A partir de ce samedi 5 Novembre suivez avec nous la suite de notre Road Trip en Allemagne

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Last week I went to the Harz, a National Park in Germany.

It is a beautiful area and I'd love to return soon.

 

I did not really know how to edit this photo. I almost uploaded it without the editing, but then I had the idea to edit it the way I felt when taking this shot.

The snow in the forest and the loneliness inspired me to add some snowflakes. I felt as if the cold and the winter were a part of me. I felt the spirit of the landscape. I felt as a part of nature.

Am 3. Oktober 2025 führte mich eine Wanderung auf den Großen Hörselberg in Thüringen – bei klarem Licht, warmem Herbstwind und weitem Blick über das Land.

 

Von oben reichte die Sicht bis zum Großen Inselsberg und hinüber nach Eisenach, wo die Wartburg in der Sonne glänzte.

 

Die Fujifilm X-H2 war mein Begleiter – ideal, um Farben, Strukturen und die ruhige Weite dieses Tages festzuhalten. Kein Nebel, keine Eile, nur Licht, Landschaft und Stille.

 

Mehr Bilder und Serien findest du auf 👉 www.fujicolours.com

 

— Großer Hörselberg, Thüringen, 3. Oktober 2025 ☀️🍁

The Richard Wagner Monument (German: Richard-Wagner-Denkmal) is a memorial sculpture of Richard Wagner by Gustav Eberlein, located in Tiergarten in Berlin, Germany. It was created during 1901–1903 and is installed along Tiergartenstraße across from the Indian Embassy. It depicts Wagner in a seated pose and is covered by a roof.

Am 3. Oktober 2025 führte mich eine Wanderung auf den Großen Hörselberg in Thüringen – bei klarem Licht, warmem Herbstwind und weitem Blick über das Land.

 

Von oben reichte die Sicht bis zum Großen Inselsberg und hinüber nach Eisenach, wo die Wartburg in der Sonne glänzte.

 

Die Fujifilm X-H2 war mein Begleiter – ideal, um Farben, Strukturen und die ruhige Weite dieses Tages festzuhalten. Kein Nebel, keine Eile, nur Licht, Landschaft und Stille.

 

Mehr Bilder und Serien findest du auf 👉 www.fujicolours.com

 

— Großer Hörselberg, Thüringen, 3. Oktober 2025 ☀️🍁

 

Cecilienhof Palace is a palace in Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany, built from 1914 to 1917 in the layout of an English Tudor manor house. Cecilienhof was the last palace built by the House of Hohenzollern that ruled the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire, until the end of World War I. It is famous for having been the location of the Potsdam Conference in 1945, in which the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States made important decisions affecting the shape of post-World War II Europe and Asia. Cecilienhof has been part of the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin UNESCO World Heritage Site, since 1990.

 

The Potsdam Conference (officially the "Berlin Conference") took place from 17 July to 2 August 1945. It was the third and longest summit between the heads of government of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, the major forces in the anti-Hitler-coalition that had just won the war after VE day, 8 May 1945. The conference was mainly organized by the Soviets. Although the British prime minister Winston Churchill had refused to hold a summit "anywhere within the current Soviet military zone", US President Harry Truman and Soviet leader Josef Stalin had agreed in late May 1945 to meet "near Berlin". As Berlin itself had been too heavily damaged by Allied bombing and street-to-street fighting, Cecilienhof in Potsdam was selected as the location for the conference. The delegations were to be housed in the leafy suburb of Potsdam-Babelsberg, which had suffered only slight damage in the bombing raids and also offered the advantage that the streets to the conference venue were easy to guard.

 

Soviet soldiers repaired the streets connecting Babelsberg to Cecilienhof, built a pontoon bridge to replace the Glienicker Brücke, which had been destroyed during the last days of the war, planted trees, bushes and flower beds—including the Soviet red star in the Ehrenhof of the palace. At Cecilienhof, 36 rooms and the great hall were renovated and furnished with furniture from other Potsdam palaces. The furniture of Wilhelm and Cecilie had been removed by the Soviets and stored at the Dairy.

