten vegetables. Walk off the bridge on the Kreuzberg side and follow the elevated railway past the red-brick station of Schlesisches Tor into the Wrangelkiez.
4. Wrangelkiez & the Murals That Went Black

Cuvrystraße / Schlesische Straße, 10997 Berlin, Germany

Stop at the corner of Schlesische Straße and Cuvrystraße and look at the firewalls of the old tenements nearby: tall, windowless surfaces where, for years, two of the most photographed murals in Kreuzberg used to stare down. Nothing of them is left. That is the story.

In 2007 and 2008 the Italian street artist Blu painted two enormous figures here. One showed two pale bodies pulling the masks off each other's faces. The other showed a man in a suit and tie, his wrists chained together by golden wristwatches. They looked out over an empty riverside lot, the Cuvrybrache, a wild patch of land where people camped, partied, grew vegetables and watched the sun set over the Spree.

In December 2014, with the lot sold and new buildings planned, Blu and his collaborators came back and painted both murals over in black. The message was simple and brutal: the art that had made this corner fashionable was being used to sell it, so they took it away. Berlin argued about it for weeks, and the dark walls became more famous than the paintings had been.

The streets around you are the Wrangelkiez, named after a Prussian field marshal and squeezed between the Spree, Görlitzer Park and the elevated railway. In the Cold War this was a dead end, with the border on two sides, and the U-Bahn line ended at Schlesisches Tor from 1961 until the 1990s. Rents were low, and students, squatters, artists and Turkish families moved in. That mix is what still gives these few blocks their character.

Look out for the smaller art as you walk: paste-ups on the lamp posts, tiny tiles above the doorbells, stencils at knee height. Kreuzberg's walls change all the time; whatever you see today may be gone next month. Now walk down Cuvrystraße, away from the river, until the houses open up into a wide, green park.
5. Görlitzer Park: The Station That Became a Meadow

Görlitzer Park, Görlitzer Straße, 10997 Berlin, Germany

Stand on one of the paths in Görlitzer Park and look around: a broad, uneven meadow, slopes and hollows, people on blankets, smoke rising from a barbecue, a dog chasing a ball. The odd shape of the ground has a reason. This whole park was once a railway station.

The Görlitzer Bahnhof opened in the 1860s as the terminus of the line to Görlitz in Silesia, with a grand station hall, sidings and goods yards spreading over all this ground. After the war the city was divided, and in 1951 the East German railway, which still ran the line, stopped the passenger trains here. In the 1960s the station building was demolished, and for years the site was a wasteland of rusting rails and sheds.

Kreuzbergers wanted green space, not more concrete, and from the late 1980s and through the 1990s they got their park. On its far side there is even a children's farm with goats and ponies, a piece of countryside a few minutes from the U-Bahn. On a summer weekend, half of Kreuzberg seems to be here, Turkish families grilling next to students, next to tourists who have no idea they are lying on a former railway yard.

Görli, as everyone calls it, also has a harder reputation. For years it has been a symbol in German politics for open drug dealing, and the city has argued endlessly about policing, fences and closing it at night. Locals have a complicated relationship with it: it is their back garden, their playground and their barbecue spot... and their headache.

And just at the park's north-western edge, on the first of May 1987, after a street festival on nearby Lausitzer Platz, Kreuzberg erupted in riots, and a supermarket burned to the ground. May Day protests have been a Kreuzberg ritual ever since, calmer now than they were. Leave the park at its western end, by Spreewaldplatz, and walk north past Lausitzer Platz to a red-brick market hall in Eisenbahnstraße.
6. Markthalle Neun: The Market Hall Its Neighbours Saved

Eisenbahnstraße 42-43, 10997 Berlin, Germany

Step through the doors of the brick hall on Eisenbahnstraße and let your nose lead: coffee, fresh bread, smoked meat, cheese, spices. Above you, iron trusses and skylights; around you, stalls of farmers, bakers and cooks, and long shared tables full of people talking with their mouths full.

This is Markthalle Neun, market hall number nine, opened in 1891. In the 1880s and 1890s Berlin built more than a dozen municipal market halls to get food trading off the filthy, crowded open-air markets and under a roof, with hygiene rules, cool cellars and proper drainage. They were the supermarkets of the imperial capital, and Kreuzbergers did their weekly shop here for generations, carrying home cabbages, herring and potatoes from the stalls under these same iron beams.

Modern supermarkets nearly finished them off. Most of the old halls were bombed or demolished, and by the 2000s this one was half empty, with a discount supermarket and a few tired stalls. When the city planned to sell it to the highest bidder, neighbours campaigned to keep it a market, and around 2010 the hall went instead to a small group of local people with a plan built around regional food and small producers.

