Glass Dome and Golden Angel: Berlin's Reichstag, Tiergarten & Victory Column

From the parliament's mirrored dome through the green heart of Berlin: river banks, quiet memorials, a president's palace, Goldelse on her column, lake islands and the concert hall shaped like a tent

Berlin · 12 stops · 29 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Reichstag: The Parliament Under Glass

Platz der Republik 1, 10557 Berlin, Germany

Stand on the lawn of the Platz der Republik and take in the whole heavy sandstone palace in front of you, with a glass dome sitting on its roof like a soap bubble that landed on a fortress. Above the columns, in tall bronze letters, it says Dem Deutschen Volke, To the German People. Kaiser Wilhelm the Second disliked the dedication so much that it was only added in 1916, more than twenty years after the building opened... and the story goes that the letters were cast from captured French cannon.

On the night of the 27th of February 1933, four weeks after Hitler became chancellor, the debating chamber went up in flames. A young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested inside and later executed. Whoever else was or was not involved, the Nazis knew exactly what to do with the fire. The very next day a decree suspended freedom of the press, of assembly and of speech, and those basic rights did not come back for twelve years.

In the last days of April 1945 Soviet soldiers fought their way through this building room by room. The famous photograph of a red flag over the ruined roof was taken by Yevgeny Khaldei, partly restaged for the camera. When the British architect Norman Foster rebuilt the interior in the 1990s, he found the soldiers' Cyrillic graffiti under the plaster... names, home towns, a few insults, and Germany decided to keep much of it on the walls, where the members of parliament walk past it every day.

Then came the strangest summer in the building's life. In June 1995 the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the entire Reichstag in silvery fabric, roughly a hundred thousand square metres of it, tied with blue rope. For two weeks millions of people picnicked on this lawn, staring at a parliament turned into a sculpture. Four years later the Bundestag moved in under Foster's dome, where a cone of three hundred and sixty mirrors throws daylight down into the chamber and visitors spiral up the ramps above the heads of their elected representatives.

Keep that idea of light and openness with you, because the next stop is about darkness and silence. Walk south along the side of the building and cross Scheidemannstraße into the trees of the Tiergarten, where a small clearing hides a round, black pool.
2. Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe

Simsonweg, 10557 Berlin, Germany

Step through the glass panels into the clearing and you find yourself at the edge of a perfectly round pool, its water so dark it looks like a hole in the earth. In the middle sits a small triangular stone, and on it, a single fresh flower. Listen for a moment... somewhere, very quietly, a violin is playing one long, sustained note.

This is the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under National Socialism, designed by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan and opened in October 2012. Historians estimate that up to half a million Sinti and Roma were killed, shot behind the front lines in the East, starved in ghettos, gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The triangle in the water recalls the triangular badges prisoners had to wear in the camps.

The persecution began right here in Berlin, earlier than many people think. In the summer of 1936, just before the Olympic Games, the police rounded up Sinti and Roma families and forced them into a camp on the edge of the city at Marzahn, between a sewage field and a cemetery. The city wanted to look tidy for the foreign visitors. Many of the people held there were later deported to Auschwitz.

Look at the stone again. Every day it sinks beneath the surface and rises again carrying a new flower, so that the memorial is never left without one. Around the rim, letter by letter, runs a poem by the Italian Roma poet Santino Spinelli, called Auschwitz, about a hollow face, extinguished eyes and a broken heart. The violin is a piece composed for this place by the Sinto musician Romeo Franz.

For decades after the war, the genocide of Sinti and Roma was barely acknowledged. Survivors were often turned away when they asked for compensation, and West Germany only formally recognised it as a racially motivated crime in 1982. Even this memorial took some twenty years of argument to build. Leave the clearing on its south side and follow the edge of the park along Ebertstraße, past the Brandenburg Gate, to a grey concrete block standing among the trees.
3. Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism

Ebertstraße, 10785 Berlin, Germany

On the park side of Ebertstraße, half hidden by trees, stands a grey concrete cube, slightly tilted, as if it had been nudged off balance. There is no plaque on its face, only a small square window at about eye height. Go closer, and look in.

Inside, a short film is playing on a loop. Two people kiss. That's all... and that is exactly the point. This is the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism, created by the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset and unveiled in 2008. A simple act of tenderness, shown in the place where it was once a crime. The film has been changed over the years, and later versions have also shown women kissing.

The law behind the persecution was Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which dated back to 1871. In 1935 the Nazis made it far harsher, and the police kept lists of names. Around fifty thousand men were convicted during the Nazi years, and somewhere between five and fifteen thousand were sent to concentration camps, where they were marked with a pink triangle. Many of them did not survive.