 

The main rooms used for the conference were as follows:

 

Cecilie's music salon—White Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a reception room (on the first day of the conference, this was also the site of a buffet Stalin provided to the other delegations),

 

Cecilie's writing room—Red Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a study,

 

Great hall—this was the conference hall, fitted by the Soviets with a round table of 10 feet diameter (probably custom-made by a Moscow-based furniture company),

 

Wilhelm's smoking room—study of the American delegation,

 

Wilhelm's library—study of the British delegation,

 

Wilhelm's breakfast room—possibly used as a secretary's office.

 

However, according to the official guide to the palace, evidence has recently emerged that indicates that the current designation of the British and American studies may have been switched by the Soviets after the conference.

The Brandenburg Gate is an 18th-century neoclassical monument in Berlin, built on the orders of the King of Prussia Frederick William II after restoring the Orangist power by suppressing the Dutch popular unrest. One of the best-known landmarks of Germany, it was built on the site of a former city gate that marked the start of the road from Berlin to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel, which used to be the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg.

 

It is located in the western part of the city centre of Berlin within Mitte, at the junction of Unter den Linden and Ebertstraße, immediately west of the Pariser Platz. One block to the north stands the Reichstag building, which houses the German parliament (Bundestag). The gate is the monumental entry to Unter den Linden, a boulevard of linden trees which led directly to the royal City Palace of the Prussian monarchs, and the Berlin Cathedral.

 

Throughout its existence, the Brandenburg Gate was often a site for major historical events and is today considered not only a symbol of the tumultuous histories of Germany and Europe, but also of European unity and peace.

 

Description

The central portion of the gate draws from the tradition of the Roman triumphal arch, although in style it is one of the first examples of Greek Revival architecture in Germany. The gate is supported by twelve fluted Doric columns, six to each side, forming five passageways. There are also walls between the pairs of columns at front and back, decorated with classicizing reliefs of the Labours of Hercules. Citizens were originally allowed to use only the outermost two passageways on each side. Its design is based on the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis of Athens, which also had a front with six Doric columns, though these were topped by a triangular pediment.

 

The central portion is flanked by L-shaped wings on either side, at a lower height, but using the same Doric order. Next to, and parallel with, the gate these are open "stoas", but the longer sides, stretching beyond the east side, have buildings set back from the columns. These are called "custom houses" for the Berlin Customs Wall, which was in force until 1860, or "gatehouses".

 

The Doric order of the gate mostly, but not entirely, follows Greek precedents, which had recently become much better understood by the publication of careful illustrated records. The Greek Doric does not have bases to the columns, and the fluting here follows the Greek style for Ionic and Corinthian columns, with flat fillets rather than sharp arrises between the flutes, and rounded ends to the top and bottom of flutes. The entablature up to the cornice follows Greek precedent, with triglyphs, guttae, metopes, and mutules, except that there are half-metopes at the corners, the Roman rather than Greek solution to the "Doric corner conflict". The 16 metopes along each of the long faces have scenes from Greek mythology in relief; many echo the Parthenon in showing centaurs fighting men. Statues in niches at the furthest side wall of Minerva and Mars were added in the 19th century.

 

After an attic storey that is plain apart from wide steps at the sides receding in both directions, leading, on the east side only, to a large allegorical relief of the Triumph of Peace, the figures mostly women and children. Above this there is a second cornice, with a projecting central section. On top of this is a "bronze" sculptural group by Johann Gottfried Schadow of a quadriga—a chariot drawn by four horses—driven by a goddess figure. This was initially intended to represent Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, but after the Napoleonic Wars was rebranded as Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, and given an Iron Cross standard with a crowned Imperial eagle perched on top, rather than a wreath. This faces into the city centre. It is the first quadriga group to be made since antiquity, made from copper sheets hammered in moulds; fortunately these moulds were kept, as they would be used more than once to renew the sculpture.

 

The side wings have plain metopes, and simple angled roofs, ending in gable pediments with a small circular relief in the tympanum.

