Cold War Berlin

This full-day tour is built for guests who want Berlin's Cold War history specifically, told by a guide who often lived through the divided city firsthand.

Your driver meets you at the pier for the roughly 150 mile (242km) drive to Berlin, where your guide, typically an East Berlin historian with a personal connection to the period, joins you. Your first stop is the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse, the only place in the city where the Wall's full border installations, the so-called death strip, are preserved exactly as they stood at the end of the 1980s. From a viewing platform you look down on the strip and its watchtower, and hear the stories of the Wall's construction in August 1961 and its fall on the night of November 9 to 10, 1989, after nearly 28 years dividing the city.

Next you visit Friedrichstrasse station, home to the Tranenpalast, or Palace of Tears, the border crossing used by East Germans traveling west by train between 1962 and 1989. Its nickname comes from the emotional goodbyes that played out here nightly for almost three decades. From there you drive along Friedrichstrasse to Checkpoint Charlie, internationally the most famous Cold War crossing point, though your guide will explain it saw far less everyday foot traffic than Friedrichstrasse station did.

You continue to Alexanderplatz and the Berlin TV Tower, with a stop at the nearby Marx-Engels-Forum, where statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels still stand. From there you visit the East Side Gallery, a 0.8 mile (1.3km) stretch of the Wall turned into the world's longest open-air gallery by artists after reunification, and drive along Karl-Marx-Allee, the wide, monumental boulevard of eight-story "wedding cake" style buildings built by East Germany between 1952 and 1960 as a showcase of socialist architecture.

There is time for a typical German lunch along the way (meal not included) and for souvenir shopping before your driver returns you to the pier in Warnemunde or Rostock.