Berlin Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Berlin trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Berlin has been the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, the Kingdom of Prussia, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, East Germany and reunified Germany, and it wears all of that history in its streets. This quiz starts with the twin towns of Berlin and Colln in 1237, the Huguenots who made up a third of the population by 1700, Frederick the Great, Napoleon's theft of the Quadriga and the 1920 act that turned the city into a metropolis of four million. The Cold War gets its due: the Airlift's raisin bombers, the Wall's 13 August 1961 start and 9 November 1989 fall, Checkpoint Charlie's tank standoff, ghost stations, Kennedy's speech and the doughnut myth, and the Fernsehturm cross the Pope supposedly took revenge with. Then the city as it is now: Museum Island and Nefertiti, Norman Foster's Reichstag dome, the East Side Gallery, Tempelhof's runways as a park, the Berlinale, the marathon that keeps producing world records, currywurst and doner, Berghain and Knut the polar bear. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Berlin and its landmarks and events, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Our Germany quiz covers the rest of the country.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Berlin's name probably comes from an old Slavic word for which kind of landscape?
Swamp
Swamp: the name is thought to go back to a Polabian root, berl- or birl-, for wet ground, which fits a town that grew up on the low, boggy floor of a river valley.
Q 02Berlin's founding year, 1237, is really the first record of which twin town?
Cölln
Cölln appears in a document of 1237, seven years before Berlin itself; in 1307 the two towns joined forces and shared a town hall, and Cölln's name later vanished into Berlin's.
Q 03Which river was Berlin built along?
The Spree
The Spree splits into several branches as it winds through the city centre, and the island between two of them became Museum Island; farther west it flows into the Havel.
Q 04Bruno Taut's UNESCO-listed 1920s housing estate in Berlin-Britz is built around a block in the shape of what?
A horseshoe
A horseshoe: the Hufeisensiedlung bends one long block of flats around a pond; it was among six estates built to give Berliners on low incomes decent modern homes, and UNESCO listed all six in 2008.
Q 05Which dynasty ruled Berlin from the 15th century until 1918, ending as German emperors?
The Hohenzollerns
The Hohenzollerns took their name from a castle in Swabia, in Germany's far south-west; one branch was granted Brandenburg in 1415, and its heirs ruled from Berlin for the next five centuries.
Q 06The Great Elector's Edict of Potsdam in 1685 offered asylum to which persecuted group?
French Huguenots
The French Huguenots, Protestants driven out when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, settled in such numbers that a new quarter of Berlin was largely theirs; its French Cathedral still stands on Gendarmenmarkt.
Q 07Which sculpture did Napoleon carry off to Paris as war booty after his army took Berlin in 1806?
The Quadriga
The Quadriga, the four-horse chariot on top of the Brandenburg Gate, spent eight years in Paris; it came home in 1814 after Napoleon's fall and was set back in its old place.
Q 08The Brandenburg Gate was modelled on the monumental gateway to which ancient site?
The Acropolis of Athens
The Acropolis of Athens: architect Carl Gotthard Langhans copied its gateway, the Propylaea, giving Berlin twelve Doric columns and five passages, the middle one once reserved for royalty.
Q 09Before German unification in 1871, Berlin was the royal capital of which kingdom?
Prussia
Prussia: Bismarck united the German states under Prussian leadership in 1871 and its king became emperor, so the Prussian capital simply became the capital of the whole empire.
Q 10Which wealthy independent city west of Berlin became one of its boroughs under the Greater Berlin Act of 1920?
Charlottenburg
Charlottenburg was one of seven towns merged with the capital, along with 59 villages and 27 estates; overnight Berlin's population doubled to about 3.8 million.
Q 11Which Social Democrat proclaimed the German republic from the Reichstag in November 1918 without his party's approval?
Philipp Scheidemann
Philipp Scheidemann left his lunch to speak from a Reichstag window on hearing that Karl Liebknecht was about to declare a socialist republic; his party leader Friedrich Ebert was furious.
Q 12Hitler and Albert Speer planned to rebuild Berlin as a 'World Capital' under what name?
Germania
Germania was mostly never built: the war stopped work, and one surviving relic is a giant concrete cylinder that Speer had poured in 1941 to test whether Berlin's soft ground could carry his colossal buildings.
Q 13The 1936 Berlin Olympics introduced which ceremony that became a permanent Olympic tradition?
Q 21Kennedy gave his 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech in 1963 outside which building, then West Berlin's city hall?