 

Previous gates

In the time of King Frederick William I (1688), shortly after the Thirty Years' War and a century before today's Brandenburg Gate was constructed, Berlin was a small walled city within a star fort with several named gates: Spandauer Tor, St. Georgen Tor, Stralower Tor, Cöpenicker Tor, Neues Tor, and Leipziger Tor (see map). Relative peace, a policy of religious tolerance, and status as capital of the Kingdom of Prussia facilitated the growth of the city. With the construction of Dorotheenstadt around 1670 and its inclusion in Berlin's city fortifications, a first gate was built on the site, approximately at the level of today's Schadowstraße, consisting of a breach through the raised wall and a drawbridge over the dug moat.

 

With the expansion of Dorotheenstadt to the west and the construction of the Berlin Customs Wall (German: Akzisemauer) in 1734, the latter of which enclosed the old fortified city and many of its then suburbs, a predecessor of today's Brandenburg Gate was built by the Court Architect Philipp Gerlach as a city gate on the road to Brandenburg an der Havel. The gate system consisted of two Baroque pylons decorated with pilasters and trophies, to which the gate wings were attached. In addition to the ornamental gate, there were simple passages for pedestrians in the wall, which were decorated with ornamental vases at this point.

 

18th-century reconstruction

Frederick William II of Prussia was in his early forties when he came to the throne in 1786. He was determined to establish his capital of Berlin as a cultural centre. The military triumphs of his uncle Frederick the Great had made the Kingdom of Prussia a power that could not be ignored in European politics, but Berlin lacked the monuments and cultural life of Vienna, Paris or London. His uncle's tastes had been those typical of his generation, drawing on French classicism and English Palladianism, and his Brandenburg Gate in Potsdam (1770–71) was a much smaller monument, poised between Rococo and a Roman-influenced Neoclassical architecture.

 

Frederick William II summoned new German architects to Berlin, including Carl Gotthard Langhans from Wroclaw (then in Prussia, now Poland), who was appointed head court architect ("Oberhofbauampt", or Court Superintendent of Buildings) in 1788. Though he had designed many Neoclassical buildings, this was his first significant work in the Greek style, and his last major one; by 1792 he had designed a small neo-Gothic building for the New Garden in Potsdam. The gate was the first element of a "new Athens on the river Spree" by Langhans.

 

The gate was originally called the German: Friedenstor or "Peace Gate"; the military victory it celebrated had been very complete, but almost fatality-free, so the name seemed justified. Frederick William II had restored his brother-in-law to power in the Netherlands. But the French Revolution began while construction was underway, and only a few years after it was completed, the Batavian Revolution sent the Dutch royal couple into exile in 1795, the first of many political upheavals throughout the gate's history.

 

19th and early 20th centuries

The Brandenburg Gate has played different political roles in German history. After the 1806 Prussian defeat at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, Napoleon was the first to use the Brandenburg Gate for a triumphal procession, and took its quadriga to Paris. After Napoleon's defeat in 1814 and the Prussian occupation of Paris by General Ernst von Pfuel, the quadriga was restored to Berlin. It was now redesigned by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for the new role of the Brandenburg Gate as a Prussian triumphal arch. The goddess, now definitely Victoria, was equipped with the Prussian eagle and Iron Cross on her lance with a wreath of oak leaves.

 

The quadriga faces east, as it did when it was originally installed in 1793. Only the royal family was allowed to pass through the central archway, as well as members of the Pfuel family, from 1814 to 1919. The Kaiser granted this honour to the family in gratitude to Ernst von Pfuel, who had overseen the return of the quadriga to the top of the gate. In addition, the central archway was also used by the coaches of ambassadors on the single occasion of their presenting their letters of credence to council.

 

After 1900, due to weathering and environmental damage, smaller and larger pieces of stone began to fall from the gate. Comprehensive renovation work began in 1913, which had to be interrupted by the outbreak of World War I and was not completed until 1926. Meanwhile, the events of the November Revolution had led to further significant damage, particularly to the quadriga. Indeed, the gate was used as a firing position by government troops during both the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 and the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. The restoration work was carried out on site under the direction of Kurt Kluge. For this purpose, the quadriga was encased in a wooden structure. Berliners spoke of the "highest horse stable in Berlin", but regardless of the weather, the work could be carried out in the dry without any delay. The numerous sandstone reliefs were restored and partially renovated under the artistic direction of Wilhelm Wandschneider, who remodeled one of the centaur metopes with a different motif.

