Neue Wache: From King's Guardhouse to Nation's Memorial

Why is it significant?

Here on Unter den Linden, squeezed between grander neighbours, stands a small, square building of pale stone with a portico of Doric columns. Walk through into the single room inside.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here on Unter den Linden, squeezed between grander neighbours, stands a small, square building of pale stone with a portico of Doric columns. Walk through into the single room inside. It is almost empty: grey walls, a stone floor, a round opening in the roof... and under it, a dark bronze figure of a mother holding her dead son.

The building began as something very practical. Schinkel designed it between 1816 and 1818 as the guardhouse for the soldiers protecting King Frederick William the Third. The king did not live in the great palace you saw earlier; he preferred the smaller Crown Prince's Palace across the boulevard, and his guard stood watch right here. Schinkel gave the guardhouse the shape of a Roman army camp, with victory goddesses on the frieze, fresh from the wars against Napoleon.

Then the building began to mourn. In 1931 it became a memorial to the German dead of the First World War. The East German state turned it into a memorial to the victims of fascism and militarism, with an eternal flame and goose-stepping soldiers changing the guard outside. And in 1993, after reunification, it became the central memorial of the Federal Republic, dedicated to the victims of war and tyranny.

The sculpture is an enlarged version of a small Pietà by Käthe Kollwitz. She lost her younger son Peter in the first weeks of the First World War, in 1914, and later her grandson, also called Peter, in the Second. The opening in the roof is never closed. Rain falls on the mother and her child, and in winter snow settles on her shoulders. Stand still for a moment and listen to how quiet the room is, in the middle of the busiest boulevard in Berlin.

A king's guardhouse that became a nation's place of grief: few buildings in the city carry as many meanings in so little space. When you are ready, cross Unter den Linden to the wide, cobbled square on the other side, beside the opera house.