The Places
of East Germany.

The most serious of the surviving wall sites. A two-kilometre stretch of preserved fortifications — outer wall, death strip, watchtower, inner wall — with a comprehensive visitor centre. Free admission. The chapel of reconciliation, built in 2000 on the site of a 1894 church demolished in the death strip in 1985, is a small extraordinary modern building of rammed earth. Allow two hours.

The former Stasi headquarters in Lichtenberg, now preserved as a museum. The building is the original 1960s administrative complex; Mielke's office is intact on the second floor of House 1 — his desk, his chairs, his wallpaper, his secret video collection of his own family (he was a private man). The Stasi documentation centre and exhibition occupies the surrounding buildings.

A private museum near Museumsinsel that takes a quietly Ostalgie-friendly approach to GDR everyday life. Hands-on exhibits, a complete reconstructed Plattenbau apartment, the Trabant simulator. Crowded but well-made. Not a serious historical institution; an excellent introduction to daily life.

The two-kilometre socialist-realist boulevard from Alexanderplatz to Frankfurter Tor, lined with 1950s wedding-cake apartment blocks. The Café Sibylle is in one of the original ground-floor units. The Kino International (1963) and the Café Moskau (1964) — both classics of late East German modernism — are within walking distance.

The symbolic centre of East Berlin. The TV Tower (1969), 368m, with its rotating observation deck and the original 1969 World Clock at its base. The Park Inn Hotel (originally the Hotel Stadt Berlin, opened 1970, the largest hotel in the GDR) still stands. The square itself is in slow transformation but retains its East German character.

The church where the Monday demonstrations began in 1981 — quiet, modest, white-walled — and the excellent state-funded contemporary-history museum (Zeitgeschichtliches Forum), which tells the story of the GDR with a more critical edge than the Berlin DDR Museum. Combined, half a day. Leipzig itself is one of the most rewarding former-GDR cities.

Dresden was the East German showcase city for cultural conservation — the GDR rebuilt the Zwinger and the Semperoper using extensive state subsidy, though it left the Frauenkirche as a ruin until 1989 (it was rebuilt with private and international donations between 1994 and 2005). The Military History Museum, expanded by Daniel Libeskind in 2011, contains the most serious German exhibition on the GDR's National People's Army.

Founded in 1950 from scratch as the showpiece industrial city of the GDR, around a new iron-and-steel plant on the Polish border. The original 1950s city centre — laid out on a strict grid with neoclassical apartment blocks — is intact and was placed under historic preservation in 1986. Population has declined from a peak of 53,000 to around 23,000 today. A two-hour train from Berlin Ostkreuz. The DOK Centre for Everyday Culture has an excellent small museum.

The Reformation town was conserved under the GDR with extensive Soviet financial support (the Lutheran-Soviet relationship was officially better than the SED's relationship with the German Protestant Church). The Lutherhaus, the Castle Church, and the medieval market square are preserved. The town's GDR-era housing reflects the typical Plattenbau pattern around an undisturbed medieval centre.

A 4.5-kilometre concrete beachfront complex on the Baltic island of Rügen, built between 1936 and 1939 as a Nazi "Strength Through Joy" workers' holiday resort. Never used for its original purpose. The GDR used several of its eight blocks as army barracks and one as a documentation centre. Several blocks have been converted to luxury condominiums since 2010; others are still empty. The visitor centre at Prora Zentrum gives the layered history.

The principal vehicle crossing point on the inner-German border from 1945 to 1990. Preserved largely intact as the Marienborn Memorial: the East German checkpoint buildings, the customs hangars, the underground inspection bay, the watchtowers. The most authentic experience of what crossing in or out of the GDR actually looked like. Open and free.

A village of fifty inhabitants on the Bavarian-Thuringian border that was divided by the inner-German frontier between 1945 and 1990. A surviving section of the village wall, watchtower, and patrol road has been preserved as an outdoor museum. The Mödlareuth Museum, on the Bavarian side, is small and excellent.

Rostock was the GDR's principal port and shipbuilding centre. Its old Hanseatic core was extensively restored under the GDR. Warnemünde, the seaside suburb, is the most popular East German beach resort and retains its FDGB-era boardwalk and beach baskets. The Tall Ships parade (Hanse Sail, mid-August) is the largest sailing event in the southern Baltic.

The original Sachsenring plant where Trabants were produced from 1958 to 1991 is now the August Horch Museum, with a comprehensive collection of East German cars (Trabant, Wartburg, IFA trucks) and the original production line. Trabant club rallies frequently take place in the museum's parking lot.

The principal Stasi remand prison from 1951 to 1990. Preserved largely as it was at the moment of closure. Guided tours are conducted exclusively by former prisoners, several of them long-serving political prisoners. One of the most affecting historical sites in Germany. Not pleasant; very important.

The principal town of Lusatia, in eastern Saxony, and the cultural capital of the Sorbs — the small Slavic minority (about 60,000 strong) protected under both the GDR constitution and the federal Basic Law as Germany's official ethnic minority. The Sorbian National Museum, the bilingual road signs, the Sorbian-language schools and theatre are all distinctive. The Old Town is medieval and unbombed.

Weimar is the city of Goethe, Schiller, Bach, and the Bauhaus; Buchenwald, on the Ettersberg hill above it, was a Nazi concentration camp from 1937 to 1945 and a Soviet special camp from 1945 to 1950. The conjunction of the two — the cultural high point of the German Enlightenment beside one of the worst sites of twentieth-century horror — was a deliberate East German pedagogical setting. The memorial site is preserved by the federal government; the city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Two of the best-preserved Hanseatic Old Towns on the German Baltic. Stralsund, the gateway to Rügen, has an extraordinary brick-Gothic Town Hall and three medieval brick churches. Greifswald, smaller, is the home town of Caspar David Friedrich, the great Romantic painter, and houses the Pomeranian State Museum with significant Friedrich holdings. Both are unbombed and well-restored.