Schöneberg
Stand outside Rathaus Schöneberg and the square still carries the weight of a single sentence: on 26 June 1963, John F. Kennedy stood on these steps and told a crowd of West Berliners that he was one of them. The square was renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz three days after his assassination. That pairing of hope and grief is very Schöneberg.
The district runs on contrasts like that. Marlene Dietrich was born here in 1901; David Bowie lived on Hauptstraße from 1976 to 1978 and wrote three albums from a flat that looked out onto a divided city. The streets around Nollendorfplatz have been a gathering point for queer life in Berlin since the Weimar era, when Christopher Isherwood was taking notes for what would become *Goodbye to Berlin*.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to walk the U4 — all 2.9 km of it, the shortest U-Bahn line in the city — getting off at Viktoria-Luise-Platz to sit by the fountain under the Art Nouveau facades, then continuing to Bayerischer Platz. The Ceciliengärten courtyards nearby are worth slipping through on a quiet morning.
Deals in Schöneberg
Book directly at the providerHow Schöneberg came to be
Schöneberg's first written record dates to 1264, a deed issued by Margrave Otto III of Brandenburg. The village was razed on 7 October 1760, when Habsburg and Russian forces burned it and its church to the ground during the Seven Years' War. It rebuilt, and in 1751 Bohemian weavers had already established Neu-Schöneberg along the northern stretch of Hauptstraße, adding a second settlement that would merge with the original in 1874. By 1898 it held town privileges; by 1899 it was an independent Prussian city.
That independence lasted barely two decades. The 1920 Greater Berlin Act folded Schöneberg into the expanding capital, and the Rathaus — completed in sandstone in 1914 — became the seat of West Berlin's city government after the war, a role it held until 1991. The Cold War gave the building its most lasting association: the speech Kennedy delivered from its steps.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers in Schöneberg run warm and walkable, with long evenings that suit the outdoor tables around Nollendorfplatz and Viktoria-Luise-Platz. Winters are grey and often damp, but the streets are quieter and the indoor rhythm of the neighbourhood — cafés, KaDeWe's food hall — becomes its own reason to visit.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.