Queer History in Berlin: A Walk From Bebelplatz to Nollendorfplatz
Come up the stairs at U Nollendorfplatz on the Motzstraße side and there is a pink granite triangle on the station wall. Most visitors walk past it. The few who stop usually have the same question: where is the rest of this story?
It is spread across two districts. Part of it is in the Tiergarten, a short walk from the Brandenburg Gate, and part of it is in the streets around this station. The history of queer Berlin is also one of the few subjects where the order you visit the places changes what you understand, so this post is a route: seven stops, about 6.7 km on foot, from the square where the books burned in 1933 to the corner where the Eldorado club closed that same spring.
The six calla lilies on Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer, unveiled in 2017 for the first homosexual emancipation movement, which began in Berlin.
Queer history in Berlin: why the walk starts in 1897
On 15 May 1897, the doctor Magnus Hirschfeld and three other men founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in his flat in Charlottenburg. It was the first organisation anywhere to campaign against a law that made sex between men a crime, Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code. In 1919 Hirschfeld opened his Institute for Sexual Science by the Spree, with a library, a clinic and a public advice service.
The 1920s added a scene around it. Schöneberg had bars, clubs and magazines, and the Eldorado became the name people outside Berlin knew. Then it ended fast:
1 March 1933: the Eldorado on Motzstraße closed for good.
6 May 1933: students and SA men looted the Institute and took its library.
10 May 1933: books from the Institute went into the fire on today's Bebelplatz.
1935: the Nazis widened Paragraph 175. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives about 100,000 arrests under the law in the Nazi years, about 53,400 convictions, and between 5,000 and 15,000 men sent to concentration camps.
The law did not end with the war. West Germany kept the Nazi version until 1969 and repealed Paragraph 175 completely only in 1994. That is why so many of the memorials on this walk are recent. The scholars Matt Fuller and Leah Owen open their 2022 article on the attack on the Institute with the same four days in May 1933, and they are the days this walk is built around.
The walk, stop by stop
I would walk it in this order: Mitte and the Tiergarten in daylight, then down to Schöneberg for the museum and the evening. The distances are my estimates along the streets.
Bebelplatz and the Tiergarten: stops 1 to 3
Stop 1, Bebelplatz. In the middle of the square a glass pane in the paving looks down into Micha Ullman's memorial, a white room with empty shelves for 20,000 books, opened in 1995. The Institute's books burned here with the rest. My guide to Bebelplatz has the full story of the square.
Stop 2, the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, about 1.6 km west along Unter den Linden and through the Brandenburg Gate. It is a grey concrete block on Ebertstraße at the edge of the Tiergarten, by the artists Elmgreen and Dragset, opened on 27 May 2008. Look through the small window: a short film of two people kissing plays on a loop. The Stiftung Denkmal looks after it, and the plaque beside it is in German and English.
The memorial on Ebertstraße, with the Tiergarten behind it. The film plays inside the small window on the left.
Stop 3, Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer, about 1.6 km north-west through the park to the river. The Institute stood near here, at In den Zelten 10, and the building is gone. What you find is the riverside path named after Hirschfeld in 2008, a memorial stele for the Institute, and the six rainbow calla lilies from 2017, opposite the Federal Chancellery. In a 2018 article on the monument, the historian Javier Samper Vendrell quotes the reason its builders gave for the flower: one calla plant carries both feminine and masculine blooms.
6 May 1933: the Institute for Sexual Science is looted. Four days later its books were burned.
Schöneberg: stops 4 to 7
Stop 4, the Schwules Museum, about 2.1 km south through the Tiergarten and over the Landwehrkanal, at Lützowstraße 73. It was founded in 1985 and has been here since 2013, with exhibitions on lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer history and a large archive. This is the stop that needs a clock, so read the timing section below before you plan.
