This Prenzlauer Berg church became the centre of Berlin’s peaceful revolution in autumn 1989. From 2 October, opposition groups held a round-the-clock vigil here, with a contact telephone relaying arrest reports to Western media. On 7 October, police and Stasi units beat and arrested hundreds of demonstrators around the church in the last mass use of force against protesters in Berlin. Today a memorial plaque, Karl Biedermann’s relief “Resistance” and Ernst Barlach’s bronze “Geistkämpfer” (Spirit Fighter) commemorate the autumn of 1989. The Blessing Christ statue outside the west portal was rescued from the demolished Versöhnungskirche that once stood on the death strip.

On 4 November 1989, between 200,000 and 500,000 people filled this square in the largest non-state demonstration in East German history and the first legally permitted protest organised by private citizens. Twenty-six speakers addressed the crowd from a flatbed truck, among them Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym and Jens Reich, while East German television broadcast it live. The demands were free elections, press freedom, an end to Stasi surveillance and a new constitution. Five days later the Berlin Wall fell. No monument marks the event, but the square where half a million people found their voice is unmistakable.

An information stele and three panels of photographs stand in a quiet meadow park on the southeastern edge of Berlin, marking where the CIA and MI6 dug a 450-metre tunnel under the sector border to tap the telephone cables of the Soviet army. It is one of the few sites on the Berlin Wall Trail […]