The Berlin Bear: Why the City Has One, and Where to See the Bears Worth Finding

Stand on Alexanderplatz for five minutes and count the bears. One on the flag over the Rotes Rathaus, a dozen in the souvenir shop windows, one on a street sign, a painted one outside a hotel. By the end of a weekend most visitors have photographed a few of them and still could not tell you why the city chose a bear in the first place.

The Berlin bear has a better story than the souvenirs suggest, and the bears worth finding are fewer than you think. Below is why Berlin has one, how it got onto the coat of arms, and the five or six places where a bear is actually worth a detour on a short trip.

Why Berlin has a bear at all

The honest answer starts with a pun. Most historians read the name Berlin as Slavic, from an old word for swamp or wet ground, which fits a town that grew up on the marshy banks of the Spree. To German ears, though, "Berlin" sounds like Bär, bear, and a small bear, Bärlein. Medieval towns loved arms that played on their own name, and heralds call this a canting coat of arms. Berlin got a bear because the name sounded like one.

You will also hear that the bear comes from Albrecht the Bear, the margrave who founded the Mark Brandenburg in the 12th century. It is a nice story and there is no proof for it. The pun is the explanation most historians accept.

How the bear got onto the coat of arms

The bear did not start as the main figure. The city's own short history of the coat of arms says the oldest known Berlin seal, from 1253, shows only the eagle of the margraves of Brandenburg. On the second seal, from 1280, two bears appear for the first time, standing on either side of the eagle's shield like guards.

The Berlin seal of 1280, the first with bears. They still stand beside the eagle, not in its place.

Over the 14th and 15th centuries the bear moved to the centre and the eagle faded out. By the time Berlin was a royal capital, the bear was the city. The version you see today is set out in the state's rules: an upright black bear with a red tongue and red claws on a silver shield, under a gold crown whose band is a city wall with a gate. That design has been the official one in West Berlin since 1954 and for the whole city since January 1991.

Look at it closely once and you will see why it works so well on a flag. The bear is walking upright, tongue out, claws raised, half dignified and half ready for a fight. That upright heraldic bear is the one I turned into my Berlin Bear print, torn into paper layers of black, blue and pink, because the shape is strong enough to survive almost anything you do to it.

The coat-of-arms bear in torn-paper layers. My Berlin Bear print, printed to order.

The bear pit in Köllnischer Park

For 76 years Berlin did something stranger than put a bear on a flag: it kept real ones in the city centre. The Bärenzwinger in Köllnischer Park opened on 17 August 1939 with four brown bears. Two of them, Urs and Vreni, were a present from the bear pit in Bern for Berlin's 700th anniversary in 1937.

Generations of Berliners grew up visiting the bears next to the Märkisches Museum. The enclosure was small and the criticism grew louder every decade. When the last bear, Schnute, had to be put down in October 2015, the district decided that no new bears would move in.

The Bärenzwinger in 2012, when bears still lived here. The district now runs it as a free art space.

Since 2017 the empty pit has been a municipal gallery. It is open every day from 10:00 to 18:00 and entry is free. The exhibitions change, but the reason to go is the place itself: you walk through the rooms where the city kept its heraldic animal in a cage, and the shows usually deal with exactly that. It is a few minutes on foot from the U2 stop Märkisches Museum, and I would pick it over any souvenir bear in Mitte.

The bear fountain on Werderscher Markt

Two minutes from the Schlossbrücke, in front of the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche, a mother bear sits on a pillar while pairs of cubs play around her. This is the Bärenbrunnen. Hugo Lederer made it in 1928, the war destroyed it, and in 1958 the East Berlin authorities had Walter Sutkowski carve it again from the old design in red stone.

The Bärenbrunnen on Werderscher Markt. Walk round it once: every pair of cubs is up to something different.

Most people heading for Museum Island walk straight past it. It deserves two minutes, and it is the best bear in Berlin for small children, who can see every cub at eye level.

Buddy Bears: fun, but do not hunt them all

The painted bears with their arms in the air are Buddy Bears. Eva and Klaus Herlitz started them with the sculptor Roman Strobl in the early 2000s as a street-art project, and the idea stuck. Companies, hotels and embassies bought their own, so today they stand all over the city, each one painted differently.

A Buddy Bear at the Westin Grand on Friedrichstraße. There are many more; this one is on the way between Unter den Linden and Gendarmenmarkt.

My judgement: photograph the ones you pass and do not plan a day around them. They are everywhere, which is the point, and none of them is more "the" Buddy Bear than another. If your children love them, the Buddy Bear site keeps a map of where they stand.

Find the bears near you

The bears worth a detour are spread across Mitte, and walking to all of them in one go makes no sense on a short trip. I built a small map that puts them in walking order from where you start, inside the time you actually have, and tells you what to do at each stop. You can also open the Berlin Bear Hunt map on its own page.

Knut, the most famous bear of them all

If you were anywhere near a newspaper in 2007, you know Knut: the polar bear cub raised by hand at Berlin Zoo who became a world star. He died in 2011, and his mounted body now stands in the Museum für Naturkunde on Invalidenstraße, in the room on the art of taxidermy, with Bobby the gorilla.

The museum is closed on Mondays and opens Tuesday to Friday from 9:30 and at weekends from 10:00, until 18:00. An adult ticket costs 11 euros, and it also closes on a few event days, such as 24 and 25 November 2026, so check the date before you go. Knut alone is not worth the ticket. The dinosaur hall is, and I wrote about it in my guide to the Berlin natural history museum.

The bear that greets you on the motorway

The bear most people outside Berlin know comes from the sculptor Renée Sintenis. Her young bear, upright with one paw raised, became the trophy of the Berlin film festival: the Golden and Silver Bears handed out at the Berlinale every February are small versions of her Berliner Bär.

Renée Sintenis's bear on the A115 at Dreilinden. It waves at everyone driving into Berlin and turns its back on everyone leaving.

In the late 1950s a 1.6 metre bronze of the same bear was set on the central strip of the motorway at Dreilinden, where West Germans drove into West Berlin through the checkpoint. It is still there, and two more of her bears now stand on the motorways at Treptow and Pankow. You cannot stop to see them, so do not try: watch for the Dreilinden bear on the left if you come in by car or long-distance bus from the south-west.

How I would see the Berlin bear in one day

If you have a free hour or two in Mitte, this is my order:

• Lustgarten, by the Berliner Dom: the old street sign carries a crowned bear. Outside, any time.

• Bärenbrunnen, Werderscher Markt: two minutes over the Schlossbrücke. Outside, any time.

• Bärenzwinger, Rungestraße 30: the old bear pit, now a free art space. Daily 10:00 to 18:00.

• Museum für Naturkunde, Invalidenstraße 43: Knut, but only if you want the dinosaurs too. Closed on Mondays.

Finish at the Bärenzwinger if you can: it is the one place where the story of the city and its bears comes together. The Lustgarten is also a stop on my walking tour, Berlin Then and Now, which runs about 2.5 hours from the World Clock on Alexanderplatz to Hackescher Markt.

The crowned bear on the Lustgarten sign, with the Berliner Dom behind. Look up before you look at the cathedral.

Skip the souvenir-shop bears, give the Buddy Bears a photo each, and spend your time where the bear actually means something: in the story of a seal from 1280, in an empty cage on Rungestraße and on a fountain most people walk past. That is where the city's animal stops being a logo.

Image credits

Source and licence details for the 3 photographs used in this article.

The old bear pit in Köllnischer Park: Goethe20, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Bärenbrunnen on Werderscher Markt: Derbrauni, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Buddy Bear at the Westin Grand on Friedrichstraße: Aagnverglaser, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.