Kings, Domes and Empty Shelves: Museum Island & Prussian Berlin

From the Red Town Hall and Berlin's oldest church to the rebuilt royal palace, the Hohenzollern crypt, Schinkel's temples of art and the square where books burned in 1933

Berlin · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Rotes Rathaus: The Citizens' Red Palace

   Rathausstraße 15, 10178 Berlin, Germany

   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.

2. 2. Nikolaikirche: Where Berlin Began

   Nikolaikirchplatz, 10178 Berlin, Germany

   Walk around the church until you face its west front, and crouch down a little: the lowest courses of the wall are rough grey fieldstone, granite boulders dragged here by glaciers and stacked by medieval masons. Above them rises brick, and above the brick, two slender spires. You are looking at the oldest church in Berlin, the Nikolaikirche.

   Building began around 1230, when Berlin was a small trading town on one bank of the Spree and its twin, Cölln, sat on the island opposite. The church grew into a Gothic hall in the fifteenth century, but here is the twist: those two famous spires, the very symbol of old Berlin, are not medieval at all. They were added in the 1870s, during a restoration, when the Prussian capital wanted its oldest church to look properly ancient.

   In the seventeenth century the pastor here was Paul Gerhardt, one of the greatest hymn writers in the German language. If you have ever heard Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, you have heard his words in the chorale O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden. But Gerhardt was a stubborn Lutheran, and his ruler, the Great Elector, belonged to the Calvinist faith of the Hohenzollern court. When the Elector ordered the clergy to stop attacking each other's doctrines and to sign a pledge, Gerhardt refused... and in 1666 he lost his post. Faith against crown, in the city's oldest pulpit.

   The church has another claim to fame. In 1809, after Prussia's reforms gave its towns a measure of self-government, Berlin's first elected city council gathered here. Then came 1945, and almost the whole quarter was flattened. What you see around you is largely a creation of the 1980s: for Berlin's 750th anniversary in 1987, East German planners rebuilt the Nikolaiviertel as a picture-book old town, partly from prefabricated concrete panels dressed up with gables.

   So the old quarter is younger than many of the tower blocks at Alexanderplatz... and the medieval church wears spires from the age of the Kaiser. Berlin has always been good at inventing its own past. Now walk west down to the river, cross the Rathausbrücke, and follow the long baroque wall ahead of you round to its western end.

3. 3. Humboldt Forum: The Palace That Came Back

   Schloßplatz, 10178 Berlin, Germany

   Stand back far enough to take in the western front: a great gateway shaped like a Roman triumphal arch, and high above it a copper-green dome crowned with a golden cross. Everything in front of you looks three hundred years old. Almost none of it is older than 2013.

   This was the Stadtschloss, the city palace of the Hohenzollerns. The first castle was begun here in 1443 by Elector Frederick the Second, nicknamed Irontooth, and the townspeople hated it so much that they rose up against it. The story goes that they even opened the sluices to flood his building site. Around 1700 the sculptor and architect Andreas Schlüter turned it into a baroque giant for Frederick the First, who in 1701 crowned himself the first King in Prussia. The gate in front of you was added by his next architect, Eosander von Göthe, and the dome came much later, in the 1840s and 1850s.

   On the 9th of November 1918, as the monarchy collapsed, Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a free socialist republic from one of the palace balconies. In 1945 the building burned, and in 1950 the East German leader Walter Ulbricht had what remained blown up as a symbol of Prussian militarism. Only one piece was saved: the portal with Liebknecht's balcony, later built into the East German State Council building across the square.

   In its place, in 1976, rose the Palace of the Republic, a bronze-glass box with the East German parliament, theatres, restaurants and even a bowling alley. It closed in 1990 because of asbestos and was demolished by 2008. In 2002 the Bundestag voted to bring back the old palace, and the Italian architect Franco Stella rebuilt three baroque façades around a museum. Look at the east side later and you will see the compromise: a plain modern wall facing the river. The Humboldt Forum opened in 2021, and Berliners still argue over the cross on that dome.

