Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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here, including rare Przewalski horses, which have been bred here over the years,
bringing the breed back from the edge of extinction.
Schloss Friedrichsfelde
Tours on the hour: Tues, Thurs, Sat & Sun 11am-5pm • €2 plus zoo entrance • W stadtmuseum.de
Hidden away in the grounds of the zoo, just beyond an enclosure of lumbering pelicans,
is Schloss Friedrichsfelde , a Baroque palace housing an exhibition of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century interior decor. heodor Fontane was exaggerating when he described
it as the Schloss Charlottenburg of the East - the best thing about it are the pretty,
ornamental grounds. To see inside you need to take a tour (German-language only).
Karlshorst
From the Tierpark, a stroll south down Am Tierpark, bearing left along Treskowerallee
for about 1km, will bring you to the sub-district of Karlshorst . For many years you
were more likely to hear Russian than German spoken here, as the area was effectively
a Russian quarter, thanks to the presence of large numbers of Soviet soldiers and their
dependants. he Russians accepted the unconditional surrender of the German armed
forces in a Wehrmacht engineers' school here on May 8, 1945, and went on to establish
their Berlin headquarters nearby. For many years, Karlshorst was fenced off and under
armed guard, out of bounds to ordinary East Germans. Later, they were allowed back
in part, but the area retained an exclusive cachet, its villas housing the GDR elite -
scientists and writers - or used as foreign embassy residences.
Deutsch-Russisches Museum
Zwieseler Str. 4 • Tues-Sun 10am-6pm • Free • T 030 50 15 08 10, W museum-karlshorst.de • S-Karlshorst
he Russians finally left Karlshorst in the summer of 1994, but a reminder of their
presence endures as the Deutsch-Russisches Museum , in the building where the German
surrender was signed. When the GDR still existed, this museum was o cially known as
the “Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic
War 1941-45”. Since then it has been renamed and rearranged to convey a self-
consciously balanced view of the tumultuous German-Russian relations in the twentieth
century. Its hundreds of photos and video footage make the exhibition worthwhile; if
you can't read German be sure to borrow an English-language folder with translations.
Marzahn-Hellersdorf
To see the most enduring legacy of East Berlin - Marzahn-Hellersdorf - it's best to go by
day and not look too much like a tourist, as the area has a reputation for violence. It's in
places like this, all across the former GDR, that people are bearing the economic brunt
of reunification's downside - unemployment - and where you'll see the worst effects
caused by the collapse of a state that, for all its faults, ensured a certain level of social
security for its citizens. Ironically, Marzahn was one of the GDR's model new towns of
the late 1970s - part of Honecker's efforts to solve his country's endemic housing
shortage by providing modern apartments in purpose-built blocks with shopping
facilities and social amenities to hand. he result here was several kilometres of high-rise
developments housing 250,000 people, where, like similar developments in the West,
things never quite worked according to plan, with the usual crime and drugs surfacing.
Most people will see enough of the area by travelling to S-Bahn Springpfuhl and then
taking tram #M8 past endless high-rises to Alt-Marzahn , the original, slightly quaint and
now hugely incongruous district centre. Complete with a green, pub, cobbled streets,
war memorial and parish church, something of a village past survives. Admittedly it's
not a very pleasant past: from 1866 the fields of the area were used as Rieselfelder ,
designated for the disposal of Berlin's sewage. Marzahn acquired a Dorfkirche in
neo-Gothic style a few years later, built by Schinkel's pupil Friedrich August Stüler.
 
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