Amazing facts about Berlin

It's an old town
Berlin is currently the capital of Germany, but nobody knows for sure when it was colonized. There is evidence of some buildings existing there since the late 1100's, but there is no actual written record of the city of Berlin until the 1240's. It didn't become a capital until 1701, when Prussian King Frederick I declared it so and built the Palace from Charlottenburg. Either way, the city has had its fair share of history and was a focal point of German culture for most of the millennium.

They love their beer
Munich may be best known for its love of beer due to its annual Oktoberfest celebration, but for much of the 20th century, Berlin was the leading beer producer in all of Europe, with over 100 active breweries.

so many museums
Berlin currently has a staggering 180 active museum spaces and boasts the largest open-air gallery on the planet, the East Side Gallery, spanning almost a kilometer in length. In fact, there is an entire "Museum Island", which is home to the oldest museum in the city, the Königliches Museum, and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its architectural and cultural legacy.

Raising a flag over the Reichstag, a photograph taken during the Battle of Berlin on May 2, 1945. (Mil.ru/Wikimedia Commons)

it’s war seen
Many cities in Europe were devastated by the World Wars, but Berlin holds a special place in history, as the Battle of Berlin is often considered the true end of the Nazi regime. Hitler escaped to a bunker in Berlin in January 1945, believing until the end that he would never fall out of Nazi control, but the United States and United Kingdom bombed the city during the spring and the Soviet army fought its way into the ground. through Germany to finally begin bombing Berlin on 20 April. What was left of German forces was too meager to prevent their invasion, although Hitler made a last ditch effort, sending the famous Hitler Youth, full of 14-year-old boys, to face the Soviet army. After 10 brutal days, during which 130,000 people were killed, Hitler finally saw what was written on the wall and took his own life on April 30th. The commanding general surrendered to the Soviets a few days later.

Trecho remanescente do Muro perto de Ostbahnhof em Friedrichshain chamado East Side Gallery, agosto de 2006. (Herraotic/Wikimedia Commons)

It was split in two
After the war, control of Germany was divided among the Allied forces, giving the Soviets the easternmost portion and the United States, United Kingdom and France the areas to the west, including West Berlin. However, tensions mounted over the next few years, as the ideological divide between western capitalists and eastern socialists began to threaten the Soviets, who devised a plan to squeeze other nations’ influence in Berlin. They first set up a blockade to prevent goods from entering the city, but the former Allied countries responded by airlifting supplies. By the 1960s, the area now known as the German Democratic Republic (or simply East Germany) had lost a relative amount of its population to West Berlin, so they decided to build a wall and establish a closed border. This obviously caused a lot of problems for what was once a busy city, and over 100 people died trying to illegally cross the wall. It wasn’t until the end of the Cold War that the GDR decided to end the division, and the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989.