Köpenick Berlin: The Palace, the Lake and the Fake Captain Who Fooled Prussia
Ask Berliners where the city's oldest corner is and most will point at Mitte, somewhere between the TV Tower and the Nikolaiviertel. They are wrong by about 15 kilometres. The oldest place in Berlin is Köpenick, a town on an island in the far southeast, first recorded in 1209, almost thirty years before Berlin and Cölln show up in any document. It has a Baroque palace on its own island, a lane of fishermen's houses, the city's biggest lake around the corner, and a town hall that once got robbed by a shoemaker in a second-hand captain's uniform.
My advice: treat Köpenick as a half-day boat trip you take by S-Bahn. The mistake I see visitors make is squeezing it between two Mitte museums and spending more time in transit than by the water. Go out with time to waste, walk the old town slowly, and decide on the spot whether the afternoon belongs to the palace or the lake. Here is how the whole thing fits together.
The old town island across the Frauentog bay, where the Dahme wraps around Köpenick's medieval core.
Why Köpenick is older than Berlin
Köpenick began as a Slavic fortress settlement on the island where the Dahme river meets the Spree, and the water explains everything about it. The location controlled river trade, so it was fortified, fought over and finally absorbed by the growing Brandenburg towns downstream. The first written record, as "Copnic", dates to 1209. Berlin's own founding documents come from 1237 and 1244, which is why locals here enjoy pointing out that Köpenick was already old news when Berlin was invented.
It stayed its own town until 1920, when Greater Berlin swallowed it whole, and that is exactly what it still feels like: a small Brandenburg town that happens to have a Berlin postcode. If you have read my piece on why Berlin has no beautiful old town, Köpenick is the footnote that proves the rule. The old town Berlin lost in the centre survives out here, on an island the war largely passed by.
Getting to Köpenick from central Berlin
Take the S3. It runs from the central Stadtbahn stations through Ostkreuz straight to Köpenick station, about 20 minutes from Alexanderplatz. From the station you have two good options: bus 164 takes about nine minutes to Schloßplatz at the edge of the old town, or you can make the flat 20-minute walk down Bahnhofstraße. The station itself is a construction site with a purpose: it is being rebuilt so that regional trains can stop here too, currently planned for the end of 2027.
A yellow tram crossing Schloßplatz at the edge of the old town. From here everything is two to five minutes on foot.
One normal AB ticket covers the entire day out here, including the S-Bahn, bus 164, the trams and even the F12 ferry you will meet later in this guide. Köpenick sits comfortably inside zone B, so there is no ticket puzzle to solve; if zones are new to you, my AB and ABC ticket guide settles it in two minutes, and my tram guide explains why the southeast is tram country in the first place.
The town hall and the fake captain
The brick town hall on Alt-Köpenick is worth a stop for the architecture alone, a Gothic-revival pile from the early 1900s with a tower you can see across the water. But the reason its name is known far beyond Berlin is what happened on 16 October 1906.
Rathaus Köpenick. In 1906 a fake captain marched in through this entrance with borrowed soldiers and left with the town treasury.
Wilhelm Voigt, an unemployed shoemaker with a long prison record, bought a used Prussian captain's uniform, stopped two squads of real soldiers on their way back to barracks, and ordered them to follow him. Nobody questioned the uniform. He occupied this town hall, arrested the mayor, declared the treasury confiscated and walked out with around 4,000 marks. The soldiers obeyed him to the end, because in Prussia a uniform outranked common sense. The world's press loved it, the Kaiser reportedly laughed, and German gained a word, the Köpenickiade, for a con pulled off with nothing but the costume of authority.
Find the bronze captain on the town hall steps. The statue by Spartak Babajan has stood there since 1996, next to the memorial plaque for Voigt, and it is the most photographed pair of boots in the district.
The captain himself, waiting at the Rathaus steps since 1996. Rub shoulders with Germany's most successful bad actor.
Schloss Köpenick: a palace on its own island
A five-minute walk from the town hall, over a small bridge, sits Schloss Köpenick, a Dutch Baroque palace built between 1677 and 1685 on yet another island in the Dahme. Today it houses a branch of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, the museum of decorative arts, with Renaissance and Baroque interiors that fit the building better than most Berlin museum pairings.