   A palace destroyed for being too royal, replaced by a people's palace, replaced by a copy of the royal one. Few buildings anywhere have changed their mind so often. Now turn north, cross the road towards the green lawn, and face the largest church in the city.

4. 4. Berliner Dom and the Hohenzollern Crypt

   Am Lustgarten, 10178 Berlin, Germany

   Turn your face up to the enormous green dome, the four corner towers, the staircases and statues piled one on top of another. If it feels a little like an imperial wedding cake, that is roughly the idea. The Berliner Dom was built to impress, and it still does.

   It went up between 1894 and 1905, designed by Julius Raschdorff and pushed forward by the last German emperor, Wilhelm the Second. Wilhelm wanted a Protestant answer to Saint Peter's in Rome, a church that would say the Hohenzollerns ruled by the grace of God just as surely as any pope. An older, smaller cathedral built for Frederick the Great stood here before; it was pulled down to make room for this one.

   But the real heart of the building is underground. In the crypt lie around ninety members of the Hohenzollern family, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, in coffins of wood, tin and stone, some richly decorated, some heartbreakingly small. Upstairs, inside the church, stand two gilded sarcophagi designed by Andreas Schlüter for the first royal couple, King Frederick the First and Queen Sophie Charlotte. She was a brilliant woman who corresponded with the philosopher Leibniz, and the palace of Charlottenburg is named after her.

   Now the surprise: the two most famous Hohenzollerns are not here. Frederick the Great wanted to rest beside his dogs on the terrace of Sanssouci in Potsdam, and only in 1991, after reunification, was his wish finally granted. And Wilhelm the Second, who built this church, died in exile in the Netherlands in 1941 and is buried there. He never came back to the cathedral he had made.

   Bombs set the dome on fire in 1944, and for decades the building stood damaged. Restoration began in the GDR years and was completed in 1993, with a simpler and lower dome than before. Now walk west across the Lustgarten lawn, past the fountain, towards the long row of columns at the far side.

5. 5. Lustgarten and Schinkel's Altes Museum

   Am Lustgarten, 10178 Berlin, Germany

   Walk up to the foot of the steps and let the eighteen tall Ionic columns line up in front of you like a guard of honour. Behind them is one of the first buildings in Germany designed from scratch to be a public museum: the Altes Museum, the Old Museum, opened in 1830.

   Its architect was Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the man who more or less designed the face of Prussian Berlin. King Frederick William the Third paid for it, but the idea behind it was radical for a monarchy. The royal collections of ancient sculpture and paintings would no longer be the private pleasure of the court, but something to educate ordinary citizens. Inside, at the centre, Schinkel placed a domed rotunda modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, a temple for art in the heart of a royal capital.

   Now turn round and find the huge polished granite bowl standing near the steps. It is nearly seven metres across and was carved from a single glacial boulder found in the hills east of Berlin. It was meant to stand inside the rotunda... but it turned out to be too big for the room, so it has stood outside ever since, the world's most elegant oversized birdbath.

   The lawn itself has had many lives. The Lustgarten began as the palace's pleasure garden, where, legend says, some of the first potatoes in Brandenburg were grown. Then the Soldier King, Frederick William the First, who loved nothing more than drilling troops, turned it into a parade ground. In the 1930s the Nazis paved it over for their mass rallies. Only at the end of the 1990s did it become a garden again, with grass, a fountain and people lying in the sun.

   So in a single glance you have it all: a dynasty's palace, its cathedral, its museum, and its parade ground turned picnic lawn. Now walk along the western side of the museum, beside the canal, until a modern white colonnade appears on your right.

6. 6. James-Simon-Galerie: The Man Who Gave Away Nefertiti

   Bodestraße 1-3, 10178 Berlin, Germany

   Climb the broad flight of pale stone steps and stand under the thin white columns of the newest building on Museum Island. It looks calm and almost ancient, yet it only opened in 2019. This is the James-Simon-Galerie, designed by David Chipperfield as the new gateway to the island's museums.

