From Pariser Platz through the Brandenburg Gate into the Tiergarten, past its memorials, composers' monument and bronze animals, to the Reichstag's west front and dome and the White Crosses on the Spree.
Start · Pariser Platz: A Square Named for Paris
DirectionsStops
- 1
Pariser Platz: A Square Named for Paris
A square older than its famous gate. Laid out in 1734 and named for Paris in 1814, it was rebuilt from 1993 under a rule that every new front should join historic forms to modern ones.
- 2
Brandenburg Gate: Peace Gate, Frontier, Stage
The only city gate Berlin has kept. Opened in 1791 as the Peace Gate, it lost its goddess to Paris, carried the Wall's frontier from 1961 and opened again on 22 December 1989.
- 3
Memorial to Persecuted Homosexuals: One Window
A concrete block with one small window. Opened in 2008, it borrows the form of the Holocaust memorial across the road and adds a window showing a film of a same-sex love scene.
- 4
Beethoven-Haydn-Mozart Monument: The Musicians' Stove
A gilded monument to three composers. Unveiled in 1904 by the sculptor Rudolf Siemering, it was nicknamed the Musicians' Stove and stands over a road tunnel.
- 5
Floraplatz: Bronze Animals from Philadelphia
A Baroque clearing ringed by bronze animals. Eight animals cast after Siemering's models for a Washington monument in Philadelphia surround a bronze Amazon on horseback.
- 6
Soviet War Memorial: Across the Nazi Axis
Berlin's first great Soviet memorial after the war. Inaugurated on 11 November 1945 over the graves of about 2,500 Soviet soldiers, it stood behind British guard in West Berlin until 1990.
- 7
Memorial to the Sinti and Roma: A Pool That Mirrors
A dark round pool in a clearing. Dani Karavan's memorial to the Sinti and Roma murdered under National Socialism opened in 2012 and is open day and night.
- 8
Reichstag: Letters from French Cannon
The parliament's west front across the lawn. Its motto Dem Deutschen Volke went up in 1916 in bronze from French cannon; on this side of the square the Enabling Act was passed in 1933.
- 9
Reichstag and Band des Bundes: Crowned in Glass
The Reichstag's glass dome seen up close. Norman Foster's dome of 1999 is the building's latest top, and the government's buildings run in a line across the old border.
- 10
White Crosses: The River Was the Border
Seven white crosses on the Spree bank. They remember people who died at the Berlin Wall, where its front wall met the river behind the Reichstag.
Details
Best Time to Visit
Morning, before about 10am, for a quieter Pariser Platz and Gate; or late afternoon into dusk, when the Reichstag dome is open until its last admission at 9:45 p.m. (book ahead; closed 19 to 30 October 2026). The park paths are pleasant in daylight at any season; the Tiergarten is in leaf from May to October, which shades the memorials but does not hide the Gate or the Reichstag from the lawn. Events, state visits and demonstrations close Pariser Platz at short notice.
Pro Tips
- •Getting to the start: S+U Brandenburger Tor (S-Bahn S1, S2, S25 and S26, U-Bahn U5) is about 60 meters from Pariser Platz; bus 100 also stops there. Checked 9 October 2026.
- •The walk ends on the Spree bank about 300 meters east of U5 Bundestag and about 350 meters north of S+U Brandenburger Tor. Checked 9 October 2026.
- •Reichstag dome: free, by advance registration on the Bundestag website; spare places can be booked the same day at the service center by the Reichstag, at least two hours ahead (8am to 8pm, weekends 10am to 6pm, until 31 October). Bring photo ID (original) if you are 16 or over. Last admission 9:45 p.m.. Checked 9 October 2026.
- •Step-free route to the White Crosses (stop 10): instead of the flight of 20 steps down to the river path, stay on the upper level and go round by the Reichstagufer; it adds about 150 meters.
- •The window in the memorial to persecuted homosexuals (stop 3) can reflect bright sky: shade the glass with your hand to see the film.
Safety & Precautions
- •The Reichstag dome is closed for cleaning and maintenance from 19 to 30 October 2026; the roof terrace stays open. It is also closed on 24 December and from 4pm on 31 December. Checked 9 October 2026 on bundestag.de.
- •Pariser Platz and the Gate are crowded and pickpockets work there. The Berlin police advise walking on firmly past anyone who asks for a signature and a donation: do not sign and do not pay. If someone claims to be a police officer, ask for ID.
- •Cyclists share every park path on this walk and use a cycle strip right by the Gate's west side: look both ways before crossing.
- •The road crossings at the Gate, at the end of Yitzhak-Rabin-Strasse and at Scheidemannstrasse are busy; cross only at the lights.
- •The memorial to the Sinti and Roma (stop 7) asks visitors to speak quietly, not to enter the pool or throw coins, and to bring no flags or banners. Keep your audio low there.
- •Around 8 and 9 May each year the police set special rules on flags, uniforms and symbols at the Soviet War Memorial (stop 6).
