Kulturforum and Potsdamer Platz

Why is it significant?

In front of you rises a golden building that looks less like a concert hall and more like a circus tent caught in a gust of wind, its roof folding and peaking in odd directions. This is the Philharmonie, home of the Berlin Philharmonic, designed by Hans Scharoun and opened in 1963.

Key Facts

Open the walk

In front of you rises a golden building that looks less like a concert hall and more like a circus tent caught in a gust of wind, its roof folding and peaking in odd directions. This is the Philharmonie, home of the Berlin Philharmonic, designed by Hans Scharoun and opened in 1963. Berliners nicknamed it Zirkus Karajani, after its star conductor Herbert von Karajan.

Inside, Scharoun broke every rule. Instead of rows facing a stage, the audience sits on terraces like vineyards on a hillside, all around the orchestra, so the music is in the middle of the people. Concert halls from Tokyo to Hamburg have copied the idea. And when it opened, it stood almost at the edge of the world: from 1961 the Wall ran just a few hundred metres east of here.

Before you go further, look at the long blue glass wall along the street beside the Philharmonie. At Tiergartenstraße 4 stood the villa from which the Nazi regime organised the murder of disabled people and psychiatric patients, known after that address as Aktion T4. More than seventy thousand people were killed in its first phase alone, in 1940 and 1941. Since 2014 this memorial has named that crime in the place where it was planned.

All around you is the Kulturforum, West Berlin's answer to the Museumsinsel, which lay out of reach in the East. Across the road, Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie hovers like a steel and glass temple, opened in 1968 and reopened in 2021 after a careful renovation by David Chipperfield. Behind it, Scharoun's State Library is where the angels of Wings of Desire listen to readers' thoughts.

Now look east, to the towers of Potsdamer Platz. In the 1920s it was one of the busiest squares in Europe, with one of the first traffic lights in Germany. After the war and the Wall it became a wasteland, a death strip with rabbits, and in the 1990s it turned into a gigantic building site. From the parliament's glass dome through a forest replanted from nothing to this square reborn, you have just walked through Berlin's whole stubborn talent for starting again.