Berlin's Secret Places

Tucked inside the Brandenburg Gate's northern gatehouse, right on Pariser Platz, the Room of Silence is a 30-square-metre space designed for exactly one thing: quiet. One moment you're surrounded by tour groups and street performers at one of Berlin's busiest landmarks; the next, you're standing in a calm, dimly lit room with nothing but a woven tapestry — "Light that penetrates the darkness" — on the wall.

The idea traces back to a 1957 meditation room built inside the UN headquarters in New York for then-Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, deliberately free of any religious symbolism. A West Berlin initiative revived the concept after reunification, and this room opened on 27 October 1994 — chosen because it sits as close as possible to where the Berlin Wall once stood.

It's open to absolutely anyone, for any reason: to pray, meditate, grieve, or just sit down. Over 100 people a day use it, from every background and belief.

Everyone in Berlin knows the Wall that divided the city from 1961 to 1989 — far fewer know about the other one, nearly 750 years older. Walking along Littenstraße, a reddish-brown stretch of fieldstone and brick suddenly appears between buildings: about 120 metres of Berlin and Cölln's original medieval fortification, out of a wall that once ran 2.5 kilometres around the twin settlements.

The wall survived mostly by accident — over the centuries it was absorbed into the rear walls of later houses, and its true age only became obvious in 1948, while wartime ruins nearby were being cleared. Today it stands between the Amtsgericht Mitte courthouse, the Parochialkirche, and the historic restaurant "Zur letzten Instanz", one of Berlin's oldest.

It's a different wall from the excise wall that gave many U-Bahn stations names ending in "Tor" (gate) — that later, 18th-century customs boundary is a separate structure, with its own small surviving fragments near the Brandenburg Gate.

Long before Berlin existed, there was Spandau — and the Kolkviertel, colloquially called "Kolk", is its oldest surviving corner, first recorded in the 13th century. Entering via Hoher Steinweg, you walk alongside the last six-metre-high original stretch of Spandau's own medieval town wall, facing houses whose facades date to the 18th and 19th centuries.

Down the narrow Kolk-Gasse, most of the half-timbered houses have been carefully restored; one battered survivor, the Alte Kolkschänke, spent a century as the neighborhood pub for soldiers stationed at nearby Spandau Citadel before finally closing a few years ago. At the lane's end sits the small St. Mary's Church, Berlin's second-oldest Catholic church, built after the Reformation on ground where excavations turned up a 14th-century well — and traces of Stone Age settlement beneath that.

It's a genuine step outside central Berlin's tourist geography: Spandau's old town has its own centuries of history, largely unconnected to the Berlin most itineraries cover.