Old and New West Berlin: A Tour of Kurfürstendamm and Kantstrasse

West Berlin’s Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf area is one of the city’s most exciting neighborhoods. Every few decades, it had to reinvent itself.

It became a posh Parisian-style neighborhood in the late 1800s before the Roaring Twenties’ glitter and glamour gave way to scary NS-raids in the 30s. That was followed by war and destruction in the 40s, and student protests in the 60s. The area was reinvigorated when, in 1989, exhilarated East Germans flocked the streets. On this walking tour, you’ll explore Kurfürstendamm and Kantstrasse, where I’ll show you traces of those times.

This circular tour begins and ends outside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, one of Berlin’s landmarks, where I’ll share tales of war, tyranny and destruction. You’ll make your way down Kurfürstendamm, more commonly known as Ku-Damm, an impressive boulevard with a mix of historic and modern buildings. On your way back to the Memorial Church via Kantstrasse, with its trendy cafés and restaurants, you’ll hear about Berlin’s version of Chinatown.

On this one-hour West Berlin tour, you’ll have a chance to:

• Experience the amazing blue light inside Eiermann’s Memorial Church, and be moved by the Stalingrad Madonna
• Pop by the Paris Bar, a restaurant founded by a WWII cook, which has been visited by Madonna, Joseph Beuys, Otto Sander, David Bowie and Iggy Pop
• Enjoy ice-cream topped with colorful sprinkles at M&M’s flagship Berlin store
• Find out where French dancer and singer Josefine Baker scandalized and fascinated audiences in 1926
• Stop at Schildkröte, a restaurant with the same interior furnishing as when it first opened in the 1930s
• Hear the tragic story of Rudi Dutschke and his assassin Josef Bachmann
• See Hotel Savoy Berlin, where Western spies used to stay when in West Berlin
• Remember the victims of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas Market in 2016

So come and meet me at the Memorial Church and let’s bring the past 100 years to life!