Where Hummingbirds Swim: Baltic Sea Escapes at the Berlin Wall Memorial

The Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse is showing a special exhibition on a part of the escape story that rarely reaches the guidebooks: the people who tried to leave the GDR across the Baltic Sea.

Wo Kolibris schwimmen, or Where hummingbirds swim, combines the work of the artist Marie Jeschke with historical objects from the Berlin Wall Foundation’s own collection. It opened on 24 June 2026 and runs until 20 September 2026.

The other border

Berlin is where the border became architecture, and it is what almost everyone pictures when they think about escaping the GDR. But the country’s northern edge was a border too. The Baltic coast was patrolled, watched from towers and lit at night, and leaving across it meant open water, cold, and hours of darkness rather than a run at a wall.

The attempts made there are far less visible in public memory than the tunnels and checkpoints of Berlin, which is much of the point of putting them on show at the Memorial, in the middle of the city whose border everybody already knows.

How to visit

Admission to the Berlin Wall Memorial is free. The open-air memorial grounds on Bernauer Strasse are accessible Monday to Sunday from 8am to 10pm, and the indoor spaces, the Documentation Centre and the Visitor Center, are open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm. The last ascent to the observation tower is at 5.45pm.

The Memorial is the anchor point of the whole Bernauer Strasse site, and it sits on our interactive map alongside the watchtower, the chapel and the surviving stretch of the border strip. If you are visiting for the exhibition, it is worth allowing time for the outdoor grounds as well.

The exhibition closes on 20 September 2026.