Friedrichshain

This guide to Berlin's Friedrichshain district centers on the flak tower built here in 1941, a fortress so vast it could shelter tens of thousands of Berliners alongside crates of art pulled from the city's museums, its guns worked by teenage boys and later held off Soviet troops for days. It follows the fire that broke out inside days after the surrender, the Red Army's failed attempt to demolish the ruin, and the four years women spent hauling wartime rubble over it to bury it beneath the hill you're standing on.