Rotes Rathaus: The Citizens' Red Palace

Why is it significant?

You are standing in front of a palace that is not a palace: a long block of deep red brick, rows of arched windows, and a square tower rising about seventy-four metres above the traffic.

Key Facts

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You are standing in front of a palace that is not a palace: a long block of deep red brick, rows of arched windows, and a square tower rising about seventy-four metres above the traffic. This is the Rotes Rathaus, Berlin's Red Town Hall, and the first thing any local will tell you is that the red has nothing to do with politics. It is simply the colour of the brick.

It went up between 1861 and 1869, designed by the architect Hermann Friedrich Waesemann, and the timing matters. Prussia was ruled by King Wilhelm, who would soon become the first German emperor, and his palace stood just a few hundred metres to the west. The citizens of Berlin wanted a building of their own that could look the royal residence in the eye. So Waesemann borrowed the language of the proud town halls of Renaissance Italy, where merchants, not princes, ran the city... and gave the tower a height no burgher had dared before.

Now let your eyes run along the band just above the ground floor windows. That is the Stone Chronicle, a frieze of thirty-six terracotta panels finished in 1879, telling the story of Berlin from its medieval beginnings to the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Kings appear in it, of course, but so do traders, craftsmen and townspeople. It is history as the city wanted to tell it, not as the court did.

In 1945 the building burned out. Rebuilt in the 1950s, it became the seat of East Berlin's city government, while West Berlin was run from the town hall in Schöneberg, where John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech in 1963. For almost thirty years Berlin had two mayors, two councils, two town halls. In 1991 the government of the reunited city moved in here, and the red tower that began as an act of civic pride against a king ended up as a symbol of a city made whole again.

Keep that rivalry between citizens and crown in mind, because it runs through this entire walk. Now cross Rathausstraße to the south and slip into the narrow lanes of the Nikolaiviertel, where two needle-thin spires mark the place Berlin began.