Berlin Cathedral

The cathedral's history on the Spree island begins with a chapel inside the Berlin palace. In 1450, in the newly finished palace, the Erasmus chapel was consecrated as a court church. Frederick II Irontooth, Prince-Elector of Brandenburg, moved his residence in 1451 from Brandenburg upon Havel to Cölln, the southern part of the island, into the new City Palace, which housed a Catholic chapel. In 1454, having returned from his pilgrimage to Jerusalem by way of Rome, Frederick raised the chapel to a parish church and endowed it richly with relics and altars, and Pope Nicholas V ordered Stephan Bodecker, then Prince-Bishop of Brandenburg, to consecrate it to Erasmus of Formiae. On 7 April 1465, at Frederick's request, Pope Paul II attached to the chapel a canon-law college dedicated to Mary of Nazareth, the Holy Cross, Simon Peter, Paul of Tarsus, Erasmus of Formiae and Nicholas of Myra. Frederick endowed it with estates sufficient to supply eight canons with prebends, and on 20 January 1469 Dietrich IV, then Prince-Bishop of Brandenburg, invested eight clergymen of the elector's choosing as collegiate canons. The German word for such a foundation, Domstift, gave the church its everyday name of Domkirche, though it has never been a cathedral in the strict sense of the word: no bishop has ever had his seat here.

Joachim II Hector became elector in 1535 and obtained the consent of Pope Paul III to close the Dominican convent founded in 1297 immediately south of the palace, in order to acquire its monastic church of St Paul, built in about 1345. On 28 May 1536 most of the Black Friars moved to a Dominican house in Brandenburg upon Havel. Joachim II assigned the emptied three-naved building to the collegiate church and enlarged the college to twelve prebendaries, two of the places going to canons taken on from the convent. The medieval Gothic brick church was extended and richly furnished, princely burial places were laid out in it and a peal of bells was installed, and the new Dom was consecrated in 1536. In 1538 a western façade with two towers was added, the building having had no tower before as the church of a mendicant order. In 1539 Joachim II converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism, and the collegiate church turned Lutheran with him. His notions of reformation were not the modern ones: after his conversion he enriched the church with paraments, monstrances, relics, chasubles and antependia. From 1545 the electoral house of Hohenzollern used the building as its burial place.

In 1608, the year of his accession, Prince-Elector John Sigismund, then a crypto-Calvinist, dissolved the college, and the church was renamed the Supreme Parish Church of Holy Trinity in Cölln. On Christmas Day 1613 he and his court professed the Reformed confession in the cathedral itself. He waived the princely privilege of demanding the same of his subjects, and while he and his family converted, his wife Anna stayed steadfastly Lutheran and most of his subjects remained Lutherans. Berlin's other churches, under Lutheran city-council jurisdiction, remained Lutheran; the Hohenzollerns' house church became the town's first and, until 1695, its only Calvinist church, and from 1632 it served as the parish for all Calvinists in Berlin. The conversion and the reordering of the church in the Reformed manner brought conflict with the estates and with the Lutheran church of the Kurmark, which broke out in April 1615 in the Berliner Tumult, with severe rioting in Berlin and Cölln and the plundering of the Calvinist court preachers' houses.

The old collegiate church aged badly. Its dilapidated twin-tower façade was pulled down in 1667, and in 1717 Martin Böhme put up a new baroque front with two towers. With effect from 1 January 1710, Cölln was united with Berlin under the latter name. The Supreme Parish Church was then demolished outright to clear ground for the baroque extension of the Berlin Palace, in 1747 by some accounts and only after the electoral coffins had been carried into its replacement by others. Frederick II had that baroque building raised between 1747 and 1750 at the Lustgarten, the site the cathedral occupies now. Its architects, working to an inauguration on 6 September 1750, were Johann Boumann, who came from the Netherlands and held a very sober conception of the baroque, and Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff. The new structure covered ground north of the palace that the present building still covers.

In 1817, under King Frederick William III of Prussia, the congregation joined the umbrella body known from 1821 as the Evangelical Church in Prussia and adopted the new denomination of the Prussian Union. Its presbytery still carries the unusual name Domkirchenkollegium, cathedral college, which recalls the church's collegiate past. To mark the union Karl Friedrich Schinkel remodelled the interior in 1817 and the exterior at the start of the 1820s in a plain version of the classicism then in fashion, the supervising government building conductor being Schinkel's pupil Friedrich Wilhelm Buttel, later court architect at Mecklenburg-Strelitz. The church faced the Berlin City Palace, the Hohenzollern residence, across its southern front, and the Lustgarten park across its western one.

Through the 19th century it was debated whether the modest Schinkel cathedral, itself a remodelling of the baroque church built under Frederick the Great, still answered the monarchy's claims to display. At King Frederick William IV's urging it was resolved to build a new and more splendid cathedral church, a two-towered basilica with a three-aisled nave on Italian models, to designs by Friedrich August Stüler, a pupil of Schinkel. Work began. Foundation walls with the outline of the apses were raised in the Spree, and beside the cathedral went up the high walls of the royal Hohenzollern burial place that Frederick William IV called the Campo Santo, the royal wash house on the site having been demolished first. The revolution of 1848 interrupted the work. In the reaction that followed, public interest moved from the basilica towards a domed design, and in 1854 the completion of the palace chapel under the palace dome gave the court a splendid new court church of its own. By then the Prussian House of Representatives determined the state budget, and its majority was unwilling to fund the king's ambitious schemes. The work had stopped in 1848, and it stayed stopped for decades.

