The Wall on Bernauer Straße: Escapes, Tunnels and the Mauerpark in Berlin

Along the street the Berlin Wall cut in half: the preserved death strip, the church the GDR blew up, Tunnel 57, the first deadly jump of 1961, and the strip that became a park

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

1. Berlin Wall Memorial: The View from the Tower

Bernauer Straße 111, 13355 Berlin, Germany

Climb to the top of the viewing tower beside the Documentation Centre and look down across Bernauer Straße. Below you lies a stretch of the Berlin Wall exactly as the border guards saw it: the grey outer wall, a sandy strip, a patrol road, tall lamps, a watchtower, and a second wall on the far side.

Bernauer Straße was where the division of Berlin cut deepest into everyday life. The border between the Soviet sector and the French sector ran along the front walls of the houses. The pavement belonged to West Berlin, in Wedding. The buildings on the south side belonged to the East, in Mitte. Step out of your front door, and you were in a different political world.

When the border was sealed on the 13th of August 1961, people in those houses suddenly found themselves living in the wall itself. In the first days, some simply climbed out of their windows into the West, while neighbours below held out blankets. Then the doors were bricked up, then the windows, and in the end the residents were moved out and the houses torn down. Over the years the barrier grew into a deep system of walls, fences, alarms and floodlights that the GDR called the border security installations. Everyone else called it the death strip.

The section below you was preserved in 1998, enclosed at both ends by tall steel walls designed by the architects Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff. From the street you can only peer through narrow slits. From up here you see what a would-be escaper faced, and how little chance they had.

Across the whole city, the Wall around West Berlin ran for about one hundred and fifty-five kilometres. Research by this memorial counts at least 140 people who were killed at it or died in direct connection with it between 1961 and 1989. The memorial stretches along almost one and a half kilometres of the former strip, and our walk follows it east. Climb down, cross Bernauer Straße, and walk a little to your right, to a long wall of rusted steel filled with faces.
2. Window of Remembrance: The Faces of the Wall

Bernauer Straße, 10115 Berlin, Germany

In front of you stands a long wall of rust-coloured steel, divided into small windows, and in almost every window a face looks back at you. Young men in sports jackets, a woman with neat grey hair, teenagers, soldiers in uniform... and here and there, a window with no picture at all.

This is the Window of Remembrance, opened in 2010 as part of the Berlin Wall Memorial. Each window holds a name, dates and, where one survives, a photograph of a person who died at the Berlin Wall. The empty frames are for those of whom no picture has ever been found. Take a moment to read a few of the names; most visitors walk past too fast.

Their stories are not all the same, and that is part of what makes this place so powerful. Most were people trying to escape: shot in the strip, drowned in the Spree or the canals, fallen from windows and roofs. Some were border soldiers, killed by escapers or by their own comrades. And some never meant to cross at all, like children from West Berlin who fell into the river at the border and drowned because no one was allowed, or dared, to pull them out.

The youngest was a baby boy, just fifteen months old, who suffocated in 1973 while his parents were trying to smuggle him through a checkpoint hidden in a truck. The last man shot dead at the Wall was Chris Gueffroy, aged twenty, in February 1989. Just one month later Winfried Freudenberg fell to his death when his homemade gas balloon crashed. Eight months after that, the Wall was open.

The ground around here has its own sad history. Much of it once belonged to the old cemetery of the Sophien parish, whose northern edge the border troops took for the death strip. So the dead of the Wall are remembered on land that was taken from the dead. Now turn away from the street and walk a few steps south into the quiet cemetery itself, among the trees and old gravestones.
3. Sophienfriedhof: The Cemetery on the Border

Bergstraße 29, 10115 Berlin, Germany

Walk slowly between the old gravestones: ivy climbing over broken angels, iron crosses leaning in the grass, tall trees closing over your head. The noise of the city drops away within a few steps, and it is hard to imagine that searchlights and watchtowers once stood just at the end of this path.

This is the cemetery of the Sophien parish, opened in the first half of the nineteenth century when the old churchyard in the city could no longer hold the dead. The parish itself has a royal name: its church, a few streets south of here, was founded in 1712 and named after Queen Sophie Louise, the third wife of Prussia's first king. Among the people buried here is the composer Albert Lortzing, whose comic operas, like Zar und Zimmermann, were hugely popular in the nineteenth century. He died poor in Berlin in 1851, aged only forty-nine... a sad end for a man who had made half of Germany laugh.

