Unter den Linden
Subway: Hackescher Markt
Bus: 100, 200, 348
Open: 10am- 6pm daily
Neue Wache is a war memorial constructed in 1816- 18 after a design of architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. This beautiful neo- Classical building was originally used for the royal guards as their guardhouse, however between 1930 and 1931 government of the Weimar Republic turned it into a monument to honor German soldiers that were killed during World War I. In 1960 it was re- dedicated as the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism to fit politically correct nature of its time upon its reconstruction. Apparently it wasn't enough so after last restoration of 1993 it was re- dedicated again to all victims of war and dictatorship.
Guard building
The one from 1816 to 1818 on behalf
of Friedrich Wilhelm III. According to plans by Karl Friedrich Schinkel,
the main and royal guard built up is one of the main works of German
classicism. It served as a guard building for the slanted royal palace
and at the same time as a memorial for the fallen of the liberation wars
against Napoleon. In Schinkel's plans, earlier designs by Heinrich Gentz
and, according to his own statements, Solomo Sachs, who had not come to
execution due to the Napoleonic Wars.
The building stone
originally consisted of the anteroom, the wax room, the officer room,
the arrest room and several side rooms around an inner courtyard. The
five -axle main facade under the Doric column portics of the Linden
divided into a central portal and two side windows each.
The
change in the old guard, canon guard, castle or royal guard has been a
preferred redesign topic of the king since 1803/04. For this purpose,
prices for the academy exhibitions in Berlin were formulated. The task
was carried out to implement the college of the Oberhof construction and
the Royal Prussian Academy of the Arts. For example, Heinrich Gentz
asked Schinkel on May 6, 1805 whether he could help him to help with the
design of the area between the Linden and the Royal Palace "when he was
designed by his" beautification project of the area between the Linden
had to present the arts there until May 25, 1805. In the period between
1786 and 1816, designs and architectural model buildings were in the
foreground.
A memorable event occurred on October 16, 1906, when
the cobbler Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt disguised as "Captain von Köpenick"
the mayor of Köpenick, captured his main treasurer of Wildberg and
confiscated the city treasury. With military accompaniment, he put Georg
Langerhans and from Wildberg in a Droschke to Berlin and had them locked
in the guard by the duty of the guard regiment, a sprout of the imperial
family.
Before the First World War, the new guard had been
expanded to the main center of the military telegraph of Berlin and from
1900 to the military post office for internal roster. The military
leadership made daily commands for the Berlin garrison. From here on
August 1, 1914, the mobile positions went out and four years later the
demobilization. During the November Revolution in 1918, soldiers and
workers occupied the building.
Memorial
At the suggestion of
Prussia's Prime Minister Otto Braun (SPD), Heinrich Tessenow converted
the new guard in 1931 to the memorial for the fallen of the World War,
which was then called the memorial of the Prussian state government.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Hans Poelzig won the second or third prize
with their competition designs for the redesign of the interior.
Mies van der Rawes not executed design provided for a monumental
interior with a flat black memorial stone, which was decorated with the
German coat of arms at the top and on the side with the simple
inscription "the dead". There were two stone benches on the side walls
of the interior, in the back wall there was a glass door through which
the visitor entered the boulevard under the linden trees had seen the
chestnut grove behind the new guard. The same materials as for the
Barcelona Pavilion should be chosen for the Berlin memorial, namely
floors made of light gray travertine and walls made of dark green tinos.
After the new guard burned down during an air raid in the Second
World War, there were various usage proposals for reconstruction, e.g.
B. as a university bookstore, Goethe memorial or memorial for the
victims of fascism and war. One of the rescuers of the new guard
included the head of the monument conservation and state conservator of
Berlin Hinnerk Scheper after the war. Another rescuer from Schinkelbau,
the architect Selman Selmanagić, prevented a demolition requested by
Berlin FDJ members in 1949 by the plans and inserted a veto with the
responsible Soviet cultural officer Dymschitz. This finally decided with
a word of power about the fate of the guard. In 1949, the FDGB Cultural
Commission of Groß-Berlin also confessed to the preservation of
Schinkelbau as a Goethe memorial. In the period that followed, the front
of the guard was used as a poster area.
On April 12, 1950, part
of the front of the building collapsed and damaged gable reliefs and
some victory figures. The secured pieces were stored in the National
Gallery. Almost simultaneously, the funds for the reconstruction of the
guard's outer facade were approved and was carried out from 1951 to
1957. Finally, from 1957 to 1960, under the direction of Heinz Mehlan,
the building was restored as a memorial for the victims of fascism and
militarism. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the GDR in 1969,
Lothar Kwasnitza added a prism -shaped vitreous with an eternal flame in
the middle of the room.
