Berlin This Week: When the Day of Liberation Falls on a Mother's Day Weekend

May 4–10, 2026

This is one of the strangest weeks on the Berlin calendar. On Friday, May 8, the city marks the 81st anniversary of the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht — the day Berlin was liberated from Nazi rule. Less than 48 hours later, families with bouquets will spill out of Schöneberg cafés for Mother's Day brunch, and a corner of Akazienstraße will smell of grilled white asparagus.

Berlin doesn't reconcile these things. It just holds them at the same time.

Add to that the peak weekend of the country's most important theatre festival, the public opening of the World Press Photo 2026 exhibition, the largest comic festival in the German capital, and a major Anton Corbijn retrospective unveiling its first day — and you get a week where you'll have to choose. Here are the seven things worth choosing between.

1. World Press Photo 2026 opens at Willy-Brandt-Haus

For 22 consecutive years, the SPD's headquarters in Kreuzberg has been the Berlin home of one of photography's most consequential annual exhibitions. The 2026 edition is selected from 57,376 submissions by 3,747 photographers from 141 countries — narrowed to 42 award-winning works.

The vernissage is Thursday evening (May 7, 7 pm), and the exhibition opens to the public on Friday, May 8. This year's selection foregrounds the climate crisis from Los Angeles to the Philippines, alongside reportage on conflict, migration, and resistance. A parallel show by Pablo E. Piovano — winner of the Long-Term Project category — documents the human cost of glyphosate use in Argentina.

It is free, it is open to everyone, and it is one of the few places in Berlin where world events arrive with the weight of evidence rather than the volume of opinion.

• Where: Willy-Brandt-Haus, Stresemannstraße 28, 10963 Kreuzberg

• When: May 8 to 31, Tue–Sun 12 pm – 6 pm

• Cost: Free

• Getting there: S+U Anhalter Bahnhof / U6 Kochstraße

2. The 81st Day of Liberation at Museum Berlin-Karlshorst

May 8 is not a public holiday in Berlin in 2026 — that one-off was last year, for the 80th anniversary. But the day still matters, and the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst is the one place in the city where it matters with full historical weight. This is the building where Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the Wehrmacht's unconditional surrender in the small hours of May 9, 1945. Sometimes the past sits in a room you can walk into.

The museum's commemoration is open all day, with free entry. Guided tours run in seven languages — including English at 12 pm, 4:30 pm and 5:30 pm. The focus is the photographic and journalistic record of the surrender itself, beginning with the arrival of the Allied delegations at Tempelhof and tracing their drive through a destroyed city to the Karlshorst building.

For visitors with even a passing interest in 20th-century European history, this is the most important place in Berlin to be on May 8. Bring time. Bring patience. Don't try to combine it with anything else that afternoon.

• Where: Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Zwieseler Straße 4, 10318 Lichtenberg

• When: Friday May 8, 10 am – late evening

• Cost: Free

• Getting there: S3 Karlshorst, then 10-minute walk

3. Theatertreffen reaches its peak weekend — Wallenstein and the 3sat Award

The Berliner Theatertreffen is the German-speaking world's most important theatre festival: ten productions, picked by a critics' jury from 739 contenders across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It runs May 1–17, and this is the weekend when it gets serious.

The event of the weekend is Wallenstein. Jan-Christoph Gockel's seven-hour adaptation of Schiller's epic about a 17th-century warlord — produced at Münchner Kammerspiele — is one of the most talked-about productions of the German season. It's playing at Haus der Berliner Festspiele on Saturday May 9 and Sunday May 10, with three intermissions and English surtitles. On Saturday, immediately after the performance, actress Katharina Bach receives the 3sat Award for outstanding artistic achievement (free admission to the ceremony). On Sunday, there's an audience talk after the show.

If seven hours feels like a commitment, it is. If you make it, you'll have seen the production that this year's German theatre criticism is going to argue about for the rest of 2026.

• Where: Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaperstraße 24, 10719 Wilmersdorf

• When: Saturday May 9 from 5 pm; Sunday May 10 from 5 pm

• Cost: Tickets from approx. €18 (concessions); award ceremony free

• Getting there: U3/U9 Spichernstraße

4. Anton Corbijn's first Berlin retrospective in over a decade opens at Fotografiska

Saturday, May 9 is also the public opening of Corbijn, Anton — a 200-work retrospective marking the Dutch photographer's 50 years behind the camera. If the name doesn't ring a bell, the images will: the cover of Joshua Tree by U2, Joy Division on a Manchester staircase, decades of Depeche Mode portraits, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, David Bowie, Kate Moss, Ai Weiwei, Gerhard Richter.

Corbijn shoots analogue, on available light, and his work is defined by a deliberate refusal of glamour. Faded tones, low resolution, fragments — what he himself calls Corbijnism. After Stockholm and before Tallinn, Berlin is the European stop with the longest run.

It opens just as the World Press Photo show across town opens too, which makes this a serious week for photography in the city.

• Where: Fotografiska Berlin, Oranienburger Straße 54, 10117 Mitte

• When: From May 9, 2026 through September 20, 2026. Daily 10 am – 11 pm.