After the founding of the German Empire the call revived for a representative church that could measure itself against the great churches of the world and impressively replace the Protestant buildings that had preceded it. In 1885 Julius Carl Raschdorff, professor at the Technical College in Charlottenburg, submitted plans for a new building. It was Wilhelm II, acting as king and summus episcopus in Prussia, who brought about the demolition of the Schinkel cathedral and the raising of a new one to Raschdorff's designs, marked by what has been called a "baroque-influenced Italian High Renaissance" and belonging to the neo-Renaissance strand of historicism. That building was demolished in 1893, its movable interior of altar, paintings and sarcophagi dismantled first. The foundation stone was laid on 17 June 1894 with the aim of consecrating the finished church in 1900; delays in building meant the consecration came only on 27 February 1905.

With no separation between the Protestant church and the Prussian state, Wilhelm II held office as summus episcopus, Supreme Governor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces as it had been styled since 1875, and the state met the whole construction cost of 11.5 million marks. The building was originally 114 metres long and 73 metres wide and seated 2,100. It was far larger than any of its predecessors, and it was regarded as a Protestant counterweight to St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. A cathedral building administration ran the work under Raschdorff, Dombaumeister from 2 July 1892, its drawing and artistic department headed by his son Otto and its building department by Baurat Julius Kleinau, while Heinrich Müller-Breslau was responsible for the structural calculations and the design of the dome's steel construction.

Wilhelm II kept a hand on the design throughout the building period, and the painter Anton von Werner altered his schemes for the mosaic fields of the dome, the mosaics of the evangelists and the window design in the apse to suit the emperor's personal wishes. The main altar from the previous building, made in 1850 by Friedrich August Stüler, was given a place in the new church, and the altarpiece of the Tauf- und Traukirche had been painted in 1821 by Carl Joseph Begas. In the Hohenzollerngruft the sarcophagus of Emperor Frederick III, which had stood in the mausoleum at Potsdam since his death, was given a new position, and for the occasion Reinhold Begas made a fresh sarcophagus in Greek marble on Wilhelm II's commission, finished in November 1905. The Sauer organ in the Predigtkirche was designed and built at the same time as the church and was then the largest cathedral organ in Germany.

The cathedral took progressively heavier damage in the Second World War. Blast from Allied bombing blew away part of the windows in 1940. An Allied raid on the neighbouring Burgstraße destroyed all the altar windows and opened large cracks in the domes of the corner towers. In one of the heaviest raids on Berlin, on 24 May 1944, the dome and its lantern were hit hard: a canister of liquid incendiary set alight the timber sheathing beneath the copper roofing, which was lined with peat as insulation, and the fire crews who came up could not reach the seat of the blaze. The lantern burnt and fell vertically into the Predigtkirche, its enormous weight driving it through the floor, from which it then protruded, and it damaged large parts of the Hohenzollerngruft beneath. The organ had been sheltered from the falling debris, and the cathedral organist Fritz Heitmann is said to have gone on playing it with the dome open above him. The same raid damaged the Denkmalskirche and the four towers again. After the war the cathedral was reckoned twenty-five per cent destroyed. Thieves later did great harm to the organ, taking about a third of its pipes and tearing out the tubing of the pneumatic action to sell the metal.

With the Predigtkirche unusable, the congregation gathered for the first time at Whitsun 1944 in a section of the Hohenzollerngruft partitioned off beneath the Denkmalskirche. Converted into the Domgruftkirche and fitted from 1946 with a Schuke organ, it carried the congregation's services apart from a break between the spring and the September of 1945, and the Oberdomprediger Bruno Doehring preached there every Sunday to about a thousand worshippers until he stepped down in 1960. The inner dome had survived with all its ornament, but a wide hole now gaped in the middle of the Predigtkirche, and the interior and the dome mosaics, already badly harmed by dust and rubble, suffered further from the weather. The city assembly voted emergency funds in 1948, though the necessary work was not finished until 1953, a temporary roof being built between 1949 and 1953 to enclose the building. The crypt was not renovated and was shut to the public in those years. From 1945 until restoration work began, the cathedral housed the theological faculty of the Humboldt University and the theological branch library of the university library.