After the German reunification in 1990,
the new guard was redesigned. In the interior, all elements were removed
from the GDR period and the Tessenow design from 1931 was largely
restored. Instead of the oak leaf wreath, Chancellor Helmut Kohl,
however, had a very enlarged copy of the plastic mother with a totem son
of Käthe Kollwitz, which caused a violent public controversy. The
inauguration of the new guard rededicated to the memorial for the
victims of war and tyranny took place on the 1993 Memorial Day.
A
return of the programmatic statues of Bülow and Scharnhorst, which stood
next to the new guard until 1950, is repeatedly discussed.
In
2017, the building received barrier-free access, new lighting and an
anti-graffiti protection coating.
Ceremonial
On September 18,
1818, on the occasion of the visit of Tsar Alexander von Russia,
soldiers of the Alexander Regiment moved to the new guard with a
sounding game in the "Big Wachtung Unter den Linden". From then on, the
military ceremonial took place with minor changes and longer
interruptions after the First and Second World War until German
reunification in 1990.
From 1962 to the end of the GDR, two
soldiers of the Wach regiment Friedrich Engels, who were replaced every
hour in the small wax elevator, stood in front of the new guard. On
Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2:30 p.m., an honorary formation of the
regiment for the big waking up on the street Unter den Linden. The
waking lifts attracted numerous spectators who observed the replacement
of the soldiers in the parade step.
Since the Memorial Day on
November 14, 1993, the new guard has served as the central memorial of
the Federal Republic of Germany for the victims of war and tyranny. On
the Memorial Day and on other official occasions - such as wreath
resolution - the wax battalion at the Federal Ministry of Defense
provides a guard of honor for the building.
Outer facade
Schinkel's plans for the Neue Wache incorporated
earlier designs by Heinrich Gentz and Salomo Sachs, which were not
implemented due to the Prussian defeat in the Battle of Jena and
Auerstedt in 1806. Only after the end of the liberation wars against
Napoleon in 1815 were the plans resumed.
Despite its relatively
small structure, Schinkel managed to give the building a monumentality
by means of clear forms, massive corner projections and a strictly Doric
columned portico, thanks to which it is able to withstand the impact of
the surrounding building complexes such as the university or the armory.
He used the Roman fortifications as a model: "The plan of this building,
which is completely exposed all around, is roughly modeled after a Roman
castrum, hence the four more solid corner towers and the inner
courtyard." Strelitz court architect Friedrich Wilhelm Buttel.
sculpture program
Schinkel's sculptural program, which elevated the
Neue Wache to a memorial for the victims of the wars of liberation
(1813–1815), consists of three parts: the relief on the gable, the
frieze on the entablature and the statues next to the building.
The statues of the liberation fighters Friedrich Wilhelm Bülow von
Dennewitz and Gerhard von Scharnhorst next to the Neue Wache, carved in
Carrara marble, were executed by Christian Daniel Rauch in 1819-1822 and
are considered masterpieces of classicism. Schinkel: "On the perspective
view, the two colossal marble statues of Generals Scharnhorst and Bülow
are indicated, which Se. Majesty the King had Professor Rauch work on
it, and which were erected in 1822."
The zinc cast relief of the
goddesses of victory on the gable was not executed until 1842-1846 by
August Kiss. Schinkel described it in the collection of architectural
drafts in the following words: "The sculpture in the gable [...]
represents a fight, a victoria decides in the middle for the hero
fighting on the right, on the left is shown: last effort, encouragement
to fight, flight, robbery, and pain of the family awaiting their fate;
on the right one sees overwhelm and mourning for a fallen hero.”
The frieze of the goddesses of victory on the entablature, cast in lead,
was executed by Johann Gottfried Schadow in 1816-1818. Schinkel: "The
frieze is adorned with victories, which indicate the stone beam above
each column instead of the triglyphs." The relief and frieze are
provided with sanding imitating stone. They were restored in 1957–1962
and last restored in 2009.