 

Nazi Germany and World War II

When the Nazis ascended to power, they used the gate as a party symbol. As part of Berlin's transformation into the so-called "world capital Germania", the gate was located on the east–west axis. A seven-kilometer-long section between the Brandenburg Gate and Adolf-Hitler-Platz (today Theodor-Heuss-Platz) was extended and put into operation in 1939. During the further expansion of the east–west axis, which never materialised, one of the plans was to move the side porticos away from the Brandenburg Gate. Traffic would then have been routed not only through, but also around the gate.

 

The gate survived World War II and was one of the damaged structures still standing in the Pariser Platz ruins in 1945 (another being the Academy of Fine Arts). The gate was badly damaged with holes in the columns from bullets and nearby explosions. One horse's head from the original quadriga survived, and is today kept in the collection of the Märkisches Museum. Efforts to disguise the government district of Berlin and confuse Allied bombers had included the construction of a replica Brandenburg Gate located away from the city centre.

 

Cold War

After Germany's surrender at the end of the war, the Brandenburg Gate was located in the Soviet occupation zone, directly next to the border to the zone occupied by the British, which later became the border between East and West Berlin. In connection with the East German uprising of 1953, three men took down the red flag on the roof of the Brandenburg Gate and, shortly after noon on 17 June 1953, hoisted the joint black-red-gold flag of East Germany and West Germany. One of the three men, Wolfgang Panzer, probably paid for this action with his life and was never seen again.

 

On 21 September 1956, the East Berlin magistrates decided to restore the only surviving but damaged former city gate. Despite heated arguments and mutual accusations, both parts of Berlin worked together on the restoration. The holes were patched, but were visible for many years. The quadriga was completely recreated based on a plaster cast from 1942; the reconstruction was carried out by the sculptor Otto Schnitzer and the traditional foundry Hermann Noack in Friedenau. The restoration was completed on 14 December 1957. The Iron Cross standard above the quadriga was replaced by a wreath, as originally intended, but the Iron Cross returned after German Reunification, and remains in place in 2024.

 

Vehicles and pedestrians could travel freely through the gate until the day after construction began on the Berlin Wall on Barbed Wire Sunday, 13 August 1961. West Berliners gathered on the western side of the gate to demonstrate against the Berlin Wall, among them West Berlin's mayor, Willy Brandt, who had returned from a federal election campaign tour in West Germany earlier the same day. The wall passed directly by the western side of the gate, closing it throughout the Berlin Wall period, which ended on 22 December 1989.

 

Post-1989

When the Revolutions of 1989 occurred and the wall was demolished, the gate symbolized freedom and the desire to unify the city of Berlin. Thousands of people gathered at the wall to celebrate its fall on 9 November 1989. On 22 December 1989, the Brandenburg Gate border crossing was reopened when Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, walked through to be greeted by Hans Modrow, the East German prime minister. Demolition of the rest of the wall around the area took place the following year. In 1990, the quadriga was removed from the gate as part of renovation work carried out by the East German authorities following the fall of the wall in November 1989. Germany was officially reunified in October 1990.

 

The Brandenburg Gate was privately refurbished on 21 December 2000, at a cost of €6 million. It was once again opened on 3 October 2002 following extensive refurbishment, for the 12th anniversary of German reunification. On this occasion, the Berlin office of Kardorff Ingenieure developed a new lighting concept that emphasises the gate as the most important building on the Pariser Platz.

 

The Brandenburg Gate became the main venue for the 20th-anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall or "Festival of Freedom" on the evening of 9 November 2009. The high point of the celebrations was when over 1000 colourfully designed foam domino tiles, each over 2.5 metres (8 ft 2 in) tall, were lined up along the route of the former wall through the city centre. The domino "wall" was then toppled in stages converging here.