It worked better than anyone expected. Its street food evenings helped launch a whole new Berlin food scene, cooks from every corner of the world found their first customers here, and there is a bakery and a small brewery under the same roof. Not everyone is thrilled: some neighbours complain the hall has become a food temple for visitors, and the fight over the cheap supermarket inside became a local battle. In Kreuzberg, gentrification is never far from the menu.

Buy something small and eat it standing up, the Berlin way. Then wander north-west through the side streets towards Mariannenplatz, where a long green square ends at a building with two slender towers.
7. Mariannenplatz & Bethanien: From Hospital to Squat to Studios

Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin, Germany

Stand on the long lawn of Mariannenplatz and look at the building at its head: a broad pale-brick façade with two slender towers rising over the entrance, like a stretched-out church. It looks far too grand for this square, which is half its charm.

This is Bethanien, built in the 1840s as a hospital run by Protestant deaconesses, under the pious King Frederick William the Fourth. And in 1848 a young pharmacist worked in its dispensary, teaching the sisters how to prepare medicines. His name was Theodor Fontane, and years later he would become one of Germany's great novelists, the man who wrote Berlin onto the page.

The hospital closed in 1970, and the city planned to tear it down. In December 1971, after a concert by the rock band Ton Steine Scherben, young people occupied the former nurses' home beside it and named it the Georg-von-Rauch-Haus, after a young activist shot dead by police days earlier. The band then wrote the Rauch-Haus-Song, and it became the anthem of Kreuzberg's squatters for a generation. Instead of sending in the police for good, the city eventually gave the occupiers a contract, which is how, in Berlin, a squat turns into an institution.

Instead of a wrecking ball, Bethanien got an artists' house: the Künstlerhaus Bethanien was founded here in the 1970s, and generations of international artists have since had studios in the old wards. The Rauch-Haus still exists too, as a youth housing project, and its painted façade looks across the square. A building made for healing bodies ended up healing a neighbourhood's sense of itself.

Look at the lawn itself: it was laid out by Peter Joseph Lenné, the great Prussian garden designer, the same man who planned the canal you will meet at the end of this walk. Now follow Mariannenstraße south-west to Oranienstraße, the main artery of SO36, and turn right.
8. Oranienstraße & SO36: Punk's Postcode

Oranienstraße 190, 10999 Berlin, Germany

Walk along Oranienstraße and read the façades: Turkish bakeries, bookshops, bars with stickers layered thick on their doors, posters for demonstrations and concerts, and at number 190 a low club entrance plastered with flyers. That is SO36, and it took its name from the neighbourhood it stands in.

SO 36 was a postal district, Südost 36, Berlin's south-east district number thirty-six. When the Wall went up, this corner of Kreuzberg found itself wrapped by the border on three sides, the forgotten back end of West Berlin. The city planned to bulldoze the crumbling tenements and run a motorway through. Meanwhile rents fell, and people with little money and big ideas moved in. Kreuzberg's other half, around Bergmannstraße, was SW 61, the tidier, more bourgeois sister, and the two postcodes still stand for two moods of the same district.

In 1978 a club opened here and took the old postcode as its name. Within months it was the centre of West Berlin punk, and for a while the painter Martin Kippenberger ran it. Bands played to crowds who lived in squats around the corner, drinking cheap beer under bare light bulbs. The club has outlived noise complaints, money troubles and a pandemic, and it still runs on that collective spirit.

Oranienstraße is also where Kreuzberg's politics live out on the street. In the early 1980s squatters fought the city over empty houses; on May Day 1987 shops along here were looted and set alight; and the neighbourhood still argues loudly with every new wave of rent rises. Just east of here, Heinrichplatz was renamed Rio-Reiser-Platz in 2022, after the singer of Ton Steine Scherben, the band you met at Bethanien.

Look for the street art at ankle height as well as up high: tiny stencils, tiles, stickers, a whole second gallery that most people walk straight past. Keep heading west along Oranienstraße until the elevated railway swings over a roaring roundabout. That is Kotti.
9. Kottbusser Tor: The Heart of Turkish Berlin

Kottbusser Tor, 10999 Berlin, Germany

Stand under the elevated tracks at Kottbusser Tor and take it all in: a roaring roundabout, a yellow train clattering overhead, and a vast concrete housing block from the 1970s straddling Adalbertstraße on stilts. Below it, shops sell gold, phones, baklava and wedding dresses. It is loud and far from pretty, and it is the beating heart of Turkish Berlin.

