A walk through Schinkel’s Berlin with John Toews

On Wednesday John took us on a tour of Berlin’s historical district, known as Mitte. The focus of our walk was the city as it was in the 19th century, when its inhabitants included some of the leading intellectuals of the time, and the city styled itself as “Athens on the Spree.” We began at the Brandenburg Gate, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans in the late 18th century as a kind of propylaea leading into Berlin. Karl Friedrich Schinkel had a hand in redesigning the staff held by the goddess of peace who crowns the monument.

We continued on to Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus (now called the Konzerthaus) on the Gendarmenmarkt, a somewhat early commission and an example of the architect’s turn toward neoclassicism.

On the Forum Fridericianum, a square built under Frederick the Great (whose monument you see on the right), there is now a memorial to the book burnings that took place there in the 1930s. The square is home to the former Royal Library, now housing Humboldt University’s law school. Interestingly, we learned that the book burnings were not carried out by Nazi officials, but rather by zealous student party members.

Next stop: the Neue Wache, a guardhouse designed by Schinkel along Unter den Linden. The building has been the site of numerous memorials over the course of the 20th century, including both East German and reunified German commemorations of World War II.

One of Schinkel’s masterpieces, not only of architecture but of urban planning, is the Altes Museum. Sitting across from the site of the royal Prussian palace (not currently extant), the building housed the first true modern museum in Europe. Schinkel designed it to integrate the viewer’s experience of art with that of the urban environment: he provided a viewing platform on the interior of the building, from which visitors could contemplate the royal gardens, palace, and the cityscape beyond.

The tour wrapped up near the site of Schinkel’s Bauakademie – his architectural and design academy. The building is also considered one of his masterworks, and was unfortunately torn down in the post-WWII period. This nylon-covered scaffolding has been here for years, but there’s no money to rebuild it. Its ghostly presence reminds us of the many memories and layers that reside amongst one another in Berlin’s cityscape.