In 1961 the border came right up to the cemetery. Its northern strip, along Bernauer Straße, became part of the border installations. Graves there were cleared to make room for the strip. For almost three decades, mourners tending family graves near the border did so under the eyes of the guards in their towers.

Cemeteries along the Wall were dangerous places, because they offered something rare: trees, shadows and hiding places right next to the strip. That is exactly why the border troops watched them so closely.

Today the cemetery is a peaceful green island again, and part of its lost land has become the memorial you just walked through. Notice how the living city has crept back, with neighbours using the paths as a quiet shortcut between the streets. Now leave the cemetery the way you came, return to Bernauer Straße and turn right, heading east along the memorial towards a small, round building made of earth.
4. Chapel of Reconciliation: The Church in the Death Strip

Bernauer Straße 4, 10115 Berlin, Germany

In front of you stands a small oval building wrapped in a screen of tall wooden slats, and behind the slats, walls of rough, compacted clay. It is quiet, modest, almost humble. To understand why it is here, you have to imagine a very different church on this spot: tall, neo-Gothic, red brick, with a spire visible from far across the city.

That church, the Church of Reconciliation, was consecrated in 1894 for a working-class parish that lived on both sides of what later became the border. Then, in August 1961, the Wall went up, and the church found itself standing in the death strip. Its congregation could no longer reach it. Its doors were sealed. For more than twenty years a church called Reconciliation stood trapped between two walls, in plain view of both halves of a divided city.

In January 1985 the East German authorities blew it up. First the nave was demolished, then, a few days later, the tower came down in a cloud of dust, filmed by television cameras from the West. The official reasoning was security and a clear line of sight for the guards. To many people on both sides, it looked like a state destroying a symbol it could not control.

After the Wall fell, the parish got its land back, and in 2000 this chapel was consecrated. Its walls were built with the ancient technique of rammed earth, and mixed into the clay are crushed bricks from the old church. The bells, which were rescued, now hang in a simple frame outside, and inside stands the old altarpiece that survived the demolition.

On most weekdays at midday a short service is held here in memory of one person who died at the Wall, read out by name, one life at a time. Then continue east along Bernauer Straße and turn right into Strelitzer Straße, where one of the most daring escapes in Berlin's history came up through a courtyard.
5. Tunnel 57: The Escape Under Strelitzer Straße

Strelitzer Straße 55, 10115 Berlin, Germany

Stand on this ordinary residential street, with its parked cars and courtyard entrances, and picture it on a night in October 1964: dark windows, nervous footsteps, people pretending to be on their way home. Somewhere in a courtyard here, a hole led down to the West.

For months, a group of mostly young West Berliners, many of them students, had been digging. They started in the cellar of a disused bakery on the western side of Bernauer Straße and went down about twelve metres, deep enough to pass beneath the border installations. Then they dug roughly one hundred and forty-five metres south, lying in the cold, sticky sand and hauling the earth back to the cellar. The tunnel came up in an old outside toilet in a courtyard on Strelitzer Straße, in the East.

On the nights of the 3rd and 4th of October 1964, fifty-seven people crawled through it to freedom. That number gave the tunnel its name. Among the diggers was a young man named Reinhard Furrer, who two decades later flew into space aboard the Space Shuttle as a West German astronaut. From a tunnel twelve metres under Berlin to orbit around the Earth... it is hard to invent a better story.

But on the second night, the Stasi had been tipped off. Armed men came into the courtyard, there was shooting, and a young East German border soldier, Egon Schultz, was killed. The GDR turned him into a hero, murdered by Western agents. Only after 1990, when the files were opened, did it emerge that the fatal bullet had come from the gun of one of his own comrades. He too is remembered in the Window of Remembrance you saw earlier.

Fifty-seven people free, one young soldier dead, and a lie that lasted twenty-five years. Few places show the moral tangle of the Wall as clearly. Now walk back to Bernauer Straße and continue east to the next big crossroads, where Brunnenstraße meets the old border.
6. Bernauer Straße and Brunnenstraße: The Window Jumps of 1961

Bernauer Straße, corner of Brunnenstraße, 10119 Berlin, Germany

Stand at the corner where Brunnenstraße meets Bernauer Straße and imagine the south side of the street as it was in the summer of 1961: a solid row of four- and five-storey tenements, their windows opening straight onto a pavement that belonged to another country.

In the days after the 13th of August, the people living in those houses could still look out onto the West, but they could no longer walk out into it. The front doors were bricked up. Then the ground-floor windows. Families watched the bricklayers work their way up the building towards them. And some of them decided not to wait.