The name comes from the Kottbusser Tor, a gate in the old customs wall on the road to Cottbus. But the modern story of this place begins in 1961, the same year the Wall went up, when West Germany signed a recruitment agreement with Turkey. Workers came for the factories and building sites, many expecting to stay only a few years. They stayed for good.

Kreuzberg was where they found flats: run-down tenements by the Wall that nobody else wanted, many of them slated for demolition. Families moved in and opened grocers, tea houses and prayer rooms in back courtyards, and by the 1970s people were calling the area Little Istanbul. Berlin also claims the modern döner kebab, sold in flatbread to hungry workers in the early 1970s... though Istanbul, understandably, has opinions about that.

The concrete giant, the Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum, went up in the early 1970s, in an age of bulldozer planning, and for years it was a byword for neglect. In 2012 tenants, many of them Turkish-German pensioners, built a small wooden protest hut on the square against rising rents, and called it Gecekondu, the Turkish word for a house built overnight. Berlin's fight over housing has been unusually loud ever since.

The line rumbling above your head is the U1, part of Berlin's very first U-Bahn, opened in 1902, and the station platform is one of the best places to watch the square swirl. Now walk south down Kottbusser Damm to the canal bridge, and to the market on the far bank.
10. Maybachufer: The Turkish Market on the Canal

Maybachufer, 12047 Berlin, Germany

Cross the Kottbusser Brücke and turn left along the south bank of the Landwehrkanal. On market days the Maybachufer turns into a long canyon of stalls under the plane trees: pyramids of tomatoes and peppers, armfuls of fresh herbs, olives in twenty shades, bolts of bright fabric, and traders calling out over the crowd. On other days it is a quiet, leafy bank with the water sliding by.

Technically, you have just left Kreuzberg. Here the canal is the border, and the Maybachufer belongs to Neukölln. The market everyone calls the Turkish market has been here for decades, born to serve the Turkish families on both banks. Today you will hear Arabic, Polish, Spanish, English and plenty of Berlin dialect between the stalls, and the bargaining is half the fun. At the end of the day, traders sometimes shout out bowls of whatever is left at give-away prices, and the crowd surges like a wave.

The canal itself is older than all of it. The Landwehrkanal was dug between 1845 and 1850, to plans by the garden designer Peter Joseph Lenné, to carry barge traffic around the crowded centre of Berlin. Bricks, coal, sand and timber floated along this water to build the booming city. Lenné gave it tree-lined banks, which is why it feels like a promenade rather than an industrial ditch.

It carries darker memories too. In January 1919, after the Spartacist uprising was crushed, soldiers murdered the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and threw her body into this canal, further west, near the Tiergarten. It was only found months later. Every January people still gather to remember her, and the canal that looks so gentle in summer keeps that story in its dark water.

Buy a handful of something you cannot name, ask the trader what it is, and eat it by the water. Then walk back to Kottbusser Damm and carry straight on westwards along the canal, on the Planufer, to the next bridge: the Admiralbrücke.
11. Admiralbrücke: Sunset on the Landwehrkanal

Admiralbrücke, Admiralstraße, 10999 Berlin, Germany

Here it is: a little bridge with old lanterns and cobblestones, and if the sun is out, people sitting all over it, on the kerbs, on the railings, cross-legged on the stones, with a beer, a guitar, a dog. There is barely room for a bicycle to squeeze through.

The Admiralbrücke was built in the early 1880s, an iron bridge on stone piers, and it is a protected monument today. For most of its life it was just a crossing between two quiet residential streets. Then, some time in the 2000s, it became something else entirely, and nobody quite organised it.

Travellers, students, neighbours, buskers: on a warm evening hundreds of people gather here to watch the light go down over the water. Someone plays the accordion, someone else sells beer from a cool box, strangers share cigarettes and opinions. And then the residents of the handsome houses around the bridge, who wanted to sleep, complained, and the police and the noise rules arrived. A whole Berlin debate about who the city belongs to, played out on one small bridge.

Look east and west along the canal: swans gliding, plane trees leaning over the water, tour boats sliding under the arch with people waving from the deck. This is the view that explains the pull of Kreuzberg. A district of concrete, protest and politics that, at the right hour, turns soft and golden. Locals will tell you, with some pride, that the best seat in the city costs nothing at all.

You began at a Wall that West Berliners never saw, and you end on a bridge that belongs to whoever happens to be sitting on it. In between: a kiss, two vanished murals, a squat that became an institution, a market hall rescued by its neighbours. So find a spot on the kerb, and let the evening do the rest. When you are ready, Kottbusser Tor is a few minutes' walk north, up Admiralstraße.