On 9 May 1967 the still undivided Evangelical Church of the Union resolved on a committee for the reconstruction of the cathedral, which lay in East Berlin. The government of the German Democratic Republic did not oppose the committee's work, given the inflow of Deutsche Marks that came with it, and in October 1974 it promised an annual subsidy of 200,000 East German marks towards the building's upkeep, a promise that met a condition set by the contracting parties. The East German side was reported to have demanded beforehand that negotiations on church building programmes in the German Democratic Republic would take place only alongside negotiations on the rebuilding of the cathedral. After long argument over the shape of the East Berlin centre, in which the cathedral's demolition or its conversion to some altered use was repeatedly on the table, the government decided in 1975 to rebuild it, on the principle that the state buildings by then raised on Marx-Engels-Platz should not have their effect diminished by a fully restored monument of the empire. It therefore had the Denkmalskirche on the north side and the undamaged carriage porch at the south-west tower taken down, and the main dome and the four tower tops were heavily simplified rather than restored, each cut by sixteen metres in height, with all the crowning lanterns removed and a wholly new dome cross set up. The Denkmalskirche, a memorial room between the preaching church and the graves that held the Hohenzollern state sarcophagi and the stair down to the crypt, was blown up on 30 October 1975. Accounts of its condition differ: it is described both as damaged in the raid and as having come through the war completely intact, demolished for ideological reasons by the communist government because it was a hall of honour for the Hohenzollern dynasty. Scaffolding for restoration went up on it while demolition charges were laid against its undamaged rear, and the government also demanded the removal of as many crosses as possible. Its loss took from the cathedral the display room for the sarcophagi, which were moved into the now reduced crypt church, and from the Hohenzollerngruft its access. Reinhold Begas's marble Bismarck memorial was destroyed, though building workers saved the head from the smashing, and some 204 façade elements were carried to a depot at Ahrensfelde, where they still lie. The demolition and redesign cost 800,000 marks, while the restoration, done on the cheap, cost 50,000.

The baptistery and wedding church reopened for services in 1980. By 1983 the work had gone far enough for the elaborate reconstruction of the interiors, which ran until 1993, and restoration of the nave began in 1984. The imperial staircase and the central Predigtkirche were restored to Raschdorff's original plans, the south portal received Siegfried Krepp's bronze Door of Reconciliation, and the coloured chancel windows were then installed and the dome mosaics restored, the last section of them unveiled in 2002. On 6 June 1993 the nave was re-inaugurated at an event attended by Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and televised across Germany, and daily services have been held in the Predigtkirche since that year. The rebuilding had been estimated at 45 million Valutamark, and the Evangelical Church in Germany and the federal government paid 45 million Deutsche Marks, to which a supplementary payment of 20.5 million was added in 1976, bringing the total to 65.5 million. The actual cost of the work to its completion in 1993 came to 150 million marks, and was met by the same two funders. It was the largest Protestant church building project on German soil in the post-war period and the longest and most extensive cooperation on a religious building between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic.

The listed building is the largest Protestant church in Germany, and besides its services it is used for state ceremonies, concerts and other events. State memorial services have been held in it for the former federal presidents Johannes Rau in February 2006, Richard von Weizsäcker in February 2015, Roman Herzog in January 2017 and Horst Köhler in February 2025, and for the former president of the Bundestag Wolfgang Schäuble in January 2024, along with an ecumenical service of thanksgiving for the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaties of Rome in March 2007 and the official funeral service in August 2007 for the three German close-protection officers killed in Afghanistan. The congregation numbers about 1,800 members and has been growing for years; its governing body, the Domkirchenkollegium, seats eight cathedral councillors elected by the congregation and the cathedral preachers alongside four delegated members representing the federal government, the Berlin Senate, the Union of Evangelical Churches and the regional church. Katharina Berner has chaired it since 2023, and the serving cathedral preachers are Stefan Scholpp, appointed in 2023, and Christiane Münker, appointed in 2024. Only four per cent of the congregation's income comes from church tax and more than eighty per cent from admission charges, which fell during the coronavirus crisis of 2020 and brought tensions and rifts in the leadership over how the congregation should be run.

The Hohenzollerngruft, which fills almost the whole basement, holds ninety-four members of the House of Hohenzollern buried between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 20th, among them electors and kings who shaped the history of Brandenburg and Prussia, and it ranks with the vaults of the Austrian emperors in the Capuchin church in Vienna, of the French kings at Saint-Denis and of the Spanish kings at El Escorial among the most significant dynastic burial places in Europe. Bomb hits damaged it badly during the war and almost completely destroyed some of the coffins. Since it reopened on 20 November 1999 it has recorded around 720,000 visitors a year, and a refurbishment costed in advance at some 18.6 million euros, restoring the original arrangement of the coffins and bringing step-free access, was completed on 1 March 2026. The fabric above ground has needed work of its own: the lantern crown placed on the dome in 1981 was taken down in December 2006 after rust was found beneath its gilded copper sheathing in August 2006, and a reconstruction of it was lifted into place on 19 August 2008, and in March 2019 it emerged that soot, rain and exhaust fumes were crumbling the façade, whose repair was costed at 1.6 million euros. The simplified post-war form is itself under monument protection, and the cathedral congregation has rejected calls from the Evangelischer Kirchenbauverein and the Gesellschaft Historisches Berlin to restore the pre-war lanterns. Rebuilding the Denkmalskirche is pressed for by the Dombauverein, whose chairman Horst Winkelmann holds that without it the cathedral remains a torso, and the cathedral archive keeps almost five hundred original drawings of the lost building. The Domkirchenkollegium agreed in principle to a reconstruction in 2011, but questions of use, architecture and financing remain open.