Schloss Köpenick from across the Dahme. The palace island and its garden are free to walk even when the museum is closed.
The practical rules are simple. Entry costs 8 euros, reduced 4, and the museum is closed Monday and Tuesday. Summer hours are Wednesday to Friday 11:00 to 17:00 and weekends 11:00 to 18:00. The palace garden and the island itself are free and open daily, which matters, because on a warm evening the lawns by the water are reason enough to come.
One dark footnote for the history-minded: in October 1730 the court-martial in the affair of Crown Prince Frederick, later Frederick the Great, and his friend Hans Hermann von Katte met in this palace after their failed flight to England. The king overrode the court's mercy for Katte, and the affair ended with his execution while the prince was forced to watch. The prettiest island in the southeast has one of Prussia's coldest stories in its guest book.
The Kietz, and how to plan the rest
Cross Müggelheimer Straße from the palace bridge and you are in the Kietz, the old fishermen's lane. It is one quiet street of low houses with river gardens, some from the 18th century, and it asks for fifteen unhurried minutes rather than a checklist. This is the version of Berlin where you hear your own footsteps.
From here the question is how much water you want. I built the map below the way I plan the district with friends: pick your time budget, and it shows which loop actually fits, leg by leg, from a two-hour old town visit to a full Müggelsee day, with the transport for each step on one AB ticket.
Extending to the water: the ferry and the lake
Two extensions turn Köpenick from a sightseeing stop into a proper day out.
The F12 ferry loop is Berlin's shortest boat trip and its best transit secret. Take tram 68 from Schloßplatz to its leafy Wendenschloß terminus, walk a few minutes down to the Dahme, and the little F12 ferry crosses to Grünau in about two minutes, on a normal BVG ticket. On the Grünau side, tram 68 from Wassersportallee runs you back to Schloßplatz. The whole loop takes about an hour and gives you the district from the water without booking anything.
The Luisenhain promenade behind the town hall. Excursion boats tie up here in season, and the whole old town is water-edged like this.
The Müggelsee, Berlin's largest lake, is a short S-Bahn ride away. Continue east on the S3 from Köpenick to Friedrichshagen, then walk Bölschestraße, the old brewery town's main street, about 20 minutes down to the lakeside Müggelpark. The lake is about 7.3 square kilometres of open water with official bathing beaches around its shore, and a pedestrian tunnel under the river connects the park to the wooded south bank. If lakes are the reason you came to Berlin in summer, my Berlin lakes guide ranks this one against the rest of the field.
Energetic visitors can keep going: from the tunnel, a forest walk of about an hour climbs the Müggelberge to the Müggelturm, a 30-metre tower with 126 steps and a view from the lake all the way back to the TV Tower. It costs 6 euros and its opening hours are short, so check before you commit to the hike.
Football fans have their own reason to be here: Union Berlin's stadium, the Alte Försterei, sits in the trees of the Wuhlheide a short walk from Köpenick station, and my guide to seeing a match in Berlin explains why their home games are the hardest ticket in the city.
Where Köpenick fits in a Berlin visit
Köpenick is not a first-day destination, and it does not pretend to be. It is what you do once the Brandenburg Gate photos exist: the day you find out Berlin has an old town after all, it just keeps it 20 minutes from Alexanderplatz, surrounded by water. Pair it with a lazy lake afternoon in summer or a palace-and-coffee loop in winter, and you will come back with photos most Berlin visitors cannot place.
On my free 2-hour walking tour from Alexanderplatz I tell the story of medieval Berlin around the Marienkirche and the TV Tower, where the original town has to be imagined between the towers. Köpenick is the perfect companion piece: the small river town that kept everything Berlin's centre lost. See the imagined old town with me in the morning, then take the S3 out and walk through the real thing in the afternoon.
Image credits
Source and licence details for the 6 photographs used in this article.
Old town island across the Frauentog: Lotse, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Tram at Schloßplatz Köpenick: Paul Korecky, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Rathaus Köpenick: Paul Korecky, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Captain of Köpenick statue: OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Schloss Köpenick across the Dahme: A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Luisenhain waterfront on the Dahme: Paul Korecky, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.