The Rough Guide to Berlin and other Berlin, Germany General Tips

Favorite Thing: Berlin asks for some preparation! It is a city without a central square, without charming boulevards and without many equestrian monuments. It is not an ancient city and its development shows all traces of its history that often took dramatic and even tragic courses. Berlin sights cannot only be looked at, you have to at least try to understand the stories that happenned behind their walls.

I am a big fan of Rough Guide guidebooks and Berlin RG is a great source of background information about the city including the stories, people and off the beaten track places. (I doubt there are many guidebooks that list Marzahn on their pages ;) Written by John Gawthorp and Jack Holland they provide the usual useful information with just a right amount of other stories that make it easier to digest the Berlin puzzle.

www.roughguides.com


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Favorite Thing: This fantastic book by Rainer Hildebrandt is a real bestseller (sold in more than 1,200,000 copies) and a must-read for everyone interested to find out what life in Berlin looked like between August 13, 1961 and November 9, 1989.

The book is in fact a catalogue of the "Checkpoint Charlie" museum and features the introduction to the Wall and the background info about its phenomenon. A large part of the book is dedicated to the creativity of East Berliners trying to escape to the West - a black and white photography documenting something that we all took almost as normal until 1989.

Great b/w photographs and descriptions in German, English and French make this 224-page book easy to read but hard to understand.

The book is sold in many bookshops in Berlin, as well as in Tourist Offices. A very good bookshop is "Berlin Story" bookshop at Unter den Linden 40 offering many books in non-German languages.

www.berlinstory.de


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Favorite Thing: Of course, once inside the bookshop I bought some other books as well:

Berlin architecture and design is a small picture-book showing the main highlights of Berlin architecture and some of the best interiors worth visiting.

Berlin highlights by Clemens Beeck (with photos by Günter Schneider) is a quick overview of main sights of Berlin, more worth for the pictures than for the text giving only brief info.

Berlin New Architecture by Michael Imhof and Leon Krempel is a guidebook to new Berlin architecture from 1989 to today. From Reichstag to Potsdamer Platz and from Galleries Lafayette to the Nordic Embassies it lists all most important new buildings with basic info and a short description. Even if you're not an architect I guess this is interesting since Berlin in the 1990s was Europe's largest construction site.


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Favorite Thing: Robert Schwandl is a well-known name to train enthousiasts (at least in Europe) and he recently published two books that every trainspotter needs to have. A 144-page "Berlin S-bahn Album" features descriptions of the history of S-bahn, description of the rolling stock and richly illustrated descriptions of 170 stations of this great transport system.

The book also has its sister that features the same overview of the Berlin's U-bahn system with an overview of all 192 stations.

After reading the both books all you have to do is buy your ticket and start exploring the stations, viaducts and tunnels yourself.

http://www.robert-schwandl.de/


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