Berlin for The Curious Wanderers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend
Concrete, linden, and a city that keeps starting over.
No theme, just the city at its best. The sights that earn their reputation, a workshop or a market, one strange place nobody told you about, and dinner where the food is the point.
Friday: Under Gesundbrunnen
- Berliner Unterwelten, Dark Worlds tour
Down from the U-Bahn mezzanine into a wartime bunker with its glow-paint still live, the city's rubble filed above your head.
- Monsterkabinett
A courtyard of mechanical monsters built from scrap, performing in the dark behind the street-art alley.
- Max und Moritz
A Kreuzberg tavern of 1902 under its original tin ceiling, Buletten and a Kreuzberger Molle with the regulars.
Saturday: Market, porcelain, and the Brandenburg table
- Winterfeldtplatz market
The Saturday market: cheese from the Uckermark, fish smoked in Spandau, flowers sold by the armful before ten.
- KPM manufactory tour
Watch the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur's painters at work and the blue sceptre put on by hand, as since 1763.
- Nobelhart & Schmutzig
A counter around the open kitchen and nothing from farther than Brandenburg, with the farmers and fishermen named on the menu.
Sunday: Listening station and the bunker
- Teufelsberg
The abandoned NSA listening station on a hill of war rubble heaped over Speer's unfinished military academy.
- Sammlung Boros
A 1942 air-raid bunker with three-metre walls, a Cold War banana store and techno club turned private art collection; tours booked weeks ahead.
- Prater Gaststätte
The restaurant of Berlin's oldest beer garden, open since 1837, where the Sunday roast comes with red cabbage and silence.
Monday: Grimm and the magic shop
- Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof
The Brothers Grimm under ivy, Rio Reiser, and the grave the Stauffenberg plotters held for one night before the SS dug them up.
- Zauberkönig
A magic shop trading since 1884, with a back room of tricks and the ghosts of Berlin's variety stage.
- Konnopke's Imbiss
A currywurst stand under the U-Bahn viaduct since 1930, eaten standing with the trains rumbling overhead. Order it with the skin on and a roll, and eat it hot.