Now turn around and look across the road. Those grey stelae are the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and this cube is deliberately cast in the same concrete, like a single block that has wandered away from the field. It is a dialogue between two memorials, and a reminder that persecution came in many shapes. And here is the part people find hardest to believe: West Germany kept the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 on its books until 1969. Men who survived the camps could be prosecuted again under the same law.

The paragraph was only removed completely in 1994, and in 2017 the Bundestag finally quashed the post-war convictions. So the cube speaks about the past and about very recent history at once. From here, walk back into the Tiergarten heading north-west, along the paths towards the long avenue called Straße des 17. Juni, until you see a curved stone colonnade and two tanks.
4. Soviet War Memorial on Straße des 17. Juni

Straße des 17. Juni, 10557 Berlin, Germany

In front of you a bronze soldier stands on top of a curved stone colonnade, rifle slung over his shoulder, arm stretched out as if to hold back everything behind him. At either end, raised on plinths, sit two real tanks and two heavy guns from the Second World War. Behind the colonnade, under the grass and the trees, lie the graves of around two thousand Soviet soldiers.

This memorial was unveiled in November 1945, only months after the end of the war, while Berlin was still a field of ruins. The Battle of Berlin cost the Red Army tens of thousands of lives in a few weeks of fighting, and these men were among them. Berliners have long told the story that the red marble was taken from the wrecked Reich Chancellery of Hitler. It is a legend that historians treat with some caution, but it shows how people read this place: the victors building their monument out of the defeated regime.

Then the city was divided, and something absurd happened. The memorial ended up in the British sector of West Berlin. So for more than forty years Soviet soldiers stood guard here every day, inside the West, and British military police stood guard around the Soviet guards. In 1970 a young West Berlin neo-Nazi shot and wounded one of the sentries, and the protection was tightened even further.

Now look along the wide avenue. Straße des 17. Juni is named after the 17th of June 1953, when workers in East Berlin and across East Germany rose up against the communist government and were crushed by Soviet tanks. A memorial to Soviet soldiers on a street named after a revolt crushed by Soviet soldiers... Berlin does not do simple. The avenue itself was widened in 1939 as part of the Nazi east-west axis, ready for a parade on Hitler's fiftieth birthday.

Cross the avenue carefully and head north through the park, on the path towards the river Spree. Ahead of you, beyond a wide lawn, a huge white building with round windows is waiting... the Berliners have a rude nickname for it.
5. Federal Chancellery and the Spreebogen

Willy-Brandt-Straße 1, 10557 Berlin, Germany

Across the lawn rises a big white cube with a huge round window cut into its face, flanked by long low wings stretching towards the river. Berliners took one look and called it the Waschmaschine... the washing machine. It is the Bundeskanzleramt, the office of the German chancellor, designed by Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank and finished in 2001.

Stand back and you can see the bigger idea. The Chancellery is one end of a long strip of government buildings called the Band des Bundes, the Federal Ribbon, which runs east to west and leaps across the Spree twice. For almost three decades the Wall cut through this part of Berlin from north to south, only a few hundred metres east of here. So the architects stitched the city back together with a ribbon running the other way.

This loop of the river is called the Spreebogen, and before the war it was a smart quarter of villas and embassies. Then Albert Speer began clearing it for Hitler's capital Germania. Right about here was to stand the Great Hall, a domed building planned to be close to three hundred metres tall, big enough to hold over a hundred and fifty thousand people. It was never built, but the demolitions and the bombs left the whole bend empty.

Look east, towards the river and the Reichstag, and you will spot one small, old, lonely building standing on its own. That is the Swiss Embassy, the only survivor of the old quarter. Switzerland simply refused to sell, the war ended before the bulldozers arrived, and today it sits beside the chancellor like a stubborn neighbour who never moved out.

Not every chancellor wanted to live above the shop. There is a flat on the top floor, but Angela Merkel famously preferred to keep living in her own apartment across town. The chancellor's garden lies across the Spree, reached by a private bridge. From here, follow the river path west for a few steps, to a white building whose roof sweeps up like a giant shell.
6. Haus der Kulturen der Welt: The Pregnant Oyster

John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin, Germany

Walk up to the long reflecting pool and let your eyes follow the roof of the building in front of you: a huge concrete shell curving up into the sky on both sides, like a hat brim caught by the wind. In the water sits a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, two great smooth forms almost touching, called Butterfly.

Berliners, never shy, named this building the schwangere Auster... the pregnant oyster. It was built in 1957 as the Kongresshalle, the Congress Hall, a gift from the United States to West Berlin, designed by the American architect Hugh Stubbins. It was meant as a message across the Cold War: a free, open meeting place, deliberately visible from the East, with a roof that seemed to float.