• Cost: Adult tickets approx. €19 (booking via fotografiska.com/berlin recommended)

• Getting there: S Oranienburger Straße

5. Comic Invasion Berlin: 80 artists, free entry, Korea in focus

The 15th edition of Berlin's largest comic festival takes over the Museum für Kommunikation in Mitte on Saturday and Sunday. Around 80 illustrators and small publishers — from across Europe and beyond — fill the Artist Alley with new books and original work. The country focus this year is South Korea: a programme on manhwa, migration, memory, and the Korean diaspora's contribution to the European comics scene, in cooperation with the Korean Cultural Center Berlin.

Entry to all festival events is free. Workshops for kids run on Sunday afternoon (12 pm – 4 pm). The Berlin Comic Scholarship awards are presented Saturday at noon, with the new recipients' work on display through August. There's also a public reading of Patrick Wirbeleit's beloved children's comic Kiste on Sunday at 3 pm.

For a Mother's Day weekend with kids, this is the move.

• Where: Museum für Kommunikation Berlin, Leipziger Straße 16, 10117 Mitte

• When: Saturday May 9 and Sunday May 10, 10 am – 6 pm

• Cost: Festival events free; museum exhibitions €8 / €4 reduced

• Getting there: U2 Spittelmarkt or U6 Stadtmitte

6. Primavera: Schöneberg's spring and asparagus festival

Akazienstraße is one of Schöneberg's quieter pleasures — a tree-lined street of cafés, bookshops and old apartment buildings that has somehow stayed itself while everything around it changed. Twice a year, the neighbourhood opens its main street to a festival: pumpkins in autumn, asparagus in spring.

Primavera is the spring one, and it always falls on the Mother's Day weekend. Beelitz farmers (the asparagus capital of Brandenburg) bring the year's first white spears for soups, gratins, and the unbothered classic of asparagus-with-ham-and-Hollandaise. There's a stage on Belziger Straße with Spanish choirs, flamenco, and a couple of unselfconsciously local rock bands. The Beelitz asparagus queen makes an appearance. Children's areas are around the Apostel-Paulus-Kirche.

It is not glamorous and it does not try to be. That's the point.

• Where: Akazienstraße & Belziger Straße, 10823 Schöneberg

• When: Saturday May 9 (11 am – 8 pm); Sunday May 10 (10 am – 8 pm)

• Cost: Free

• Getting there: U7 Eisenacher Straße (200 m)

7. Hertha BSC vs Greuther Fürth — the last home match of the season

Hertha is in the 2. Bundesliga and has been for several seasons now. The 2025/26 campaign hasn't gone to plan. But the Olympiastadion is the Olympiastadion, and Sunday May 10 is the last time Hertha plays at home this season.

Tickets are far cheaper than for any Bundesliga match — from around €35 — and the atmosphere on the East Curve remains one of the best things in Berlin sport. For visitors interested in football culture rather than league tables, this is a chance to see a 74,000-seat stadium do its full-throated thing without the price tag of a top-flight game.

Kick-off is 11:30 am, which is also early enough that you can still catch the Comic Invasion or Primavera in the afternoon.

• Where: Olympiastadion Berlin, Olympischer Platz 3, 14053 Charlottenburg

• When: Sunday May 10, 11:30 am

• Cost: Tickets from approx. €35 (herthabsc.com)

• Getting there: S5/S3 Olympiastadion or U2 Olympia-Stadion

The Berlin Reality Check

Most cities ask you to compartmentalise. You either visit the war memorial, or you go to the asparagus festival, or you sit through seven hours of Schiller. Berlin doesn't. This week it offers all three within walking distance of each other and assumes you can hold them in the same head.

That's the part that surprises first-time visitors and that long-term residents stop noticing. The 81st anniversary of liberation lands on a Friday. Mother's Day lands on Sunday. A 14-year-old Korean illustrator will be selling a comic about her grandmother in the same building where Friday's exhibition tells the story of a city that was nearly destroyed. None of it is contradiction, exactly — it's accumulation. Berlin is a city of layers that don't resolve.

If you only have one day this week, May 8 is the day with the most weight. If you have a weekend, the asparagus is probably the most Berlin thing on the list.

Quick Reference

Event	When	Where	Cost
World Press Photo 2026	May 8–31	Willy-Brandt-Haus, Kreuzberg	Free
Day of Liberation commemoration	Fri May 8	Museum Berlin-Karlshorst	Free
Theatertreffen: Wallenstein	Sat May 9 & Sun May 10	Haus der Berliner Festspiele	From €18
Anton Corbijn retrospective	Opens Sat May 9	Fotografiska Berlin, Mitte	~€19
Comic Invasion Berlin	Sat May 9 & Sun May 10	Museum für Kommunikation, Mitte	Free
Primavera spring festival	Sat May 9 & Sun May 10	Akazienstraße, Schöneberg	Free
Hertha BSC vs Greuther Fürth	Sun May 10, 11:30 am	Olympiastadion	From ~€35