Discover Friedrichshain

Friedrichshain offers several starting points for planning your trip: protected art, park history, architecture and video game culture. When looking for a hotel, you can consider which of these themes will provide the strongest framework for your stay. The following places take you from protected works of art to a historic park and a museum with interactive exhibits.

Monument Preservation, Art and Architecture

The East Side Gallery in Friedrichshain is considered the world’s longest open-air gallery. It has been a protected monument since November 1991. The Fairy Tale Fountain in Volkspark Friedrichshain is also protected, and has been since 1959. It is the park’s main attraction and is distinguished by its romantic fairy-tale figures by Ignatius Taschner and Georg Wrba. The two places offer different points of interest for visitors interested in works of art and monument preservation.

Karl-Marx-Allee, known as Stalinallee during the GDR era, stretches between Strausberger Platz and Frankfurter Tor. With its monumental street architecture, it was East Berlin’s showcase boulevard. The History Walk to 24 landmark buildings lets you explore key architectural sites using an interactive map. The map marks their locations and shows you the way. This places both the street’s design and individual buildings in focus.

Volkspark Friedrichshain: History and Paths

Volkspark Friedrichshain was laid out between 1846 and 1848 according to plans by Gustav Meyer, who later became Berlin’s first municipal director of gardens. It is one of Berlin’s oldest municipal parks. Its network of paths is dense and winding; at its center is a splendid promenade with a viewing area. A stream flowed into the Great Pond below it. The park’s history can therefore be seen in the layout of its paths, as well as in the promenade and its relationship to the pond.

The Fairy Tale Fountain complex is also one of the park’s defining features: its figures were created by Ignatius Taschner and Georg Wrba, and the fountain itself has been a protected monument since 1959. If you would like to connect the park’s history with a specific work of art, this takes you from the older landscape to a named ensemble of works whose protected status is also dated.

Video Game History You Can Try Out

The Computer Games Museum opened in Berlin in 1997 as the world’s first permanent exhibition on digital interactive entertainment culture. Its current permanent exhibition opened in 2011 in the former Café Warschau in Berlin-Friedrichshain and traces the development of video games over the past 70 years. The museum thus combines a historical overview of the medium with an exhibition in a former café.

More than 30 of the over 300 exhibits can be played and tried out, and there are even more depending on the special exhibition. This sets the exhibition apart from one that is purely for viewing: some of the exhibits can be experienced interactively. If you are interested in the development of video games, you will find both a historical overview and the chance to try selected games for yourself here.

A Tour and a Crossing of the Spree

A sightseeing tour of Friedrichshain starts at Frankfurter Tor subway station, which is also served by two tram lines. It leads from the nightlife district around Simon-Dach-Straße to viewpoints on the Spree, with a detour to Treptower Park, then on to the East Side Gallery and Karl-Marx-Allee, and finally to Volkspark Friedrichshain. The travel time alone is one hour and 20 minutes; time for stops is not included. This makes it easy to distinguish between the individual stops and the additional time spent at them.

Another landmark with a specific connection to the Spree is Oberbaum Bridge: pedestrians can cross the river there beneath the elevated railway viaduct of Berlin’s oldest subway line.

Discover more destinations: Karow, Schöneberg, Marienfelde, Pankow, Berlin, Hermsdorf, Karlshorst, Schmöckwitz.

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