Big names came to speak under that roof. On the 26th of June 1963, the same day he told a huge crowd in Schöneberg that he was a Berliner, John F. Kennedy also addressed a trade union congress inside this hall. For West Berlin, an island surrounded by East Germany, a building like this was a kind of window to the world.

Then on the 21st of May 1980 the unthinkable happened: part of the great roof suddenly collapsed. One person was killed and several were injured. Engineers found that the steel cables inside the concrete had corroded. Berlin argued about whether to rebuild, and in the end the shell was reconstructed and reopened in 1987, the year the city celebrated its 750th anniversary. Since 1989 it has been the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the House of the World's Cultures, full of exhibitions, music and debates from every continent.

Just beside it stands a tall black tower that sometimes starts to sing. It is a carillon with sixty-eight bells, also a present for that anniversary, and on concert days the bells ring out over the treetops. Now find the path down to the river behind the building and walk a short way west along the water, where the city suddenly goes quiet.
7. On the Spree Bank Behind the Tents

John-Foster-Dulles-Allee, 10557 Berlin, Germany

Find a spot by the railing and just watch the river for a minute. The Spree slides past slowly, olive green, with coots paddling along the edge, and if you are lucky, a grey heron standing perfectly still on the far bank like a forgotten umbrella. Across the water, on the island-like strip called Moabiter Werder, a long, winding apartment block curls along the shore.

That curving building is known in Berlin simply as the Schlange, the snake. It was built to house federal civil servants who moved here after the Bundestag voted in June 1991, by a narrow margin, to leave Bonn and bring parliament and government back to Berlin. Hundreds of families from the Rhineland arrived on this river bank, and some of them were not at all happy about it.

The Spree itself has travelled a long way to get here. It rises in the hills of Lusatia near the Czech border and winds for around four hundred kilometres through forests and wetlands before it reaches Berlin, and it ends a few kilometres west of here, in Spandau, where it flows into the Havel. In the heart of the city it is so slow that in summer you can watch swallows skim it for insects.

Behind you, between here and the Chancellery, ran a street that no longer exists, called In den Zelten, In the Tents. In the 1740s Frederick the Great allowed refreshment tents on the edge of his park, and for a century Berliners came out to drink coffee and listen to music under the trees. Later, villas replaced the tents, and in one of them the doctor Magnus Hirschfeld opened his Institute for Sexual Science in 1919, the first of its kind anywhere.

On the 6th of May 1933 Nazi students stormed the institute, smashed it and carried away its library. Four days later many of those books burned in the great book burning on what is now Bebelplatz. The river path along the Chancellery is named Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer in his memory. Now carry on west along the water, past the old Lutherbrücke, to a white palace with a flag on its roof.
8. Schloss Bellevue: The President's Palace

Spreeweg 1, 10557 Berlin, Germany

Through the railings you can see a long, white, elegant palace with a columned centre and two wings reaching forward like open arms. Glance up at the roof. If a flag is flying there, the German Federal President is in Berlin... this is Schloss Bellevue, the president's official seat, and the name means exactly what it promises: beautiful view, over the bend of the river.

It was built in 1786 for Prince August Ferdinand of Prussia, the youngest brother of Frederick the Great. Compared with the Baroque palaces of the time it is strikingly plain, clean lines, no gilded excess, one of the early examples of the neoclassical taste that would soon spread across Berlin. The prince wanted a summer house on the edge of the royal park, close enough to court, far enough to breathe.

The palace has lived several lives. In the 1930s it housed a museum of German folk culture, and from 1938 the Nazi government turned it into a guest house for foreign state visitors. In 1945 it was badly damaged in the fighting for the Tiergarten. After the war it was restored, and from 1959 West Germany's presidents used it as their Berlin residence, while the real capital was still Bonn. Since 1994 it has been the president's principal seat.

Behind the palace, partly hidden in the trees, there is a strange black oval building, polished and dark like a pebble. That is the Bundespräsidialamt, the president's office, opened in 1998. And the park around you is not just decoration: the gardens of Bellevue still follow the idea of an English landscape garden, with lawns opening onto the water and trees placed to frame the views, as if nature had arranged itself.

Close by, to the west, lies the Englischer Garten, laid out after the war with help from Britain when the whole Tiergarten had to be replanted from almost nothing. But you will hear that story a little later. Now walk south along Spreeweg, and in a few minutes you will see a golden figure flashing above the trees.
9. Großer Stern and the Victory Column

Großer Stern 1, 10557 Berlin, Germany

In the middle of the roundabout a red granite column shoots up out of the traffic, ringed with golden bands, and on top a golden winged woman holds a laurel wreath high over the trees. Berliners call her Goldelse, golden Else. Officially she is Victoria, the goddess of victory, more than eight metres tall and weighing around thirty-five tonnes.

