Charlottengrad and the Sunken Village of Lietzow: A Self-Guided Tour

Charlottenburg holds layers most visitors never reach. On this walking tour, you'll follow the ghost of Nabokov's 1925 Berlin through a neighborhood once nicknamed Charlottengrad for its dense colony of Russian émigrés. You'll also uncover how radical communes, occultists, and exiled writers left their mark on these streets.

The tour starts at Charlottenburg's S-Bahn station at Stuttgarterplatz, beside a Russian grocery that's been permitted to open 24 hours due to a Soviet-era contract. From there, you'll walk through the former haunt of Kommune Eins – West Berlin's first political commune, whose members staged a pudding attack on a US Vice President – past the Klick Kino, one of Berlin's last surviving Ladenkinos, and along Kantstraße, where Russian bookshops once lined every block. You'll also hear the story of Elfrida Scholz, sister of Erich Maria Remarque, who was executed in 1943 after a customer at her dressmaking shop reported her to the Gestapo.

The tour ends with a circuit of the Lietzensee, a glacial lake whose Jugendstil park was designed by Erwin Barth, a half-Jewish landscape architect who took his own life when the Nazis came to power. Local folklore claims a medieval village sank beneath the water, and fishermen once reported their nets catching on a submerged church spire. Aleister Crowley briefly rented a room across the lake in 1930, and rumors of nocturnal rituals have circled the shoreline ever since.

On this 45-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Step inside Zum Hecht, a cash-only Kneipe that allegedly never had a key made
• Visit the Hadayat bookshop-café on Kantstraße, keeping the work of banned Iranian writers in circulation
• Pass the Wilmina Hotel, a former women's prison whose cells are now boutique rooms
• See the Treblinka sculpture by Vadim Sidur, one of West Berlin's earliest Holocaust memorials
• Discover how Dernburgplatz was renamed for a Nazi martyr within two weeks of his assassination
• Find a small plaque at the lake's cascade bearing the Ampelmann beside a mushroom cloud
• Explore the Parkwächterhaus, a caretaker's cottage whose attic yielded forgotten municipal scandals

This tour rewards anyone willing to look closely at the ordinary. Every trifle, as Nabokov once wrote, will be valuable and significant.