Private Walking Tour of East Berlin's Street Art and Counterculture
Anti-authoritarian action and citizen uprisings secured Berlin’s place in history as a hotbed of counterculture and on this private walking tour, you will delve deeply into the city’s rich alternative scene. With your private guide, you will:
- See Boxhagener Strasse (“boxi” to Berliners) art studios and graffiti-covered hip cafes.
- Admire iconic Oberbaum Bridge: a Cold War checkpoint between East and East a modern-day symbol of unified Berlin.
- Mingle amongst the locals in Revaler Strasse’s funky cafes, veggie bistros, DJ bars and art spaces.
- Visit the East Side Gallery - stretching 1.3 km, it is the longest open air gallery in the world.
- See Urban Spree, a 1700 square metre art space and beer garden dedicated to urban cultures.
- Visit RAW, an offbeat sociocultural jumble of graffiti-covered subcultural compounds.
- See refurbed bunkers, bookshops, art cinemas and grassroots record labels.
Friedrichshain is one of Berlin’s most eclectic and interesting neighbourhoods, is steeped in historic political art, creative self-expression and punky rebel music and on the Private Walking Street and Counterculture Tour of East Berlin you will see contemporary and underground art galleries, urban sculpture, guerilla gardens and soak the neighbourhood’s alternative, Bohemian vibe. A subterranean world of tunnels, storage rooms, air-raid shelters and deserted subway stations once smuggled people East to West. Today entire buildings cloaked in protest murals and rebel-rousing graffiti draw visitors to an artsy counterculture scene where the past lives on in clandestine kitsch cafes, funky bars and slogan-painted techno clubs in disused former Eastern Bloc warehouses.
This immersive Private Walking Street and Counterculture Tour of East Berlin takes you beyond the typical tourist sites to discover more than Brandenburg Gate and Checkpoint Charlie, into the city’s lesser-known treasure-troves of Cold War subterfuge and dissent. On the banks of the Spree River, Friedrichstain’s art installations include everything from concrete mixers and barbed wire to 1960s newsreels. Stroll Boxhagener Platz and Revaler Strasse to see Soviet-era buildings, GDR-era relics, the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall, the East Side Gallery and Karl-Marx-Allee, a monumental socialist boulevard created by East German leaders as “Germany’s first socialist street.” Experience the artsy Friedrichshain district with its diverse subcultures and storied past.