The statues of Scharnhorst and Bülow
survived the Second World War in walls, but were cleared away and stored
by the SED regime in 1950. In 1963 only the Scharnhorst monument was
erected on the green area of Bebelplatz, followed in 2002 by Bülow's
statue. The originals, most recently restored in 2006, were brought to
the Spandau Citadel in 2021 to protect them from weathering and will be
replaced by copies in the future. In this context, experts are calling
for the copied statues to be set up in their original locations next to
the Neue Wache in order to reunite the sculpture programme, which has
been divided for decades.
Inner space
Since 1931 there has
been an oak leaf wreath made of gold and silver leaves by the sculptor
Ludwig Gies on a 1.67 meter high memorial stone made of black granite,
from which the architect Heinrich Tessenow had removed the interior
walls and intermediate ceilings. The wreath is now on display in the
neighboring German Historical Museum is. The roof of the hall opened up
in a circle above it. In 1934, two wreaths were attached to the outer
corner towers and a cross to the inner rear wall.
On May 8, 1960,
the 15th anniversary of the liberation, the party and state leadership
of the GDR inaugurated the monument created by Heinz Mehlan for the
victims of fascism and militarism. The cross was not used in the design;
the wreath had been in West Berlin since 1948. On the 20th Republic Day
in 1969, it was redesigned again based on a design by Lothar Kwasnitza.
The light opening was closed and the granite block was replaced by an
Eternal Flame in a glass prism. In front of it, the mortal remains of an
unknown resistance fighter, an unknown concentration camp prisoner, and
an unknown soldier were buried under two bronze plates. Under the
resistance fighter's plate lay soil from nine concentration camps, under
that of the soldier from nine World War II battlefields. On the back
wall was the state coat of arms of the GDR.
In the interior of
the building, which was largely reconstructed according to Tessenow's
plans from 1931, since 1993, at the suggestion of the then Federal
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Harald Haacke's copy of the bronze sculpture
Mother with Dead Son has been enlarged four times from the original 38
centimeters to around 1.6 meters in height by Käthe Kollwitz, also
called Pietà. It depicts the artist and her son Peter, who died in World
War I. In front of the sculpture, the words "To the victims of war and
tyranny" are embedded in the floor. The urns with the mortal remains of
the unknown resistance fighter and the unknown soldier, as well as the
vessels filled with earth, have been under the black granite memorial
slab ever since.
Kohl's announcement that Käthe Kollwitz's Pietà
was to be chosen for the memorial triggered a fierce controversy. For
example, the Academy of Arts called for the abandonment of "self-pitying
dismay kitsch" and the restoration of Tessenow's interior true to the
original. At the time, Reinhart Koselleck questioned the appropriateness
of the Kollwitz sculpture because it excluded both Jews and women, "the
two largest groups of innocently killed and perished in World War II":
"A double blunder with consequences resulting from a therefore also
result in an aesthetically secondary solution. The mistake in reasoning
gives birth to aesthetic deformities.” Wolf Jobst Siedler considered it
ironic that Chancellor Kohl, by erecting a Kollwitz sculpture in the
Neue Wache, implemented an earlier proposal by the SED Politburo.
Context and set-up
Since 1822, the marble statues of Friedrich
Wilhelm von Bülow (left) and Gerhard David von Scharnhorst (right) have
been in front of the Neue Wache, and since 1855 the bronze statues of
Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg (left), Gebhard Leberecht von Blüchers
(middle) and August Neidhardt von Gneisenaus (right). The statues
created by Christian Daniel Rauch based on designs by Karl Friedrich
Schinkel are reminiscent of most of the most important generals and
reformers of the wars of liberation. They are among the masterpieces of
the Berlin school of sculpture and were unusual at the time in that they
honored bourgeois figures in central Berlin. At the original location,
Rauch's statues of generals referred to each other, to Schadow's
Victoria relief of the Neue Wache and to the groups of figures on the
Schlossbrücke, which also commemorate the wars of liberation. In
addition, Rauch's statues of generals were part of Schinkel's "monument
road" Unter den Linden, which stretched from the castle to the Forum
Fridericianum and the Brandenburg Gate. They also found their way into
the literature:
Scharnhorst stood to the right of the guard with
his hand raised in lecture, Bülow to the left in a pose of calm, one
hand on his hip, the other on his sword as if on a walking stick. The
relationship of the figures on their pedestals to the Neue Wache, their
distance from the building, was precisely calculated. It was also
calculation that these two men were standing here, Scharnhorst, the
revolutionary-minded farmer's son who had defeated Napoleon with the
ideas of the revolution he betrayed, and Bülow, the victorious defender
of Berlin, who saw the threat to the open city far away. in brilliant
field battles, turned away from their gates."
