Berlin audio guide: the stories of its sights

The Berlin Television Tower, the Berliner Fernsehturm, was built without a building permit.

It began life as a black build, an unauthorised construction, right in the middle of East Berlin. Today it stands 368 metres tall, the highest structure in Germany. The German Post Office of the GDR put it up between 1965 and 1969. It rose in the park that now surrounds it, on the ground where the old Marienviertel quarter had been torn down. Because the true costs were being kept quiet, the tower never had a foundation stone ceremony.

There was no first turn of the spade either. No one marked the start of a project that was officially not quite what it seemed. And the bill grew. In the end the tower cost at least four times as much as planned. A final account was never drawn up. The bodies involved spread the costs across different funds, hoping to save their balance sheets. The tower still does its job as a broadcasting mast.

It is also an observation tower, with a bar at 203 metres and a revolving restaurant at 207 metres. Today, a lift carries visitors up to the viewing level in about 40 seconds. And the restaurant turns a full 360 degrees in an hour, so the whole city slowly passes by over a single meal.

The Museumsinsel, Berlin's Museum Island, nearly lost one of its finest buildings to the wrecking ball.

The ruin of the Neues Museum, the New Museum, was called an eyesore, and for a time it was meant to be torn down. The Museumsinsel is a group of five museums in the northern part of the Spree island, in the historic heart of Berlin. They were built between 1830 and 1930, on the orders of the Prussian kings, to plans by five architects. Then came the Second World War. More than 70 percent of the museums on the island were destroyed.

The New Museum stood there as a ruin, and many saw it as a shame on the cityscape. Demolition was seriously considered. It never happened, and the reason is rather ordinary. There was no suitable place to move the collections to in the meantime. So the ruin stayed standing. In October 2009, after 70 years, the New Museum opened again. Today the island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed since 1999.

In the New Museum you will find the famous bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. And the Pergamon Museum shows reconstructions on a grand scale, among them the Pergamon Altar, the Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon.

For two weeks in the summer of 1995, the Reichstag building in Berlin vanished.

In its place stood a shimmering silver shape, tied up with blue rope. This is the Reichstag, the home of the German parliament, the Bundestag, since 1999. The architect Paul Wallot built it between 1884 and 1894, in the style of the Neo-Renaissance. It is said to be the most visited parliament building in the world. But back to that summer. From 24 June to 7 July 1995, the whole building was wrapped in silver, fireproof fabric.

Blue ropes, more than three centimetres thick, bound it tight. You might expect a wrapped-up parliament to draw a quiet, curious crowd. Instead, the event quickly turned into something like a people's festival. Five million visitors came in just two weeks. Today the Reichstag draws crowds in a different way. Its glass dome has become a landmark of Berlin.

Inside it, two spiral ramps wind up to the platform, each one about 230 metres long.

In 1904, two Berlin newspapers did something remarkable.

They got around 30,000 people to put their names on a protest, all to save a forest. That forest was the Grunewald, a woodland of about 3,000 hectares in the west of Berlin. It lies partly in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf and partly in Steglitz-Zehlendorf. A chain of smaller lakes runs through it, known as the Grunewaldseenkette, the Grunewald lake chain.

Why the outcry? Land speculation was running wild at the start of the twentieth century, and the Grunewald was right in the thick of it. The forest was in danger of being destroyed. So the newspapers called on their readers, and the readers answered. 30,000 signatures is a great many for that time. The protest worked. In 1915, the Zweckverband Groß-Berlin, an association of local authorities, bought large areas of woodland around Berlin from the Prussian state.

This was the so-called permanent forest agreement, and it included the Grunewald. Since then, the forest has belonged to Berlin. It was not a gift from above. The agreement came about, not least, through the pressure of the first German environmental movement. Ordinary citizens had saved their forest. And today, it is still there for everyone. The Grunewald offers dunes, heath and moors, which are valuable habitats for plants and animals.

Several million walkers come every year, and that is the balance this forest has to strike: nature, forestry and all those visitors, side by side.