Berlin Map

• Berlin's transportation infrastructure is highly complex, providing a very diverse range of urban mobility. A total of 979 bridges cross 197 kilometers of innercity waterways, 5,334 kilometers (3,314 mi) of roads run through Berlin, of which 73 kilometers (45 mi) are motorways ("Autobahn"). In 2006, 1.416 million motor vehicles were registered in the city. With 358 cars per 1000 residents in 2008 (570/1000 in Germany), Berlin as a German state and as a major European city has one of the lowest numbers of cars per capita.

• Long-distance rail lines connect Berlin with all of the major cities of Germany and with many cities in neighboring European countries. Regional rail lines provide access to the surrounding regions of Brandenburg and to the Baltic Sea. The Berlin Hauptbahnhof is the largest crossing station in Europe. Deutsche Bahn runs trains to domestic destinations like Nuremberg, Hamburg, Freiburg and others. It also runs an airport express rail service, as well as trains to international destinations like Moscow, Vienna, and Salzburg.

• The Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe and the Deutsche Bahn manage several dense urban public transport systems.

• Berlin has two commercial airports. Tegel International Airport (TXL), which lies within the city limits, and Schönefeld International Airport (SXF), which is situated just outside Berlin's south-eastern border in the state of Brandenburg. Both airports together handled 22,3 million passengers in 2010. In 2011, 88 airlines serve 164 destinations in 54 countries from Berlin. Tegel Airport is the European hub of Air Berlin, whereas Schönefeld services mainly low-cost airline travel.

• Berlin's airport authority plans to transfer all of Berlin's air traffic in June 2012 to a newly built airport at Schönefeld, to be renamed Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER). City authorities want to establish a European aviation hub with a gateway to Asia.

• In 2009, the nominal GDP of the citystate Berlin experienced a growth rate of 1.7% (-3.5% in Germany) and totaled €90.1 (~$117) billion. Berlin's economy is dominated by the service sector, with around 80% of all companies doing business in services. The unemployment rate had steadily decreased over the past decade and reached a 13-year low in 2008; As of April 2010 unemployment was at 14.2% (German average: 7.9%).

• Fast-growing economic sectors are communications, life sciences, and transportation. Specifically, services that use information and communication technologies, as well as media and music, advertising and design, biotechnology, environmental services, and medical engineering.

• The Science and Business Park of Berlin-Adlershof is among the 15 largest technology parks worldwide. Research and development have high economic significance for the city, and the Berlin–Brandenburg region ranks among the top-three innovative regions in the EU.

• Berlin's history has left the city with a highly eclectic array of architecture and buildings. The city's appearance today is predominantly shaped by the key role it played in Germany's history in the 20th century. Each of the national governments based in Berlin​—​the 1871 German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, East Germany, and now the reunified Germany​—​initiated ambitious (re-)construction programs, with each adding its own distinctive style to the city's architecture. Berlin was devastated by bombing raids during World War II, and many of the buildings that had remained after the war were demolished in the 1950s and 1960s in both West and East Berlin. Much of this demolition was initiated by municipal architecture programs to build new residential or business quarters and main roads.

• The eastern parts of Berlin have many Plattenbauten, reminders of Eastern Bloc ambitions to create complete residential areas that had fixed ratios of shops, kindergartens and schools to the number of inhabitants.

• The Berlin-Brandenburg capital region is one of the most prolific centers of higher education and research in the European Union. The city has four universities and 27 private, professional and technical colleges (Hochschulen), offering a wide range of disciplines. 135,327 students were registered at the 31 universities and colleges in 2008/09. The three largest universities combined have approximately 100,000 enrolled students. They are the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin with 35,000 students, the Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin) with ca. 35,000 students, and the Technische Universität Berlin with 30,000 students. The Universität der Künste has about 4,300 students.