- Walther Kiaulehn:
Berlin - fate of a cosmopolitan city
removal and displacement
On the occasion of the youth meeting in Germany in 1950, the statues
were removed by order of Walter Ulbricht and stored in the depot of the
Neues Museum. In 1964 the bronze statues and the marble statue of
Scharnhorst were repositioned on the green area of Bebelplatz. In the
process, not only were the original inscriptions on the bronze statues
destroyed, but also the height of their bases was reduced and all the
framing grilles were removed.
In 1990 - still in the GDR era - it
was initially planned to set up the Prussian generals again in their
original places. After German reunification, Eberhard Diepgen confirmed
the return of stills according to Schinkel's concept "so that German
history from the wars of liberation to the present day can be read
again". However, Helmut Kohl then agreed with Käthe Kollwitz's heirs
that the marble statues should not be returned to the Neue Wache until
the copyright expired in 2015. Finally, they were stored in the depot of
the Senate Department for Building and Housing, restored and
repositioned in 2002 opposite the Neue Wache, where the bronze statues
used to be.
Discussion about reinstatement
The current
locations of the five statues violate Article 8 of the Venice Charter
and are therefore criticized by monument experts. For historical and
artistic reasons, the historian Christoph Stölzl is in favor of putting
the marble statues of Bülow and Scharnhorst back in front of the Neue
Wache. In addition, the bronze statues of Yorck, Blücher and Gneisenau
from exile on the green space at the back of Bebelplatz were to be
returned to the Unter den Linden boulevard. Berlin's state curator a. D.
Jörg Haspel is in favor of restoring the statues in front of the Neue
Wache because of the contextual and artistic connections with the groups
of sculptures on the Schloßbrücke, which are also reminiscent of the
wars of liberation. Rauch's generals are also masterpieces of the Berlin
school of sculpture. The preservation of monuments is very important to
restore this ensemble, which is unique in the world. Furthermore, the
former CDU culture expert Uwe Lehmann-Brauns, with reference to the
return of the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great Unter den Linden,
advocates a reinstallation of the general statues in front of the Neue
Wache. Scharnhorst was a "deserving reformer" who abolished corporal
punishment in the Prussian army and introduced general conscription.
Bülow was also “not a militarist”, but defended Berlin three times
against Napoleon and composed motets at the same time.
Wolf Jobst
Siedler criticized the incorrect installation of the statues by
Christian Daniel Rauch due to the refusal of Käthe Kollwitz's
grandchildren at the time as the "ruin of a total work of art through
good will". He pointed out that Schinkel's Neue Wache, with Schadow's
Viktorien on the portico and Rauch's Generals on the forecourt, united
the "triumvirate of architects and sculptors" that Prussia had at its
"happiest moment in history". "So the unity of Schinkel, Schadow and
Rauch - the incarnation of the Enlightenment congealed into classicism -
is given up just because late grandchildren want it? Or because that is
in line with the zeitgeist, the subsequent pacification of history? Or
basically just because Berlin no longer understands anything about
itself? The place where traces could still be seen is being destroyed,
which is why Berlin was one of the great cities of Europe, at least at
this point.” Peter Bloch expressed double criticism of the incorrect
positioning of the statues in his standard work Die Berliner
Bildhauerschule: “On this historical manipulation Something else also
occurs: since the statues by Scharnhorst and Bülow also refer to their
function as flanking the Neue Wache in their statuary structure – in the
closed outline and the turning of the head towards the center – the
isolation of Scharnhorst becomes one elsewhere artistic falsification.”
Arne Kollwitz, the grandson of Käthe Kollwitz, agreed that the
statues of Bülow and Scharnhorst would be put up again in front of the
Neue Wache if the palace were to be rebuilt. In addition to the
historian Laurenz Demps and the publicist Friedrich Dieckmann, this is
also demanded by the Gesellschaft Historisches Berlin, the Berlin
Cityscape Forum and the Berliner Historische Mitte association.
Ulbricht's censorship had to be reversed and the statues put back in
their original places. The composition of Schinkel's building and
Rauch's sculptures is world art, according to the association's
chairwoman, Annette Ahme. In 2017, however, the State Monument Council
rejected the return of Bülow's and Scharnhorst's statues in front of the
Neue Wache.
The structure inspired numerous contemporary architects to emulate it. The copies include the Alte Wache (1837-1839) by Schinkel's student Carl Scheppig on the market square in Sondershausen, Thuringia.