   Who was James Simon? He was a Jewish cotton merchant, one of the richest men in Berlin around 1900, and one of the most generous. He was close to Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, but he spent his fortune on others: on hospitals, on schools, on charities for poor children... and on art for the city. He gave the royal museums whole collections of Renaissance paintings and sculpture.

   And then there was Egypt. Simon paid for the German excavations at Amarna, and in December 1912 the archaeologists found a painted limestone bust of a queen with a long neck and one missing eye: Nefertiti. Under the rules of the dig, the finds belonged to Simon. In 1920 he gave them, Nefertiti included, to the museums of Berlin. She has been the city's most famous resident ever since, and she lives just next door in the Neues Museum.

   James Simon died in 1932, a few months before Hitler came to power. Under the Nazis his name was quietly pushed aside, as if the treasures had come from nowhere. Naming this building after him, almost ninety years later, was a deliberate act of remembering. Behind you stands the Pergamonmuseum, built between 1910 and 1930 to hold whole buildings from the ancient world: the Pergamon Altar and the blue-glazed Ishtar Gate of Babylon. It is closed for a renovation that will last years, so for now its giants wait in the dark.

   When you walk through the galleries here, remember that a queen of Egypt reached Berlin thanks to a private citizen who gave everything away, and whom his own city then tried to forget. Now pass along the colonnade into the garden courtyard behind, where a temple on a high podium waits.

7. 7. Alte Nationalgalerie and the Colonnade Courtyard

   Bodestraße 1-3, 10178 Berlin, Germany

   Step into the garden courtyard framed by slender stone colonnades, and look up at a temple raised high on a podium, with twin staircases sweeping up its front. At the top of the stairs, on horseback, rides a bronze king. That is Frederick William the Fourth, and in a way this whole island was his dream.

   He was the most romantic of all the Prussian kings: a gifted draughtsman, in love with the Middle Ages, with Italy and with ideas. In 1841 he decreed that the island behind his palace should become a sanctuary for art and science, and he sketched the temple you are looking at with his own hand. His architect, Friedrich August Stüler, worked it up into plans, and it was built after both of them were gone, from 1867 to 1876.

   The king's story ended sadly. After a series of strokes in 1857 he could no longer rule, and his brother Wilhelm took over as regent, later as king and then emperor. Read the inscription over the entrance: it dedicates the building to German art and bears the date 1871, the year the German Empire was proclaimed. A romantic's temple of culture, finished as a monument to a new nation.

   The collection began with a gift from a banker, Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener, who left some two hundred and sixty paintings to the king in 1861. Inside today hang some of the great treasures of the nineteenth century, including two haunting canvases by Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea and The Abbey in the Oakwood. The royal family bought both in 1810, and the story goes that it was the teenage crown prince, the future Frederick William the Fourth, who begged for them.

   So the boy who fell for a lonely monk by a grey sea grew up to build a temple to hang him in. Now leave the courtyard by the south gate, cross the little iron bridge over the canal to the west, and follow the water down to the trees of Unter den Linden.

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

   Unter den Linden 4, 10117 Berlin, Germany

   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.

9. 9. Bebelplatz: Frederick's Forum and the Empty Library

   Bebelplatz, 10117 Berlin, Germany

   Walk to the middle of the cobbled square and look down. Set into the stones is a square pane of glass, and beneath it, deep below your feet, a white room lined with shelves. Every single shelf is empty.

   Before we come to that room, look around you, because this square was meant to be a royal masterpiece. Frederick the Great planned it as his Forum Fridericianum. On one side stands the opera house, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, opened in 1742 by a young king who loved music and played the flute himself. Opposite is the curved Old Library, which Berliners nicknamed the chest of drawers. And in the corner rises the round dome of Saint Hedwig's, a Catholic cathedral that the Protestant king allowed after he had conquered Catholic Silesia.

   On the evening of the 10th of May 1933, this square was filled with fire. Nazi-organised students carried books here from the libraries and threw around twenty thousand of them onto a bonfire. Joseph Goebbels gave a speech. Works by Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Erich Maria Remarque and many others went into the flames. The writer Erich Kästner stood in the crowd and watched his own books burn.

