Berlin Palace

Elector Frederick II of Brandenburg, called Irontooth, chose the twin town of Berlin and Cölln as his residence and the seat of his court, the settlement on the Spree having grown into an economic and by then partly political centre of the Mark Brandenburg. He laid the foundation stone on 31 July 1443, an act the Codex diplomaticus Brandenburgensis records with the note that the margrave set the stone with his own hand; Cölln had to surrender for the purpose part of the Spree island outside its town wall. The castle stood beside the Lange Brücke, where every vessel had to tie up because the bridge's low arches could not be passed beneath, so it could, if need be, be used as a coercive stronghold on the towns' lifelines. The elector carried the work through against the protests of the councillors, the episode known as the Berliner Unwille, and the twin town forfeited political and economic freedoms for its refusal; how far those restrictions really went is disputed, since everything known of them comes from a single chronicle, the Wandalia of Albertus Crantzius, written some sixty years afterwards with visible glorification of patrician autonomy. The main role of the castle and its garrison in this period was to establish the authority of the margraves over the citizens of Berlin, who were reluctant to give up the medieval privileges the towns had won during the Brandenburg interregnum of 1319–1415, King Sigismund having enfeoffed the Hohenzollern princes with Brandenburg in 1415.

The building was finished in 1451, and Frederick moved there from the town of Brandenburg; granting a castle fief on 15 December that year he spoke of having fortified the place, and the work of 1443–1451 was a fortified castle and citadel directed against Berlin and Cölln. What it looked like is not known. In 1454, having returned from his pilgrimage to Jerusalem by way of Rome, Frederick made the castle chapel 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 Pope Paul II, at Frederick's request, attached to the Erasmus chapel a college of canons, and that collegiate church became the nucleus of the cathedral that now adjoins the site. Elector Joachim II had the late medieval castle largely pulled down and a Renaissance building raised in its place on the model of the castle at Torgau, its architect Konrad Krebs supplying the plans and his pupil Caspar Theiss carrying them out; the citadel was slighted so that an unfortified residence could stand on its foundation walls, and the new palace was joined to the first Berlin cathedral church, which from then on served as the palace church. Towards the end of the 16th century Elector John George had his court architect Rochus Graf zu Lynar build the west wing and the court pharmacy that gave the Pharmacy Wing its name, and Frederick William, the Great Elector, had the palace put back in order after the Thirty Years' War of 1618–1648 had left it much decayed.

In 1699 Elector Frederick III, who took the title King in Prussia in 1701 as Frederick I, appointed Andreas Schlüter palace architect. Schlüter rebuilt the palace as a major secular work of Protestant baroque; his first design probably dates from 1702, his conception was governed by the older building, and to the front on the Schlossplatz he added the colossal Portal I. The four-winged scheme he intended was never realised. At the king's wish the Mint Tower at the north-west corner, fitted with a carillon bought in the Netherlands for 12,000 gulden, was to be raised to 94 metres, but the foundations of the medieval building proved inadequate even though Schlüter tried to strengthen them with iron reinforcement then new; the unfinished tower had in the end to be taken down, and in 1706 he was replaced as court architect, remaining in office as court sculptor. His rival Johann Friedrich Eosander took the post and submitted a fresh plan that doubled the palace westward and moved the main entrance to the new west wing, though only part of it was built, chiefly around the later Eosander courtyard and portal. Frederick William I, king from 1713, brought artistic life at the Berlin court to a halt and dismissed most of the craftsmen at work on the palace, having it completed externally in simplified form by Schlüter's pupil Martin Heinrich Böhme while fitting out with great splendour the state rooms already begun. The Amber Room, made for Frederick I, was part of the palace until Frederick William I gave it in 1716 to Tsar Peter the Great; it was later installed in the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg. Johann Sebastian Bach met Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg here in 1719 and dedicated the Brandenburg Concertos to him; they were probably performed in the palace in 1721.

Frederick the Great was born in the building. As king he lived at Potsdam, and though he kept an apartment in the Berlin palace he came as a rule only for the ball season at carnival time, while court life went on in Berlin under his consort Queen Elisabeth Christine, who discharged the courtly duties in his stead. His nephew and successor Frederick William II returned to Berlin and revived court life with festive processions and evenings at the opera and theatre, taking the former apartment of Frederick William I in the north-west range, whose twenty-nine rooms were recast entirely in the neoclassical style; the apartments made for him in the Lustgarten wing west of Portal V were built in 1787–1789 by Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff and Carl von Gontard. Frederick William III used the palace for ceremonial purposes only, going on living with Queen Luise in his former Kronprinzenpalais after his accession.

