Queer Berlin Walking Tour

Berlin is the queer capital of Europe and on this fascinating and fun tour, you will explore Schöneberg, the city’s gay neighborhood, and walk through the Tiergarten, it’s best-known gay meeting spot. The city has been a pioneer of gay and lesbian rights since the late 19th-Century, despite the notorious “Section 175” of the German penal code, which criminalized male homosexuality for decades after World War 2. In Schöneberg, see where Marlene Dietrich lived and worked and where Christopher Isherwood and Otto Dix chronicled the city’s fantastic cabaret and nightlife scene. Visit the Eldorado, one of Berlin’s oldest gay and transvestite bars, and stop at the poignant memorial to all the homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis and sent to the concentration camps. Find out how openly queer and transgendered individuals found assistance and support from Magnus Hirschfeld, whose ground-breaking Institute for Sexual Science was shut down in 1933, and had its library destroyed during the notorious Nazi book-burnings. Walk through the Tiergarten, the city’s best-known gay meeting spot, located in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Find out how queer figures, from the Prussian King Friedrich the Great to today’s openly gay mayor Klaus Wowereit, have shaped the history of Berlin.