   In 1995 the Israeli artist Micha Ullman created the memorial under your feet. He called it simply Library, and the empty shelves have room for about twenty thousand books, the number that burned. Nearby, a plaque quotes a line Heinrich Heine wrote more than a century earlier, in a play: where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too. At night the room glows from below like a light that cannot be put out.

   A forum built to show off the Enlightenment of a philosopher king, and a square where that Enlightenment was set on fire. Both stories belong here. Now walk past the side of the opera house and head south-east, towards a tall red-brick church with two square towers.

10. 10. Friedrichswerdersche Kirche: Schinkel's Gothic Gamble

    Werderscher Markt, 10117 Berlin, Germany

    In front of you rises a tall church of bare red brick, with two square towers and long pointed windows. It looks as if someone had lifted it out of a medieval English college town and set it down in the middle of Berlin. That someone, once again, was Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

    You have now seen Schinkel the classicist, with his Greek columns and Roman domes. So why Gothic? The story is that Schinkel offered several designs for this church in the 1820s, including classical ones, but the crown prince, the future Frederick William the Fourth, the same romantic you met on Museum Island, loved the Middle Ages and wanted Gothic. The church was finished in 1831, and it became one of the first important neo-Gothic buildings in the city.

    Schinkel was a man of astonishing range. Before he built anything famous, he painted stage sets, and his starry night sky for a production of Mozart's Magic Flute in 1816 is still reproduced on stage today. Across the road stood his most modern building, the Bauakademie, a brick school of architecture that pointed straight towards the twentieth century. East Germany demolished it in 1962. Today you can see a reconstructed corner and plans to bring the rest back.

    The church has had its own troubles. Badly damaged in the war, it was restored and later used as a Schinkel museum. Then, in 2012, it had to close: the digging for a row of expensive new townhouses right next door had cracked its walls and vaults. After years of repairs it reopened in 2020 as a gallery of nineteenth-century sculpture, white marble figures standing under brick Gothic vaults.

    A royal whim, a damaged masterpiece and a museum again: Schinkel's churches seem to survive everything. Now walk south-west along the quiet streets for a few blocks, and you will come out onto the most beautiful square in Berlin, between two domed churches.

11. 11. Gendarmenmarkt: Huguenots, Domes and a Concert for Freedom

    Gendarmenmarkt, 10117 Berlin, Germany

    Stand in the centre of the square and turn slowly: a domed tower to the north, an almost identical domed tower to the south, and between them, at the top of a broad flight of steps, Schinkel's concert hall. Many people call it the most beautiful square in Berlin, and it is hard to argue.

    Start with the word Dom. Neither of these churches is a cathedral. The towers were added in the 1780s by Frederick the Great's architect Carl von Gontard, and the word comes from the French dôme, meaning a cupola. Frederick wanted his square to echo the twin churches of Rome's Piazza del Popolo, so the towers are mostly for show, attached to two older, much humbler churches. Building them was not smooth either: one of the towers collapsed during construction and had to be started again.

    The church to the north is the French one, and it tells the story of the people who shaped this part of the city. In 1685 Louis the Fourteenth banned Protestantism in France, and the Great Elector answered at once with the Edict of Potsdam, inviting the Huguenots to Brandenburg. Thousands came: weavers, doctors, gardeners, jewellers. Around 1700, it is often said, about one in five Berliners spoke French. Berliners still claim words from them, like the Bulette, the city's beloved meatball. And the name Gendarmenmarkt? For much of the eighteenth century a cavalry regiment called the Gens d'armes kept its stables right here, on the square where you now hear Mozart.

    At Christmas in 1989, just weeks after the Wall opened, Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the concert hall in front of you, with musicians from East and West. He changed one word in the Ode to Joy: Freude became Freiheit, joy became freedom.

    And with that, our walk through royal Berlin ends: from a citizens' town hall and the city's oldest church, past a palace that came back from the dead and a square where books burned, to a square where kings, refugees and musicians all left their mark. Take a seat on the steps of the concert hall, and enjoy the view.