Friedrichshain holds two ideas of the city a few hundred metres apart: the GDR's grandest boulevard, and the squares where ordinary life went on around it. This walk goes from one to the other, best in the morning before the bars wake up.
Start at Frankfurter Tor, under Henselmann's twin domed towers, and walk west down the Karl-Marx-Allee. The avenue was the East's showpiece — the Arbeiterpaläste in full Zuckerbäckerstil, faced in pale tiles, monumental enough to make you feel small on purpose. Stop at Café Sibylle for coffee and the boulevard's own museum of itself.
Then turn south into Simon-Dach-Straße and the bar quarter, quiet at this hour, and on to Boxhagener Platz — Boxi to everyone who lives here, a leafy square with a Saturday farmers' market and a Sunday flea. Sit a while, then carry on south-west to Warschauer Straße, where every line in this corner of Berlin meets. Two cities in one short walk, and you started in the older one.