On the 22nd of August 1961, Ida Siekmann, a fifty-eight-year-old nurse, threw her bedding down from her third-floor flat at Bernauer Straße 48 and then jumped after it. She was badly injured and died on the way to hospital. She is counted as the first person to die at the Berlin Wall, just nine days after it went up. Her photograph is one of the first in the Window of Remembrance.

Others followed. West Berlin firefighters stood below with jumping sheets, and people on the pavement shouted encouragement while East German police tried to drag residents back through the windows from inside. An eighty-year-old woman, Olga Segler, also jumped that September and died of her injuries the next day. Soon the residents were moved out entirely, and over the following years the houses were demolished, until only the lowest part of the façades was left as a wall. Later even that was replaced.

A short walk further east, on the 15th of August 1961, a nineteen-year-old East German policeman named Conrad Schumann leapt over the barbed wire into the West, and a photographer caught him in mid-air. That picture went around the world as an image of hope; the window jumps were its darker twin. Now leave Bernauer Straße for a moment: head a few blocks east and south through the side streets to a leafy square called Arkonaplatz.
7. Arkonaplatz: Life in the Shadow of the Wall

Arkonaplatz, 10435 Berlin, Germany

Find a bench in the square and look around: plane trees, a playground, and all around, tall nineteenth-century apartment buildings with freshly painted façades. It feels like the most relaxed corner of Berlin. Thirty-five years ago, this was the last neighbourhood before the end of the world.

First, a word about the name. When this district was laid out in the second half of the nineteenth century, its streets were named after places in Pomerania and Brandenburg: Swinemünde, Wolin, Ruppin, Rheinsberg. Arkona is the cape at the northern tip of the island of Rügen, where a Slavic temple to the god Svantevit stood until a Danish king destroyed it in 1168. So you are sitting on a square named after a pagan sanctuary.

After 1961 this area lay just a few hundred metres from the Wall. The buildings around you were old workers' tenements, many with coal stoves and shared toilets on the stairs, and the East German state let them slowly fall apart while it poured its resources into new prefab estates elsewhere. In the 1980s young people quietly moved into empty flats without permission, a practice Berliners called schwarzwohnen, living in the dark. Artists, dissidents and church groups gathered in the neighbourhood around the nearby Zionskirche.

Here is the paradox. Just across the Wall, in West Berlin's Wedding, the city did the opposite: from the 1960s onward, whole blocks of similar old tenements were torn down and replaced by large modern housing estates. The poor East could not afford to demolish its old quarters, and so it preserved them. That is one reason why these streets look so much older and more charming today than those a few hundred metres west.

After 1990 the buildings were restored one by one, and on Sundays the square fills with a flea market. History really does come full circle here: old GDR coffee cups and enamel signs are sold on the very square where people once lived in their shadow. Now head back north to Bernauer Straße and follow it east to where a wide green park opens up on your left.
8. Mauerpark: The Death Strip That Became a Park

Bernauer Straße 63-64, 13355 Berlin, Germany

Stand at the southern entrance and look north up a long, wide expanse of grass and gravel, rising gently towards a slope on the right. On a Sunday it will be packed with people, stalls, musicians and the smell of grilled food. On a weekday you may share it with a few dog walkers. Either way, you are standing on the former death strip.

The park sits on what used to be the boundary between two districts: Prenzlauer Berg in the East and Wedding in the West. Before the Wall, much of the land to the west was railway land, part of the freight yards that served the lines heading north from the city. When the border was sealed, this became a broad open stretch of the border installations, with the Wall, the strip and the old tracks running side by side.

Remember what open space meant here before 1989. A wide, flat stretch was not a place to relax; it was a field of fire. Floodlights, patrol roads and guard towers turned a piece of empty land into the most dangerous place in the neighbourhood, a space nobody was meant to enter.

After reunification, the strip was turned into a green space instead of being built over, and the Mauerpark, the Wall Park, opened in 1994. It has become one of the most beloved and most chaotic places in the city. There is the Sunday flea market, there are buskers and jugglers, and in summer there is open-air karaoke in a stone amphitheatre up the slope, where thousands of strangers cheer for anyone brave enough to sing.

Think about that for a moment: where guards once watched for anyone moving across empty ground, people now gather precisely to be seen. Few places capture the change in Berlin as cheerfully. Walk into the park and head towards its eastern edge, where the floodlight masts of a big stadium rise above the trees.
9. Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark: Stadium at the Border

Cantianstraße 24, 10437 Berlin, Germany

Look over the fence at the tall floodlight masts and the stands of the stadium beside the park. This is the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark, and its story moves from Prussian soldiers to East German football, with the Wall running right past its edge.