Stop 5, the pink triangle plaque at U Nollendorfplatz, about 0.8 km further. It went up in 1989 and was the first public memorial to the homosexual victims of the Nazis in a German city. The words on it, Totgeschlagen, Totgeschwiegen, mean beaten to death, silenced to death.
The pink triangle on the wall of U Nollendorfplatz, with wreaths laid below it.
Stop 6, Nollendorfstraße 17, two minutes away. The English writer Christopher Isherwood rented a room here from December 1930 until May 1933, and his Berlin stories later became the musical Cabaret. It is a private house with a plaque by the door, so look from the pavement.
Stop 7, the Eldorado at Motzstraße 24, on the corner of Kalckreuthstraße. The club moved here in 1930, when the address was still Motzstraße 15, and closed on 1 March 1933. Today the ground floor is a supermarket, and the streets around it, Motzstraße and Fuggerstraße above all, are still the centre of gay Schöneberg.
The Eldorado on the corner of Motzstraße and Kalckreuthstraße in 1932. The poster says "Hier ist's richtig", this is the right place.
The same corner at Motzstraße 24 in 2022. Nothing on the building says what it was.
You can build your own version of the route here. Tap a stop to leave it out, pick your day, and the distance, the time and the museum hours change with it. On the walk, press Next stop as you go. The tool also has its own page: the queer history walk map.
When to go: the day decides more than the route
The outdoor stops are open at any hour. The museum is not, and in November the light is short, so the day you pick shapes the walk.
The Schwules Museum is closed on Tuesdays. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday it opens 12:00 to 18:00, on Thursday 12:00 to 20:00, on Saturday 14:00 to 19:00 and on Sunday 14:00 to 18:00. Admission is 10 euros, reduced 5, according to the museum's visitor page, checked on 28 October 2026.
From 3 to 8 November 2026 the whole museum is closed for building work, and from 9 to 26 November only one exhibition is open, at a lower price. In that window I would treat stop 4 as a doorway, not a visit.
The Tiergarten stops want daylight. In November it is dark by about 16:30, so start at Bebelplatz before noon.
Thursday is the best day for the whole walk: the Tiergarten in the morning, lunch, the museum in the afternoon with time to spare, and Schöneberg at dusk.
My advice: if you only have an afternoon, do the Schöneberg half. Stops 4 to 7 are within 1.5 km of each other, and the station at Nollendorfplatz is on four U-Bahn lines, so getting there and away is easy.
Where the evening goes after the walk
The walk ends where Berlin's oldest gay neighbourhood still lives. The bars around Motzstraße and Fuggerstraße fill up in the evening, and the area is easy to explore on foot, so I would rather end here than go back across town. My Schöneberg guide has the café on Hauptstraße that opened in 1977 as one of West Berlin's first openly gay cafés, and the rest of the district.
In summer the same streets fill for the Lesbisch-schwules Stadtfest, a street festival around Nollendorfplatz usually held in June, and then for Pride, the Christopher Street Day parade. My Berlin Pride guide covers the parade. For the other memorials near the Brandenburg Gate, my post on free Berlin memorials puts them in one short loop.
My move
Pick a Thursday outside 3 to 8 November. Start at Bebelplatz before noon, take the Tiergarten in daylight, spend an hour in the Schwules Museum, and finish at the Eldorado corner as the bars on Motzstraße open. If you want more Berlin notes like this, places, dates and the small decisions that change a day, my weekly newsletter is where I send them.
Image credits
Source and licence details for the 6 photographs used in this article.
The calla lily memorial on Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer, 21 October 2025: Flocci Nivis, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, Tiergarten, 30 March 2020: Agentakt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Institute for Sexual Science being looted, 6 May 1933 (National Digital Archives, Poland): Unknown photographer, National Digital Archives (Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The pink triangle plaque at U Nollendorfplatz: James Steakley, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Eldorado at Motzstraße and Kalckreuthstraße, 1932 (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1983-0121-500): Unknown photographer, Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.
The corner of Motzstraße 24, 24 August 2022: Babewyn, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.