Bernauer Straße: the Wall, told honestly
The one place the Berlin Wall is left standing as it was — death strip, watchtower, and a ghost station underground. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Nordbahnhof — the ghost station exhibition
Before you climb to the street, read the panels down on the platform. Nordbahnhof was a *Geisterbahnhof* — a ghost station — where Western trains rolled through East Berlin without stopping, past guards on dimmed platforms. The walk starts underground for a reason.

2. The preserved border strip
Out on Bernauer Straße, a length of the actual border is kept as it stood: the back wall, the raked sand, the lamps, the patrol road. Stand in the strip itself. This is the only place in Berlin where you can read the Wall as a system rather than a souvenir.

3. The last watchtower and the death strip
Look for the surviving guard tower above the open ground. The grass you're standing on was the *Todesstreifen*, the death strip — mined sightlines, raked to show footprints. Markers in the ground trace where buildings were demolished to clear the field of fire.

4. Chapel of Reconciliation
A small oval chapel of rammed earth, built in 2000 where a 19th-century church stood inside the death strip until the GDR dynamited it in 1985. The quietest building on the walk. Step inside if the door is open.

5. Window of Remembrance
A rust-coloured wall of portraits: the people who died trying to cross here. Read a few names and dates rather than all of them — the youngest were children. The memorial is open air and never closes.

6. Documentation centre and viewing tower
End at the documentation centre — free, and the place to make sense of what you've walked past. Climb the viewing platform: from above, the preserved strip suddenly reads as the corridor it was. Bernauer Straße U8 is a minute on.

Bernauer Straße: the Wall, told honestly