East Berlin: City of Shadows

This Cold War Berlin tour shines a light on East Berlin behind the Iron Curtain. In 3 hours, you’ll be guided through the surviving monuments of the divided city, transporting you back to a time of totalitarian rule. You’ll learn of the East Germans’ growing discontent and the regime’s brutal suppression. Your historian guide will reveal the dialogue between Berlin’s built environment and its dark history. Along the way, you’ll also come to appreciate the economic and social divisions that still linger between the East and West sides of the German capital, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the country’s reunification.

When Germany was reunited in October 1990, the Cold War ended and the East German nation officially disappeared. This East Berlin tour will transport you back to a place now shrouded in mystery and nostalgia, to reveal a vivid picture of daily life behind the Iron Curtain.

This 3-­hour tour explores the surviving monuments of the East German regime including the infamous Berlin Wall and Stasi headquarters. A historian will reveal the dialogue between modern Berlin’s built environment and its dark and often hidden history. You’ll hear about life under Communist rule, the East Germans’ growing discontent, and their government’s brutal suppression.

The tour begins at the Brandenburg Gate where, in June 1987, President Ronald Reagan famously called on Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” Nearby is the former Soviet Embassy, a grandiose monument built in 1945 amid the rubble of World War II as a bold declaration of Stalin’s ambition to control all of Berlin. We will discuss how the Allies’ post-war division of Germany into four parts led to decades of Cold War tensions.

The next stop is the Friedrichstrasse train station, a key crossing point between East and West Berlin. When families were torn apart by East Germany’s iron-­fisted immigration laws, they said their sad goodbyes here in the office known as the Palace of Tears. At Nordbahnhof, we’ll explore how Berlin’s division created “ghost” stations, unused but heavily guarded stops on West Berlin’s subway lines that lay in East German territory. Farther along, the Berlin Wall Memorial allows you to experience the notorious Death Strip and hear stories of East Berliners whose attempts to escape led to their tragic deaths.

We visit the grandiose mile-­long housing complex known as Karl Marx Allee and consider how East Germans’ dreams for a Socialist paradise turned into a nightmare of deprivation, suppression, and paranoia. East Germany’s secret police, the notorious Stasi, coerced neighbors, and family members to spy on each other. At the former Stasi headquarters, you’ll learn how its feared leader, Eric Mielke, recruited a massive network of spies and created innovative surveillance techniques.

Finally, we will visit the center of public life in East Berlin, Alexanderplatz, which was rebuilt in the 1960s with monuments like the former Centrum department store, the former Forum Hotel, the “House of the Teacher” and “House of Statistics”, and the iconic TV Tower. In 1989, this symbol of East German pride was the setting for massive demonstrations that led to the regime’s downfall and brought 40 years of Communist rule to an end.