Mitte Historic Monuments

The Reichstag building carries a glass dome that sits directly above the debating chamber. It serves as the seat of the German parliament. In February nineteen thirty-three, a fire gutted the main hall, providing the pretext for the Nazi…

The Brandenburg Gate stands as a sandstone wall twelve columns deep, topped by a chariot pulled by four horses. King Frederick William the Second ordered its construction in seventeen eighty-eight to mark a peaceful conclusion to local…

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe consists of two thousand seven hundred and eleven concrete slabs of varying heights arranged on a sloping, uneven grid. Architect Peter Eisenman designed the site as a space without a central…

A plain concrete slab now covers the site of what was once Adolf Hitler’s underground headquarters. Twenty-five feet below this ground, thirty rooms were packed into a complex reinforced with thick steel and concrete, designed to withstand…

The Gendarmenmarkt is defined by the symmetrical pairing of the French and German Cathedrals, which flank the central concert hall like bookends. These structures were built for two distinct immigrant congregations invited to Berlin by the…

Bebelplatz is a public square paved with light gray stones that sink slightly toward the center, where a glass plate sits flush with the ground. Looking through that glass, you see empty white bookshelves recessed into the earth. On May…

The Neue Wache features a massive, empty stone room centered on a single sculpture by Käthe Kollwitz. King Friedrich Wilhelm the Third commissioned the building in eighteen eighteen as a guardhouse for his royal palace, tasking architect…

The Lustgarten is a wide, flat rectangle of lawn sitting directly between the Altes Museum and the Berlin Cathedral. A giant granite basin, carved from a single boulder, marks its center. The space began as a formal kitchen garden for the…