• The city has a high density of research institutions, such as the Fraunhofer Society, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community and the Max Planck Society, which are independent of, or only loosely connected to its universities. A total number of 62,000 scientists are working in research and development. The city is one of the centers of knowledge and innovation communities (Future Information and Communication Society and Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation) of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).

• In addition to libraries that are affiliated with the various universities, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin is a major research library. Its two main locations are near Potsdamer Platz on Potsdamer Straße and on Unter den Linden. There are also 108 public libraries in the city.

• At the end of World War I in 1918, a republic was proclaimed in Berlin. In 1920, the Greater Berlin Act incorporated dozens of suburban cities, villages, and estates around Berlin into an expanded city. This new area encompassed Spandau and Charlottenburg in the west, as well as several other areas that are now major municipalities. After this expansion, Berlin had a population of around four million. During the Weimar era, Berlin became internationally renowned as a center of cultural transformation, at the heart of the Roaring Twenties.

• On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power through the Machtergreifung. Nazi rule destroyed Berlin's Jewish community, which had numbered 170,000 before 1933. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, thousands of the city's Jews were imprisoned in the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp or, in early 1943, were shipped to death camps, such as Auschwitz. During World War II, large parts of Berlin were destroyed in the 1943–45 air raids and during the Battle of Berlin. Among the hundreds of thousands who died during the Battle for Berlin, an estimated 125,000 were civilians. After the end of the war in Europe in 1945, Berlin received large numbers of refugees from the Eastern provinces. The victorious powers divided the city into four sectors, analogous to the occupation zones into which Germany was divided. The sectors of the Western Allies (the United States, the United Kingdom and France) formed West Berlin, while the Soviet sector formed East Berlin.

• All four allies shared administrative responsibilities for Berlin. However, in 1948, when the Western allies extended the currency reform in the Western zones of Germany to the three western sectors of Berlin, the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on the access routes to and from West Berlin, which lay entirely inside Soviet-controlled territory. The Berlin airlift, conducted by the three western allies, overcame this blockade by supplying food and other supplies to the city from 24 June 1948 to 11 May 1949. In 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in West Germany and eventually included all of the American, British, and French zones, excluding those three countries' zones in Berlin, while the Marxist-Leninist German Democratic Republic was proclaimed in East Germany. West Berlin officially remained an occupied city, but politically it was very closely aligned with Federal Republic of Germany despite Berlin's geographic location within East Germany. West Berlin issued its own postage stamps, which were often the same as West German postage stamps but with the additional word 'Berlin' added. Airline service to West Berlin was granted only to American, British, and French airlines.

• The founding of the two German states increased Cold War tensions. West Berlin was surrounded by East German territory and East Germany proclaimed East Berlin (described as "Berlin") as its capital, a move that was not recognized by the western powers. Although only half the size and population of West Berlin, East Berlin included most of the historic center of the city. The West German government, meanwhile, established itself provisionally in Bonn.

• As a result of the political and economical tensions brought on by the Cold War, on August 13, 1961, East Germany began building of the Berlin Wall between East and West Berlin and similar barriers around West Berlin, and events escalated to a tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie on 27 October 1961. West Berlin was now de facto a part of West Germany with a unique legal status, while East Berlin was de facto a part of East Germany.

• Berlin was completely divided. Although it was possible for Westerners to pass from one to the other only through strictly controlled checkpoints, for most Easterners, travel to West Berlin or West Germany was no longer possible. In 1971, a Four-Power agreement guaranteed access to and from West Berlin by car or train through East Germany and ended the potential for harassment or closure of the routes.

• In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and pressure from the East German population the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, and was subsequently mostly demolished, with little of its physical structure remaining today; the East Side Gallery in Friedrichshain near the Oberbaumbrücke over the Spree preserves a portion of the Wall.

• On October 3, 1990, the two parts of Germany were reunified as the Federal Republic of Germany, and Berlin again became the official German capital. In June 1991, the German Parliament, the Bundestag, voted to move the seat of the (West) German capital back from Bonn to Berlin, which was completed in 1999.