The Siegessäule, the Victory Column, was inaugurated in 1873 to celebrate three wars that Prussia won in quick succession, against Denmark, Austria and France, the wars that created the German Empire. Look closely at the column's grooves: those golden shapes are gun barrels, captured cannon, gilded and set into the stone like trophies.

But Goldelse did not always stand here. She originally rose in front of the Reichstag, where you started this walk. In 1938 and 1939 the Nazis moved the entire column to this roundabout as part of their grand east-west axis, and they added an extra drum to make it taller, so the whole monument now stands close to sixty-seven metres high. The statues of Bismarck and his generals were moved too, and you can still see them around the edge of the circle.

The Großer Stern, the Great Star, is much older than the column. When the Tiergarten was still the hunting ground of the Prussian rulers, straight paths met here like the points of a star, so hunters could see down long lines through the forest. Later the column became a stage. In Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire, angels sit on Goldelse's shoulders watching over a divided city. In 2008 Barack Obama spoke here to around two hundred thousand people, and for years the Love Parade turned this roundabout into the world's biggest open-air dance floor.

If you climb the narrow spiral stairs inside, nearly three hundred steps, you reach a platform just under her feet with the whole green forest of the Tiergarten spread out below. Use the underpasses to leave the roundabout towards the south-east, and follow the paths into the woods to a quiet pond with a little island.
10. Rousseauinsel: The Philosopher's Island

Großer Weg, 10785 Berlin, Germany

Here, in the middle of a still pond, sits a tiny island, and on it a slim stone pedestal topped with an urn, framed by willows dipping into the water. Ducks cruise past it as if they owned the place. It feels like a painting, and that is no accident... it was designed to look like one.

This is the Rousseauinsel, a memorial to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, created in the late eighteenth century. When Rousseau died in 1778 he was buried on a little island of poplars in a lake at Ermenonville, north of Paris, and that grave became a pilgrimage site for all of Europe. Admirers copied it in gardens everywhere, and Berlin built its own. Rousseau had told his readers to go back to nature, and gardeners took him literally.

That idea shaped the whole Tiergarten. For centuries this was a fenced hunting forest for the Electors of Brandenburg. In the eighteenth century Frederick the Great opened it up as a pleasure park, and in the 1830s the great garden designer Peter Joseph Lenné reshaped it into the landscape you walk through today: winding paths, little streams, sudden clearings, ponds that look as if they had always been there.

Almost all of it is younger than it looks. In the bitter winter after the war, freezing Berliners cut down nearly every tree for firewood, and the park was dug up into vegetable plots. Only a few hundred of the old trees survived. In March 1949 the mayor of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter, planted a young lime tree to begin the replanting, and saplings came from all over West Germany to fill the empty ground.

So when you look at these tall trees, you are looking at a forest that was planted as an act of hope by a city that had nothing else to burn. Today the Tiergarten covers about two hundred and ten hectares, and it is home to woodpeckers, foxes and even the occasional goshawk. Follow the Großer Weg east through the woods for a few minutes, to another island, this one full of flowers and dedicated to a queen.
11. Luiseninsel: The Queen's Flower Island

Großer Weg, 10785 Berlin, Germany

Cross the little bridge and you step onto an island of flowerbeds, ringed by water and tall trees, with a white marble queen standing in the middle of it all, gazing calmly over the beds. In spring the tulips here are so bright they almost hurt the eyes, and later in the year the beds are replanted in new colours.

The woman in marble is Queen Luise of Prussia, and the statue was made by the sculptor Erdmann Encke in 1880. Luise was born in 1776, a princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and married the future King Frederick William the Third. She was young, warm, informal, and the Prussians adored her in a way they never adored their stiff kings.

Her fame was made by disaster. In 1806 Napoleon crushed the Prussian army, marched into Berlin, and the royal family fled all the way east to Memel on the Baltic. In 1807, at Tilsit, Luise met Napoleon face to face to plead for gentler peace terms for her country. She failed... Napoleon was charming and unmoved. But the image of a queen standing up to the conqueror never faded.

She returned to Berlin only in December 1809, and seven months later, in July 1810, she died at the age of thirty-four. The whole country mourned. For the rest of the century Luise became almost a saint of Prussian patriotism, and this little island in the park her family had loved became one of the places where Berliners came to remember her. Her husband, by the way, stands nearby too, in his own memorial in the trees, so the royal couple still share the park.

What makes this spot special is that it is still a garden, not just a monument. Gardeners tend the beds through the seasons, and on a warm day the island hums with bees. From here, walk south out of the park towards Tiergartenstraße. Just across the road, beyond a blue glass wall, a golden building shaped like a tent will rise in front of you.
12. Kulturforum and Potsdamer Platz

Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin, Germany

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.