Pren­zlauer Berg is not exactly known to be hoard­ing under­ground secrets. The “scene”, how­ever broad and unspe­cific that term may be, has long moved towards other dis­tricts. Many fam­il­ies and a dom­in­at­ing upper middle class atmo­sphere shape the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of Pren­zlauer Berg nowadays. The children’s toy stores, plenty of cozy cof­fee shops and ice cream par­lors and slight leftovers of graf­fiti protest­ing gentri­fic­a­tion are only some of the reas­ons why I usu­ally don’t cross the bor­der over to the former East of Berlin.

So when Tobias of Son­der­weg Ber­lin asked us to join one of his tours through Pren­zlauer Berg I was a bit scep­tic. What could you show around in Pren­zlauer Berg? Espe­cially to people who know their spots in Ber­lin and def­in­itely prefer those? But the open-minded people that we are — ahem — we decided to give it a shot. As always it turns out that see­ing a city, or even just a small part of it, from the eyes of someone who’s intensely researched it is enlight­en­ing and interesting.

Tobias didn’t go out of his way to show us the greatest spots that we didn’t know about yet. Instead he focused on telling us how the dis­trict developed and which influ­ences mattered over time. We talked a lot about the dis­tinct archi­tec­ture and geo­graph­ical situ­ation as well as the socio-political issues of the past two hun­dred years.

In roughly two hours we learned a lot. From the former water tower to the Jew­ish Syn­agogue we also saw many inter­est­ing build­ings and his­tor­ical spots (which, I admit, we’d never seen before), all without being too over­loaded by facts. To really grasp which “under­ground secrets” a city can hold you should always listen to someone with as much fas­cin­a­tion and ded­ic­a­tion to the mat­ter as Tobias. For a short while, he made us go back in time to see everything get­ting build up from scratch.

If you’re inter­ested in tak­ing a tour with Son­der­weg Ber­lin don’t hes­it­ate to jump right over and book one right now. Keep in mind that you should under­stand some Ger­man (you can ask for an Eng­lish tour, they’ll be offer­ing tours in French soon, too) at best. Son­der­weg will take you not only through Pren­zlauer Berg but also through the Hansavier­tel (which we can highly recom­mend if you don’t want to hustle your­self through the neigh­bor­hood beg­ging for entrance like we did) and the “other” part of Kreuzberg, so called Kreuzberg 61, around Mehring­damm and Bergmannkiez.