Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church: How to Visit Berlin's Broken Tower

Come up the escalators at Zoologischer Garten, or walk the shopping end of Tauentzienstraße near KaDeWe, and you meet it almost by accident: a broken church tower standing in the middle of the traffic, its top sheared off and left ragged. That is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and Berliners have a blunt nickname for the stump. They call it der hohle Zahn, the hollow tooth.

Most visitors photograph it from the square and move on. That is a small miss. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is free to enter, it takes twenty quiet minutes, and it tells the story of the whole city in one spot: an imperial church, a wartime ruin, and a striking modern building that Berlin chose to grow around the damage instead of hiding it.

At night the modern nave glows deep blue and the old tower is lit gold. The two buildings side by side are the whole point.

What the "hollow tooth" actually is

The site is really two buildings on one square, Breitscheidplatz, at the head of the Kurfürstendamm in the western part of the city.

The tall ruin is what survived of the original church. The rest of the ensemble, the low octagonal hall next to it and the slim bell tower, is modern. When people say the church looks strange, this is why: Berlin did not rebuild the old church or clear it away. It kept the broken tower as a war memorial and built a new church tight against it.

Both parts are open to walk into, both are free, and both are worth your time. They just keep different hours, which is the one detail that catches visitors out. More on that below.

A short history: from Kaiser Wilhelm II to a wartime ruin

The original church was built between 1891 and 1895 by the architect Franz Schwechten, in a heavy Neo-Romanesque style. Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered it and named it in memory of his grandfather, Wilhelm I, the first emperor of a unified Germany. For decades it was one of the grand landmarks of the affluent new west end.

On the night of 23 November 1943, a British air raid gutted it. The nave burned out, but a large part of the entrance hall and the base of the tower held. After the war, the architect Egon Eiermann won the competition to replace it and first proposed clearing the ruin completely. The public pushed back hard, calling the broken tower the heart of the west, and Eiermann redesigned his plan to keep it. His new church, the glass one you see today, went up between 1959 and 1963 and was consecrated on 17 December 1961.

Inside the old tower, the original imperial mosaics survived. The banner names Wilhelm I, the emperor the church was built to honour.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church has two interiors

This is the part I want you to get right, because it decides your visit.

The New Church is the low octagonal building. Step inside and the noise of the square drops away. The walls are a honeycomb of small stained-glass squares in deep blue, designed with the French glass workshop of Gabriel Loire in Chartres, and a golden figure of Christ floats at the front. On a bright day the whole room turns cobalt. It is one of the calmest interiors in Berlin, and it is used for real services, not just sightseeing.

The Memorial Hall sits at the base of the old tower. It holds what the fire left behind: golden ceiling mosaics of the imperial family, a few original reliefs, and a small display with photographs of the church before and after 1943. There is also a Cross of Nails from Coventry Cathedral in England, a shared symbol of reconciliation between two cities that bombed each other.

The blue comes from thousands of small glass squares set into a double wall. Stand inside and let your eyes adjust.

Here are the hours that matter in 2026. Entry to both is free.

• New Church: daily, roughly 10:00 to 18:00.

• Memorial Hall (old tower): Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 18:00, Sunday 12:00 to 18:00.

• Sunday services are at 10:00 and 18:00, and casual visits pause during services, prayers and concerts.

Use the planner below to line up a day and time and see what is actually open before you walk over.

When to go, and when not to

My advice: aim for a weekday, late morning or mid-afternoon. Both interiors are open, tour groups thin out, and you can move between the two buildings without waiting on anything.

The one trap is Sunday morning. If you turn up at 10:30 on a Sunday, the New Church is holding a service and closed to sightseeing, and the old-tower Memorial Hall does not open until noon. I have watched people arrive, find both doors effectively shut, take one photo and leave, thinking that was the visit. Come after about 11:15, or just wait for midday, and you get the real thing.

If your day is already full, there is a second, free version of this church: after dark. The new nave glows blue from the inside and the old tower is floodlit, and the whole square is a good night walk near the Zoo and the Ku'damm.

How to get there

The church stands on Breitscheidplatz in City West, and it is genuinely easy to reach:

• S+U Zoologischer Garten is a three-minute walk (U2, U9 and S-Bahn lines S3, S5, S7, S9, S75).

• U Kurfürstendamm (U1, U9) is just as close from the other side.

• The sightseeing Bus 100 starts a short walk away at Zoo station, so you can pair the church with a cheap top-deck ride across the centre.

If the transport map still feels like a puzzle, my guide to the U-Bahn, S-Bahn, tram and bus walks through how tickets and lines fit together.

The church anchors the western shopping district, a short walk from KaDeWe and the Kurfürstendamm.

Is it worth it?

Yes, and it costs you nothing but half an hour. It works best as an anchor for a City West afternoon: the church, then a wander down the Kurfürstendamm, the food hall on the top floor of KaDeWe, or a walk into the Tiergarten. It is one of the better free things to do in Berlin, and it sits right in the middle of the shopping streets rather than out on its own.

Inside the old tower, the damage is left visible on purpose. That honesty is the memorial.

One quiet note before you go. The square in front of the church, Breitscheidplatz, was the site of a 2016 attack on the Christmas market. There is a memorial set into the ground by the steps, a golden crack in the paving with the names of those killed. It is easy to miss and worth a respectful pause.

That habit of keeping the scar in plain sight is very Berlin, and it is the same instinct that explains why the city has no polished old town. If that side of the city interests you, it is the thread I follow on my free walking tour through the historic centre, over in Mitte around Alexanderplatz. The Memorial Church is not on that route, but it is the clearest single example in the west of how Berlin chooses to remember.

For opening times straight from the source, the church runs its own site at gedaechtniskirche-berlin.de, and the city tourism board keeps a short overview on visitBerlin. Hours can shift for concerts and holidays, so it is worth a quick check before a special trip.

Image credits

• Night view of the church (cover): Perituss, CC0 (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

• City West daytime view: Flocci Nivis, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

• Old-tower Memorial Hall ceiling: Tenzin Peljor, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

• Imperial mosaic with the Wilhelm I banner: Wladyslaw (Taxiarchos228), Free Art License, via Wikimedia Commons.

• Blue glass detail: Jan Mathys, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.