In the nineteenth century this open ground was a parade ground of the Prussian army, where soldiers drilled in the sand on the edge of the growing city. Later it became a sports ground, and in the East German era it was rebuilt as a stadium and named after Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Jahn is a complicated hero. In 1811 he opened the first open-air gymnastics ground in Berlin, and he is still called the father of German gymnastics. But he was also a fierce nationalist who hated the French and made ugly remarks about Jews, which is why his name provokes debate today.

During the division, this stadium lay right against the border strip. Just beyond its western edge ran the Wall, the patrol road and the watchtowers, and beyond them lay West Berlin. Fans came here for football and athletics, cheering under floodlights while, just next door, other floodlights lit up the death strip.

One of the clubs that played big matches here was BFC Dynamo, the favourite club of Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi. Between 1979 and 1988 BFC Dynamo won the East German championship ten times in a row, and many fans across the country were convinced that referees knew exactly which team the Minister for State Security supported. One disputed stoppage-time penalty in Leipzig in 1986 became so notorious that it is still remembered as the penalty of shame.

A parade ground, a gymnast's name, a secret policeman's team and a border just over the fence: that is a lot of history for one sports ground. Now turn back towards the park and climb the slope to the long grey wall covered in paint that runs along its top.
10. The Hinterland Wall in the Mauerpark

Mauerpark, Gleimstraße 55, 10437 Berlin, Germany

At the top of the slope runs a long line of grey concrete, but you can barely see the concrete: it is buried under layer upon layer of spray paint, tags, faces and slogans, some of them still wet. Put your hand on it. You are touching a real piece of the Berlin Wall.

But which piece? This is not the wall the West saw. The famous outer wall, the one with the smooth rounded top that appeared on every postcard, faced West Berlin. What you are touching is the hinterland wall, the inner barrier on the eastern side of the strip. It was built to stop East Berliners from even reaching the border zone, and it faced the very people it was meant to keep in.

Think about the order of things for someone trying to escape from here. First this wall. Then a signal fence that set off an alarm at a touch, a strip of sand that showed every footprint, a patrol road, a line of lights, guards in towers, anti-vehicle ditches... and only then the outer wall. Most people who tried never got anywhere near it.

And then came November 1989. Within days of the 9th of November, new crossings were cut through the Wall all over the city, and soon afterwards people were walking freely across this ground for the first time in twenty-eight years. Most of the concrete was carted away and crushed, sold off as souvenirs or used in road building. This stretch survived, and today it belongs to the painters. Graffiti is allowed here, so the wall changes every week, sometimes every hour.

There is something fitting about it. The side of the Wall that East Berliners were never allowed to touch is now the one side of it everybody is invited to write on. Below you, in the stone amphitheatre, the karaoke crowds gather on summer Sundays. Now follow the top of the slope north, towards Gleimstraße, where the road disappears under the railway embankment.
11. Gleimtunnel: The Underpass That Was Walled Shut

Gleimstraße, 10437 Berlin, Germany

Walk into the dim, echoing underpass where Gleimstraße dives beneath the railway embankment. Rows of old iron columns hold up the tracks overhead, the light falls in pale stripes, and every sound comes back to you twice. This is the Gleimtunnel, built around the beginning of the twentieth century to let the street pass under the railway lines.

For decades it was a perfectly ordinary connection between two working-class districts: Prenzlauer Berg on one side, Wedding on the other. Carts and bicycles rattled through, workers walked to factories, children ran through to play on the other side. Nobody thought of it as a border, because there was nothing to divide.

In 1961 the line between the Soviet and French sectors ran right here, and the tunnel lay on the western side. The East sealed its end with a wall. For twenty-eight years, the street that had joined two neighbourhoods ended in a blank barrier, and the dark vault behind it became a dead end, a quiet tunnel leading nowhere. People on each side lived a few hundred steps from each other and might as well have lived on different continents.

After the Wall fell the barrier was removed, and the tunnel became a passage again. Today cyclists whistle through it, and people from Wedding walk across to the Sunday flea market without a second thought. Just beyond, a footbridge called the Schwedter Steg carries walkers high over the railway tracks that once marked the border.

And that is where our walk along the Wall ends. You began on a tower looking down on a preserved death strip, and you heard about windows bricked up, a church blown to dust, a tunnel dug by students, and lives lost for a few metres of sand. You end in a tunnel that simply lets people through, which is all it was ever meant to do. Take a last look back along the vault, then step out into the light on whichever side of old Berlin you like.