The original section
A piece kept as it was: two walls with the empty strip between them. This is the only place you can see the full border layout.
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No — they are quite different. The East Side Gallery is a painted wall, good for photographs. This site is historical and explains how the Wall actually worked. Come here to understand it; go there for the colourful pictures.
An hour covers the original section and the tower. Two hours if you want to walk the whole length and go inside the visitor centre. It is outdoors, so pick a dry day if you can.
The site is safe, open and easy to walk. But the subject is hard: there are stories of people who were killed. Older children understand it and are moved by it; very young ones will not take in much.
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This is the best place in Berlin to understand what the Wall was really like. It sits on Bernauer Straße, where a section of the Wall still stands where it always stood. You can see both walls at once, and the empty strip between them that guards watched day and night. The Wall divided the city from 1961 to 1989. On this street the houses were in the East and the pavement was in the West. Some people jumped from the windows to reach the West. The windows were then bricked up, and later the houses were pulled down. Visiting is completely free. The site is outdoors and always open, with panels and photographs explaining what happened. There is also an indoor visitor centre with films and documents, which has set opening hours. Climb the tower there to look down on the border strip from above.
A piece kept as it was: two walls with the empty strip between them. This is the only place you can see the full border layout.
Go up to the roof of the visitor centre. From above, the width of the border strip makes more sense than in any photograph.
A wall of photographs of people who died trying to cross. Names and faces, not numbers.
A small chapel built where an older church stood. The guards demolished that one in 1985 because it sat inside the border strip.
Bernauer Straße 111, 13355 Berlin