Viktoriapark walk with Annie, Melissa and Rachel

Our students Annie, Melissa and Rachel took us on a tour of Viktoriapark this week. As they explained, the park is home to the “Kreuzberg” (literally “Cross Mountain”) and gives its name to the surrounding neighborhood. The “Kreuz” – really a monument to the wars of liberation against Napoleon – was designed by this week’s featured 19th-century starchitect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

It’s a bit of a climb …

… but it’s worth it! There are beautiful views of the city, and of course, a lovely gothic monument to admire as well.

Schinkel isn’t the only artist to have left his mark (whether officially sanctioned or not) on the park. Our guides showed us an artwork commemorating a recent act of sexual violence in the park, another in honor of the uprising of Communist workers in 1953, and one (a spray-paint-covered statue of Heinrich von Kleist) that attests to one of Berlin’s biggest vandalism issues – graffiti. As in the rest of Berlin, Viktoriapark is packed with history, and our tour guides did a lovely job of uncovering some of that for us.