- •The lawn in front of the Reichstag has been worn and partly fenced for building works since 2024; in October 2026 maps showed the paths across its east side closed. The route stays on the open paths at its edges. Checked 9 October 2026.
- •The last stretch to stop 10 is a flight of 20 steps; see the tips for the step-free way round. Some park paths are fine gravel, rough for wheelchairs and strollers, and there are two short flights of five steps between stops 4 and 5.
Travel advisory: Exercise Increased Caution (Level 2).
Gallery
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Read the walk
The full story of Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag: A Gate, a Park, a Parliament, in words. Prefer to listen? Play it narrated, from home or on location.
Introduction
Berlin, the capital of Germany, keeps its most famous gate, its parliament and its great royal park side by side, and this walk joins them up.
Each of the three was built for one purpose and then read differently by whoever held the city next. The Brandenburg Gate began as an opening in a tax wall and was opened as a gate of peace. It became a victory arch, a stage for marching columns and a frontier closed by the Wall. The Tiergarten, the park between the Gate and the parliament, was a hunting ground, then a public park, then a field of stumps and potatoes, and now it holds memorials to people the Nazis persecuted and murdered. And the Reichstag, the parliament building, was crowned with a dome, burned, wrecked, stripped, wrapped in fabric and crowned again in glass.
Three people appear along the way. Rudolf Siemering, a sculptor whose marble and bronze stand in the park. Dani Karavan, the artist who made a memorial out of a pool of still water. And Norman Foster, the architect of the glass dome.
The walk is ten stops over about two point nine kilometers, just under two miles, and takes about ninety minutes. It is a loop on level ground, with a few short flights of steps, from Pariser Platz through the park to the bank of the river Spree, a few minutes from where it begins.
1. Pariser Platz: A Square Named for Paris
Welcome to Pariser Platz, the square in front of the Brandenburg Gate. The Gate closes the far end of the square: six tall stone columns in a row, and on top, a chariot drawn by four horses. You will walk through it to the next stop.
The square is older than the Gate. Prussia laid it out in seventeen thirty-four, at the end of the main avenue, Unter den Linden, together with a new wall around Berlin. It was a tax wall, not a defense: goods coming in paid duty at its gates. The way out of this square was one of those gates, a plain pair of pillars.
The name came later. In eighteen fourteen, after Prussian troops had entered Paris in the wars against Napoleon, the square was named for that city.
Now look at the buildings around you. The square was badly damaged in the Second World War, and when Berlin was divided the border ran across it. After reunification it was rebuilt from nineteen ninety-three, under a rule from the city's Senate that the new buildings should combine historic forms with modern ones. So the Hotel Adlon is not the old Adlon: it was built on the model of the old hotel, not as a copy. The glass front of the Academy of Arts is new too. Behind that glass front hides the only historic building on the square besides the Gate: a wing of the old Prussian Academy of the Arts, from the first years of the nineteen hundreds.
This is a busy place, and pickpockets work it. If a pair with a clipboard asks for a signature and a donation, the Berlin police advise: walk on, do not sign, do not pay.
Follow the route through one of the Gate's passages to the other side.
2. Brandenburg Gate: Peace Gate, Frontier, Stage
Walk on a few steps beyond the Gate and stop, then turn around to face it. Cyclists use a strip of paving just past the Gate, so look both ways as you cross it.
The Gate was built between seventeen eighty-eight and seventeen ninety-one and opened in August seventeen ninety-one, still unfinished, as the Peace Gate. Its model was the gateway to the Acropolis in Athens. Count the columns: six plain Doric columns on each face, with five passages between them, and the middle passage wider than the rest.
On top rides the goddess of Victory in her chariot, made of copper. From here you see her from behind: she faces the city. In eighteen oh six Napoleon's army took her and her horses to Paris, where they stayed for about seven years. When she came home in eighteen fourteen, an iron cross and a Prussian eagle were added to the standard she carries.
Then every regime used it as a stage. On the thirtieth of January nineteen thirty-three the Nazi storm troopers marched through it by torchlight. From the thirteenth of August nineteen sixty-one the East German regime closed it with the Wall, built lower here than elsewhere so that it looked better, and this ground became part of the border strip. On the twelfth of June nineteen eighty-seven, on this western side, the American president Ronald Reagan said: Mister Gorbachev, open this gate! Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall! When the Wall opened that November, it still stood here. The Gate opened as a crossing on the twenty-second of December nineteen eighty-nine, before more than a hundred thousand people.
Follow the route across the road at three sets of lights, past a board that marks the line of the Wall, into the Tiergarten. The name means animal garden: before seventeen hundred this was the Elector of Brandenburg's fenced hunting ground.
3. Memorial to Persecuted Homosexuals: One Window
Walk on along the path and stop beside the block of dark concrete standing among the trees. This is the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism. It opened in May two thousand eight and is open day and night.
Its shape is borrowed. On the other side of the road lies the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of concrete blocks. The foundation that runs both memorials says this one takes over their form, and adds one thing: a small window. Go up to it and look in. Inside runs a film of a same-sex love scene. In bright daylight the glass can reflect the sky, so shade it with your hand.
