Reichstag building

• 1. Introduction

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  The Reichstag building in Berlin has stood at the center of German history for well over a century, and its walls carry the evidence of every storm that history brought. Bullet holes and graffiti scratched by Soviet soldiers after the final battle for Berlin in April-May 1945 were deliberately left in place when the building was restored in the 1990s. Architects were told those traces had to remain visible. What kind of building earns that instruction? What does it mean that a parliament chose to govern inside a structure that still shows the scars of its own near-destruction? To answer that, we have to go back to 1872, when 103 architects competed for the right to design a new home for a newly unified German nation, and follow the building through fire, war, division, wrapping, and glass.

• 2. Building a Nation's House

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  Paul Wallot, a Frankfurt architect, won the second of two design contests held for the building, beating out 200 competitors in 1882. His direct model was Philadelphia's Memorial Hall, the main building of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in the United States. Wallot adorned the facade with crowns and eagles intended to express imperial strength. The four corner towers stood for the four German kingdoms that had come together at unification: Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg. The heraldic coats of arms of each kingdom, along with devices representing various German city-states, flanked the main entrance. Sculptor Otto Lessing contributed some of the decorative sculptures, reliefs, and inscriptions.

  On the 9th of June 1884, Kaiser Wilhelm I laid the foundation stone at the east side of the Königsplatz. The building was not finished until 1894, and by then Wilhelm I had already died, during the Year of Three Emperors in 1888. His successor, Wilhelm II, was far cooler toward parliamentary democracy than his grandfather had been. The original structure was praised for its cupola of steel and glass, regarded as an engineering feat, though the building's mixture of architectural styles drew widespread criticism.

  In 1916, the words Dem deutschen Volke, meaning "To the German People," were placed above the main facade. Wilhelm II had tried to block the inscription because of what he saw as its democratic significance, and he failed. Two years later, in the revolutionary days of 1918, Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the institution of a republic from one of the building's balconies on the 9th of November, hours after Wilhelm's abdication was announced and two days before World War I ended.

• 3. Fire and Political Seizure

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  On the 27th of February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, an arson attack gutted most of the Reichstag building despite the efforts of firefighters. A Dutch council communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was identified as the apparent culprit. Hitler, however, attributed the fire to Communist agitators and used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the government.

  He induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties and called for a ruthless confrontation with the Communists. The building's severe damage meant it was not used for parliamentary sessions for the next twelve years. The nearby Kroll Opera House was converted into a legislative chamber and hosted all parliamentary sessions instead. The Reichstag building itself became the setting for political exhibitions.

  By 1939, the library and archive had been moved out and the windows were bricked up as the structure was converted into a fortress. By 1943, it was being used as both a hospital and a radio tube manufacturing facility by AEG. When the Battle of Berlin arrived in 1945, the Red Army made the building one of its central targets, driven by the building's symbolic weight in their understanding of the German state.

• 4. Cold War Limbo

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  After the war, the Reichstag stood in ruins inside West Berlin's boundaries. On the 9th of September 1948, during the Berlin Blockade, an enormous number of West Berliners assembled in front of the building. Mayor Ernst Reuter delivered a famous speech that ended with the words: "Ihr Völker der Welt... schaut auf diese Stadt..." meaning "You people of the world... look upon this city..."

  In 1956, the West German government decided the Reichstag should not be torn down but restored, with architect Paul Baumgarten leading the effort. The original cupola, heavily damaged in the war, was dismantled. Ornaments and statues were stripped from the exterior, leaving a simpler facade. Reconstruction ran from 1961 and was complete by 1971.

  Under the 1971 Four Power Agreement on Berlin, Berlin sat formally outside the bounds of either East or West Germany, so the West German parliament was barred from assembling formally there. The building was used only for occasional representative meetings and one-off events. British rock band Barclay James Harvest gave a free concert in front of it on the 30th of August 1980, and Tangerine Dream performed on the 29th of August 1981. The building also housed a permanent exhibition called Fragen an die deutsche Geschichte, meaning "Questions on German History," which was widely praised. On the 26th of May 1989, the Bethke brothers landed ultralight airplanes they had used to defect from East Germany directly in front of the Reichstag.

• 5. Reunification and the Wrap

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  The official German reunification ceremony on the 3rd of October 1990 took place at the Reichstag, with Chancellor Helmut Kohl, President Richard von Weizsäcker, and former Chancellor Willy Brandt among those present. The following day, the parliament of the united Germany assembled at the building as a symbolic act.

  The question of where the government would actually be based was settled on the 20th of June 1991, when the Bundestag concluded, with a slim majority, that both government and parliament should return to Berlin from Bonn. Norman Foster was formally asked to include a dome solution in his draft reconstruction proposal on the 21st of June 1994. He incorporated it into his plans submitted on the 10th of February 1995.

  Before reconstruction began, the Bulgarian-American artists Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude wrapped the entire Reichstag in 1995, drawing millions of visitors. The project was financed entirely by the artists themselves, through the sale of preparatory drawings, collages, and early works from the 1950s and 1960s. During the reconstruction that followed, virtually everything was gutted except the outer walls, including all changes Baumgarten had made in the 1960s. Graffiti left by Soviet soldiers was kept where possible, though graffiti judged offensive was removed in agreement with Russian diplomats.

• 6. The Glass Dome

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  Gottfried Böhm, an artist and architect, proposed the redesigned walk-in glass dome that now sits above the plenary chamber. The dome offers a 360-degree view of the Berlin cityscape. From inside, visitors can look down directly into the main debating chamber of the parliament below, and natural light from the dome radiates down to the parliament floor.

  A large sun shield tracks the movement of the sun electronically, blocking direct sunlight that would otherwise create excessive solar heat gain and dazzle the members of parliament below. Construction was finished in 1999. The keys to the building were ceremonially handed over to Wolfgang Thierse, the president of the Bundestag, on the 19th of April 1999, and the Bundestag convened there officially for the first time that day.

  The Reichstag is now the second most visited attraction in Germany. The dome is open to visitors by prior registration, and the view it offers, particularly at night over the city, is part of why the building draws the numbers it does. The dome was consciously designed as a gesture to the original 1894 cupola that had been dismantled decades earlier, restoring a visual relationship between the building and the sky above Berlin.