Rathaus Schöneberg
Rathaus Schöneberg housed West Berlin's mayor and senate through the years of division; only in 1991 did the city government move back to the Rotes Rathaus in the former East.
Q 22What do Berliners themselves call the jam doughnut that much of Germany knows as a Berliner?
Pfannkuchen
Pfannkuchen is the Berlin word, which is one reason the tale that Kennedy called himself a jelly doughnut in 1963 falls flat: to his audience a 'Berliner' was a citizen, not a pastry.
Q 23The Fernsehturm, East Germany's showpiece television tower of 1969, rises beside which Berlin square?
Alexanderplatz
The torch relay from Olympia
The torch relay from Olympia was the idea of organiser Carl Diem: 3,331 runners carried the flame from Greece to Berlin, each with a steel torch made by the arms firm Krupp.
Q 14During the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, which cargo made up about two-thirds of everything flown into the city?
Coal
Coal: the blockade had cut West Berlin off from the fuel that heated its homes and ran its power stations, so sacks of coal, not food, made up most of what the aircraft carried.
Q 15What did the Berlin Airlift's 'raisin bombers' drop for the city's children?
Candy
Candy: pilot Gail Halvorsen began Operation Little Vittles, floating chocolate bars and chewing gum down to waiting children on tiny parachutes made from handkerchiefs.
Q 16On the night of 12-13 August 1961, what did East German troops first use to seal the border through Berlin?
Barbed wire
Barbed wire and fencing went up overnight along the sector boundary; only in the following days did builders start replacing it with the concrete blocks that became the Wall.
Q 17Which West Berlin mayor coined the term 'Wall of Shame'?
Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt, West Berlin's governing mayor from 1957 to 1966, coined 'Wall of Shame' (Schandmauer); the East called it the 'Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart'.
Q 18On which date did the Berlin Wall fall?
9 November 1989
9 November 1989: after spokesman Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced at a press conference that travel was allowed 'immediately', crowds forced the checkpoints open that night.
Q 19What did Berliners call the sealed East Berlin stations that western metro trains rolled through without stopping?
Ghost stations
Ghost stations: trains slowed but never stopped at the dim, walled-up platforms, which armed East German guards patrolled; most were reopened soon after the Wall fell.
Q 20Soviet and American tanks faced off in October 1961 at which crossing point?
Checkpoint Charlie
Checkpoint Charlie was named for the letter C in the NATO alphabet, after checkpoints Alpha and Bravo; in October 1961 the tanks stood gun to gun there for 16 hours before both sides pulled back.
Alexanderplatz was East Berlin's showcase square, and the 368 m tower beside it, opened by Walter Ulbricht in October 1969, was meant as a visible sign of socialism's superiority.
Q 24Berliners nicknamed the cross of light reflected on the TV tower's dome what?
The Pope's Revenge
The Pope's Revenge (Rache des Papstes) mocked the atheist state: sunlight on the stainless-steel sphere forms a cross, read as payback for the GDR's removal of crosses from churches.
Q 25Which architect gave the Reichstag its walk-in glass dome in the 1990s?
Norman Foster
Norman Foster's rebuild, finished in 1999, added the glass dome with its spiral ramps; just before work began, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the building in fabric in 1995.
Q 26What inscription was placed above the Reichstag's facade in 1916, to Kaiser Wilhelm II's displeasure?
Dem deutschen Volke
Dem deutschen Volke, 'To the German People', went up only in 1916, in the middle of the First World War and more than twenty years after the building opened; the Kaiser had long resisted so democratic a dedication.
Q 27Which city lost the 1991 Bundestag vote that moved Germany's parliament and government to Berlin?
Bonn
Bonn lost by only 338 votes to 320 after more than ten hours of debate; it kept the title of Federal City and several ministries, and the move itself was not finished until 1999.
Q 28Which Berlin boulevard runs east from the Brandenburg Gate to the Schlossbrücke?
Unter den Linden
Unter den Linden began in the 16th century as nothing grander than a bridle path from the palace to the elector's hunting grounds; the lime trees that gave it its name came a century later.
Q 29Which building on Museum Island displays the bust of Queen Nefertiti?
Neues Museum
The Neues Museum, reopened in 2009 after David Chipperfield's restoration, displays the Nefertiti bust in its own domed room; Ludwig Borchardt's team found it at Amarna in 1912.
Q 30Which cub, hand-reared at Berlin Zoo after his mother rejected him, became a worldwide star in 2007?
Knut
Knut was bottle-fed by his keeper Thomas Dörflein after his mother abandoned him and his twin died; crowds flocked to see him at what is Germany's oldest zoo, opened in 1844.