The window carries the story. In nineteen thirty-five the Nazis widened and sharpened the law against sex between men, paragraph one hundred seventy-five. From then on, the foundation writes, even a kiss between men could lead to persecution. There were more than fifty thousand convictions, and several thousand gay men were sent to concentration camps, where they had to wear a pink triangle.
The law did not end with the war. West Germany kept paragraph one hundred seventy-five unchanged until nineteen sixty-nine. Only in two thousand two did the Bundestag, the federal parliament, rehabilitate the men convicted under it in the Nazi years, and in two thousand three it voted to build this memorial. Two artists, from Denmark and Norway, designed it.
The design was meant to change, and it has. The first film showed two men kissing, again and again. It has been replaced, and since two thousand eighteen the window has shown a new film by another artist.
Follow the route west, deeper into the park. In the eighteen thirties the old hunting wood was redesigned as an English-style landscape park, open to everyone. Monuments came next.
4. Beethoven-Haydn-Mozart Monument: The Musicians' Stove
Walk on along the path. Ahead, in a clearing, stands a monument about ten meters tall: a massive colored column with a gilded dome for a roof, and on top, three small winged children holding up a laurel wreath. Around the column are portraits of three composers in white marble,…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
5. Floraplatz: Bronze Animals from Philadelphia
Walk on across the round clearing, past the woman on horseback on her tall plinth in the middle, and stop by the information board at its edge. Around her, on blocks of granite, stands a ring of life-size bronze animals. The clearing is older than anything in it: it was cut…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
6. Soviet War Memorial: Across the Nazi Axis
Walk on along the sidewalk and stop. Behind the railing on your left is the Soviet War Memorial: a curved row of stone pillars, a bronze soldier on a tall pedestal at its center, and in front, two tanks and two big guns. It was built straight after the war. The Red Army ordered…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
7. Memorial to the Sinti and Roma: A Pool That Mirrors
Turn your volume down a little here. The memorial asks visitors to speak quietly, and a violin plays inside it all the time. Walk on to the start of the path into the clearing and stop there. Inside is the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under National…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
8. Reichstag: Letters from French Cannon
Walk on along the edge of the lawn and stop. Across the lawn, on your right, stands the long west front of the Reichstag, the parliament building: six columns carrying a triangular gable, and behind them the glass dome rising over the roof. It was built between eighteen…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
9. Reichstag and Band des Bundes: Crowned in Glass
Walk on along the edge of the lawn and stop. The Reichstag is close now, and its glass dome shows clearly above the roof. The dome is free to visit, but you must register in advance; the details are on this stop's card. The dome you see is the building's second. The first, of…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
10. White Crosses: The River Was the Border
Walk on down the steps to the riverside path and stop at the bottom. Just ahead, by the water, stands a row of white crosses. This bank was the edge of West Berlin. The East German border ran right behind the Reichstag, and the river itself was already East Berlin. The south…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
- Berlin Pariser Platz | categories: Pariser Platz (Berlin-Mitte)|GFDL|CC-BY-SA-3.0,2.5,2.0,1.0|License migration redundant|Self-published wor — Yelles, CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
- Impressions from Berlin, 2020-03-17 — C.Suthorn, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Berlin, Brandenburger Tor, Westseite (Platz des 18. März) — DrKssn, CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
- Detail of the Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin TV Tower in the background — Roy Zuo, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism — Davric, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Mémorial aux homosexuels persécutés pendant la période nazie, Berlin — Tina Quintero, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- The Beethoven-Haydn-Mozart monument in Großer Tiergarten in Berlin-Tiergarten, here the side with the half figure of Ludwig van Beethoven. T — Jörg Zägel, CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
- Beethoven-Haydn-Mozart-Denkmal Berlin — Joseolgon, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Berlin in june 2008. | categories: Soviet Cenotaph in Berlin-Tiergarten|Taken with Fujifilm FinePix J50|Self-published work|Photographs by M — Mark Ahsmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
- 2018-08-04 DE Berlin-Mitte, Großer Tiergarten, Straße des 17. Juni, Sowjetisches Ehrenmal — Paul Korecky, CC BY-SA 2.0 · source
- Impressions from Berlin, 2020-03-17 — C.Suthorn, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Pictures from Berlin from the Corona years 2020 and 2021 — C.Suthorn, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- LangSwitch Error: no default — Anil Öztas, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Reichstagsgebäude in Berlin. Das 1884 - 1894 errichtete Gebäude diente dem Reichstag des Deutschen Kaiserreiches und anschließend der Weimar — W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Berlin - Government District — Andrzej Otrębski, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Memorial crosses for victims of the Berlin Wall at the bank of the Spree in Berlin with the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus in the background. — Beek100, CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
- White Crosses’ memorial site on the Spree in Berlin, Germany — Anil Öztas, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Images may be cropped or resized. Other photos via Unsplash and Pexels.