Frederick William IV took a suite on the first floor along the Spree and the Lustgarten after his accession in 1840. As crown prince he had already, in 1826, had his study fitted out in the choir of the late Gothic Erasmus chapel, its book and drawing cabinets designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel; it was the room where he spent most of his time, received guests, conducted the business of government and planned his building projects. In the tea salon next door the royal couple invited scholars and artists for unconstrained conversation, and Alexander von Humboldt is said to have read the first volume of his Kosmos there to the crown prince and princess. The Prussian State Council sat from 1817 to 1848 in the council chamber, and the rooms Schinkel designed for it served from 1910 as the offices of the president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science. Friedrich August Stüler and his site manager Albert Dietrich Schadow built the dome over the Eosander Portal in 1845–1853, to a design that went back to Frederick William IV and was reworked before execution by Schinkel; it housed the palace chapel, consecrated in January 1854.

The palace was the epicentre of the Revolution of 1848 in Prussia. Huge crowds gathered outside it to present an address to the king demanding a constitution, liberal reform and German unification, and Frederick William IV emerged to accept their demands. The trigger of the March revolution was a peaceful demonstration on the Schlossplatz on 18 March 1848, when the king tried to calm the crowds with concessions in a speech from the balcony over Portal I and then ordered the square cleared; a spontaneous rising behind barricades followed, and the day ended in bloodshed and street fighting. Frederick William later went back on his promises and reimposed an autocratic regime, and from that time many Berliners and other Germans came to see the palace as a symbol of oppression and Prussian militarism.

In 1871 King Wilhelm I was raised to German Emperor of a united Germany and the palace became the symbolic heart of the empire, though the emperor himself, who had gone on living in the Altes Palais after his accession as king of Prussia in 1861, used it for official occasions while it remained the seat of the court offices. The opening of the Reichstag was always held in the palace's White Hall, and the opening of 25 June 1888 was also the first public appearance of Wilhelm II as German Emperor, recorded by Anton von Werner in a monumental painting. Wilhelm II chose the palace as his residence, had it modernised and had the White Hall recast by the court architect Ernst von Ihne; a gallery meant to let visitors circulate through the whole second floor was halted by the outbreak of war in 1914. The empire was in theory a constitutional state, and from 1894 the new Reichstag building came not merely to rival but to overshadow the palace as its centre of power.

At the outbreak of the First World War the emperor spoke on 31 July 1914 from the balcony of Portal V to tens of thousands of Berliners assembled in the Lustgarten, to prepare them for the coming war, and again on 1 August from the window of the Pillar Hall above Portal IV, announcing Germany's entry into the war and launching the Burgfrieden policy. Germany's defeat forced him to abdicate as emperor and as king of Prussia. On the early afternoon of 9 November 1918, after Philipp Scheidemann of the Social Democrats had proclaimed the republic at the Reichstag building, the troops posted around the palace left their positions from half past two, pressed by the crowd gathering outside, and an hour later handed the building to the revolutionaries. At about half past four the Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht proclaimed the free socialist republic of Germany, then had himself led inside to proclaim it again from the great window of Portal IV, the place of the emperor's second address; shortly afterwards many people forced their way into the unguarded palace and began looting it. Liebknecht's proclamation came to nothing, but it passed into the tradition of the Communist Party of Germany, of which he was among the founders a few weeks later, and the rival proclamations underscored that more than 400 years of Hohenzollern occupation of the palace had ended. From the middle of November the People's Navy Division was quartered there, and after the sailors were accused of looting the city commandant Otto Wels pressed them to leave; the Christmas fighting was ignited over the clearing of the building, and did much to break apart the socialist coalition government of Majority and Independent Social Democrats.

In the Weimar years the palace became a major cultural centre of the city. The palace museum set up in 1921 united the state rooms of the fallen monarchy with the collections of the state museum of applied art, the Berlin Philharmonic gave public concerts in the White Hall and the Schlüter courtyard during the Berlin art weeks first held in 1926; a directory of 1924 counts a good two dozen private tenants there alongside public bodies including the Kaiser Wilhelm Society; in the Weimar Republic it was the most visited museum in Berlin. Under National Socialism that cultural and scientific use was largely retained, with the museum of the Prussian State Theatres and a rehearsal hall for the state ballet added while other occupants left; the organisations housed there were brought into line and Jewish employees were dismissed, among them Ingrid Dybwad, head of the academic department of the German Academic Exchange Service, Elisabeth Henschel-Simon, curator in the palace administration, and Marguerite Wolff, senior officer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign Public and International Law. In the Second World War the palace was struck by Allied bombs on 3 and 24 February 1945 and burnt out but for the north-west wing, the fire destroying nearly all the state rooms in the north and south ranges; the burning-out is put at the raid of 3 February on the city centre by some accounts and at the second raid, when the roof was lost, by others. Artillery fire during the battle for Berlin at the end of April did further damage to the Schlossplatz façade. The outer walls with their sculptural decoration, the load-bearing walls and for the most part the main staircases survived, and between August 1946 and March 1948 four well-attended exhibitions were held in the White Hall, among them the reconstruction show Berlin plant, directed by the city building director Hans Scharoun.

