Private Tour Guide on Berlin

I recommend Robert Sommer. He was the 15-year-old son of a fairly high-ranking East German bureaucrat when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. He knows the city incredibly well and can give many personal anecdotes about growing up in East Berlin, his dabbling in the East Berlin teen music subculture, his first trip into West Berlin, post-unification life in Berlin, and the capitalist product he held out the longest on trying. He has a PhD but presents information in a manner that is easy to understand. I did a tour comparing post-WWII East Berlin and West Berlin architecture with him and loved it, but he does a lot of "Intro to Berlin"-type tours, too. And he's a nice guy!

Just as heads up: calling "Berlin" as a port of a cruise is real fake headlining by the cruise provider (guess NCL?). You will spend around 6 hours in total on public transport (trains / buses) from Warnemünde to / from Berlin at that day (if self-organized).

Some general walking tours will give you an overview of Berlin with focus on eastern center. A HoHo bus tour from / to main station can get you around with some background info and you can spend time at sights you like before getting back to ship.

As you can see on TA nearly all Berlin tours (even the "free") are ranked very high which gives more indication on Berlin as destination than on the quality of the tour and information provided.

Also Mr Sommer has a little failure on his website because Berlin is much older than 800 years but that was the first time it was mentioned in a document. Also important to mention that some parts of what is Berlin now where mentioned long before in documents - Spandau is a well known example for that. Compared with today you can say that of course there were Internet pages before listed first time on Google :-) Currently some archaeological work is started near Nikolaiviertel (old first Berlin) because they found older rest of buildings.

In total it is really helpful to have a German or better a Berlin born guide who can tell you from an own perspective of a Berliner what the younger history meant for her / him.

Lessing, that great dramatist, has his house in the Nikolaiviertel.

If you really want to see Europe cruising is not the way to do it.

If you have not been to Berlin before, go for it. You can get a good orientation of the city, which just may inspire you to make a longer trip to Berlin in the future. I will saw Berlin on a day-tour on a Baltic cruise and later returned for nearly a week to see the city.

The top guides can arrange transportation to and from Berlin for a group. Popular guides are Heidi Leyton and Jeremy Minsberg (check out their websites).

Also, I am sure this topic has been discussed a number of times on this forum. And it frequently comes up on the cruisecritic.com website.