Reichstag

The commission wanted the east side of the Königsplatz, but that plot carried the palace of the count Atanazy Raczyński, who would not sell, and Wilhelm I would not expropriate him; Ludwig Bohnstedt's winning design of June 1872 went unbuilt. The ground came free only after the count died in 1874 and his son sold the palace to the Prussian state.

A second competition, in February 1882, was restricted to architects of German tongue; Paul Wallot of Frankfurt took the commission on nineteen of the jury's twenty-one votes, and Wilhelm I laid the foundation stone on 9 June 1884, at a rainy ceremony of much military and few parliamentarians.

Objections had forced Wallot to move the cupola from over the plenary chamber to the west entrance hall; when he got it moved back, the standing walls proved too weak for a masonry dome, and in 1889 the railway-office engineer Hermann Zimmermann cut its height from 85 m to just under 75 m and designed a steel and glass frame light enough for the walls. The building went up in the Reichsstil of the day, mainly Italian High Renaissance forms with German Renaissance and neo-Baroque elements. Verdicts split: the city architect Ludwig Hoffmann called it a “first-class hearse”, while other accounts have most German architects praising it.

Wilhelm II, emperor from 1888, turned against it from about 1892, calling it the “height of tastelessness” and, privately, the “imperial monkey house”. Its 24 million gold marks came out of the reparations France owed after the war of 1870–71. The keystone was set on 5 December 1894 before the emperor and empress.

Dem deutschen Volke — “To the German People” — was set above the main façade in 1916, over the objection of Wilhelm II, who had tried to block the inscription for its democratic meaning. On 9 November 1918, hours after the Kaiser's abdication was announced, Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic from a balcony of the building. Up to 42 protesters died there on 13 January 1920, when workers demonstrated against a law restricting their rights — the bloodiest demonstration in German history.

Four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, an arson attack on 27 February 1933 gutted most of the building. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was the apparent culprit; Hitler attributed the fire to communist agitators, used it as a pretext to claim a plot against the government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties. Parliament moved to the nearby Kroll Opera House, which held every session of the twelve years of Nazi rule.

In 1939 the library and archive were removed and the windows bricked up as the building was made a fortress; by 1943 it held a hospital and an AEG radio-tube plant. It had not been used by the Nazi government since the fire and stood in ruins, but the Soviets attached great importance to taking it in the Battle of Berlin in 1945, and the defenders put a substantial garrison into it.

A vast crowd gathered before the ruin during the Berlin Blockade on 9 September 1948 to hear Mayor Ernst Reuter call the peoples of the world to look upon the city. In 1956 the West German government decided against demolition and had Paul Baumgarten restore it: the damaged cupola came down and the façade lost its ornament and statuary, in work running from 1961 to 1971. Under the Four Power Agreement of 1971 the Bundestag could not formally assemble in West Berlin, so until 1990 it saw only occasional ceremonial meetings and exhibitions.

The reunification ceremony was held there on 3 October 1990, and the parliament of the united Germany assembled there the next day. On 20 June 1991, by a narrow majority, the Bundestag voted to move government and parliament from Bonn back to Berlin. Norman Foster was asked in June 1994 to work a dome into his design; before the rebuild, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the building in 1995. The interior was stripped to the outer walls, Baumgarten's alterations included, on condition that traces of its history stayed visible — among them bullet holes and graffiti left by Soviet soldiers in 1945, though graffiti considered offensive was removed in agreement with Russian diplomats. The keys went to Bundestag president Wolfgang Thierse on 19 April 1999, the day the chamber first sat. The listed building carries a walk-in glass dome above the chamber, from an idea of Gottfried Böhm's, open to visitors by prior registration.