Scharoun had applied at once for measures to preserve the palace, which he held to be the outstanding building of north German baroque, but the KPD-dominated magistrate installed by the Soviet military government in May 1945 agreed only reluctantly and in part. After the division of Berlin in the summer and autumn of 1948 the SED-led East Berlin magistrate, now responsible for the building, progressively prevented its further use, its securing and its heating; in October 1948 the People's Police gave the institutions housed there notice to quit, and after their protests failed they moved their offices to West Berlin. In March 1949 the building inspectorate closed the palace although a commission of experts had declared it in no danger of collapse, and in October 1949 Soviet soldiers filming the picture The Battle of Berlin destroyed several sculptures, surviving fittings and hundreds of the palace's windows. A secret report of the GDR construction ministry from 1950, rediscovered only in 2016, calculated that the damaged palace could be reconstructed for 32 million East German marks.

On 23 July 1950, at the third party congress of the SED, the new general secretary of the central committee, Walter Ulbricht, announced the coming demolition, without prior discussion in the politburo, the council of ministers or with the mayor: a rally square was to be made of the palace, the Lustgarten and the Schlossplatz on which, he said, the fighting will and building will of the people could find expression. At an event of the building ministry on 30 August 1950 leading figures of Berlin cultural life unanimously rejected the plan and tried to get a public discussion going before the vote of the Volkskammer set for 6 September, Walter Hentschel calling the palace one of the most important architectural monuments of Germany and indeed of the whole world. Removal began nonetheless in September 1950, took four months and consumed 19 tons of dynamite; so solid was the construction that the dome and its entire mount remained intact after the rest of the building had come down. One section only was kept, the portal carrying the balcony from which Liebknecht had proclaimed the German socialist republic, which in 1964 was added, with an altered cartouche, to the State Council Building, where it forms the main entrance. The empty ground was named Marx-Engels-Platz and used as a parade ground until, from 1973 to 1976 under Erich Honecker, a large modernist building went up over most of the site, the Palast der Republik, which housed the GDR People's Chamber along with leisure facilities for citizens and was itself a listed monument.

Shortly before reunification in October 1990 the Palast der Republik was found to be contaminated with asbestos and closed to the public; the asbestos was removed by 2003, the federal government decided in November 2003 to demolish it, and demolition ran from February 2006 to 2009, resented by East Germans for whom the building had been a place of fond memories. A twenty-year debate ran meanwhile on whether the old palace should be rebuilt, its opponents holding that a new building would be a pastiche, an unwelcome symbol of Germany's imperial past and unacceptably expensive; the most influential of the lobby groups, founded in 1992 by the businessman Wilhelm von Boddien with Kathleen King von Alvensleben, gathered plans believed lost, had surviving photographs and drawings turned into precise architectural plans at the Technische Universität Berlin and in 1993 raised a privately funded full-scale mock-up of two frontages that stood for a year and a half. Cross-party resolutions of the Bundestag in 2002 and 2003 supported at least a partial rebuilding, and in 2007 the Bundestag decided definitively that three façades would be rebuilt with a modern interior serving as a cultural museum and forum.

In 2008 the jury of a competition that drew 85 entries chose the design of the Italian architect Franco Stella, which provided for faithful reconstruction of the baroque façades, the dome and the essential parts of the Schlüter courtyard, with new volumes in modern form in place of the ranges on the Spree side; excavations before building found parts of the cellars in the south-west corner of the former palace, preserved and made accessible to visitors as an archaeological window. President Joachim Gauck laid the foundation stone on 12 June 2013, launching a project costed at 590 million euros; the reconstructed elements were financed almost entirely by private donations, historic spolia of the old palace were set back into the façade, and the floor plan was laid out to allow the later rebuilding of Schlüter's state rooms, the Great Staircase, the Knights' Hall and the Picture Gallery. The building was completed in 2020 as the seat of the Humboldt Forum, which presents the collections of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art of the Berlin State Museums together with holdings of the Berlin City Museum and the Humboldt University, the non-European art collections of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation having been moved here from Dahlem to form, with the European art of the Museum Island, one place of world culture. Façade work continued after the opening, and in June 2025 the last of the nineteen statues on the balustrade were installed, completing the reconstruction of the historic palace façade.