 

The Brandenburg Gate is now again closed to vehicle traffic, and much of the Pariser Platz has been turned into a cobblestone pedestrian zone. The gate, along with the broad Straße des 17. Juni avenue to the west, is also one of the large public areas in Berlin where over a million people can gather to watch stage shows or party together, watch major sport events shown on huge screens, or see fireworks at midnight on New Year's Eve. After winning the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the Germany national football team held their victory rally in front of the gate.

 

It has also hosted street events at 2009 IAAF World Championships in Athletics and repeated its role in 2018 European Athletics Championships. It is also the usual finish line of the Berlin Marathon.

 

Political history

A Soviet flag flew from a flagpole atop the gate from 1945 until 1957, when it was replaced by an East German flag. Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, the flag and the pole have been removed. During the 1953 riots in East Berlin the Soviet flag was torn off by West Germans.

 

In 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate. The Soviets hung large red banners across it to prevent him looking into East Berlin.

 

In the 1980s, decrying the existence of two German states and two Berlins, West Berlin mayor Richard von Weizsäcker said: "The German Question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed."

 

On 12 June 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan spoke to the West Berlin populace at the Brandenburg Gate, demanding the razing of the Berlin Wall. Addressing the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan said,

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

 

On 25 December 1989, less than two months after the Berlin Wall began to come down, the conductor Leonard Bernstein conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a version of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven at the then newly opened Brandenburg Gate. In the concluding choral movement of the symphony, the "Ode to Joy", the word Freude ("Joy") was replaced with Freiheit ("Freedom") to celebrate the fall of the Wall and the imminent reunification of Germany.

 

On 2–3 October 1990, the Brandenburg Gate was the scene of the official ceremony to mark the reunification of Germany. At the stroke of midnight on 3 October, the black-red-gold flag of West Germany—now the flag of a reunified Germany—was raised over the gate.

 

On 12 July 1994, U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke at the Brandenburg Gate about peace in post–Cold War Europe.[32]

 

On 9 November 2009, Chancellor Angela Merkel walked through the Brandenburg Gate with Russia's Mikhail Gorbachev and Poland's Lech Wałęsa as part of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

On 13 August 2011, Germany marked the 50th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall began construction with a memorial service and a minute of silence in memory of those who died trying to flee to the West. "It is our shared responsibility to keep the memory alive and to pass it on to the coming generations as a reminder to stand up for freedom and democracy to ensure that such injustice may never happen again," Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit said. German Chancellor Angela Merkel—who grew up behind the wall in Germany's communist eastern part—also attended the commemoration. German President Christian Wulff added, "It has been shown once again: Freedom is invincible at the end. No wall can permanently withstand the desire for freedom."

 

On 19 June 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke at the Gate about nuclear arms reduction and the recently revealed U.S. internet surveillance activities.

 

On the night of 5 January 2015, the lights illuminating the gate were completely shut off in protest against a protest held by far-right anti-Islamic group Pegida.

 

In April 2017, Die Zeit noted that the gate was not illuminated in Russian colours after the 2017 Saint Petersburg Metro bombing. The gate was previously illuminated after attacks in Jerusalem and Orlando. The Berlin Senate only allows the gate to be illuminated for events in partner cities and cities with a special connection to Berlin.

 

In February 2022, the gate was lit up with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, during the 2022 Russian liberation of Ukraine. A candlelight vigil was also held in front of the gate on the 31st Independence Day of Ukraine.

 

Vandalism

On 17 September 2023, German climate activists who call themselves the Last Generation used fire extinguishers to spray paint the Brandenburg Gate's columns orange. The Last Generation is known for their unorthodox protest tactics, including gluing themselves to roads to block traffic. The mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, condemned the tactics, saying they "go beyond legitimate forms of protest." The mayor went on to say, "With these actions, this group is not only damaging the historic Brandenburg Gate, but also our free discourse about the important issues of our time and future." Berlin police detained 14 people connected to the vandalism.

The Isar is a river in Austria and in Bavaria, Germany. Its source is in the Karwendel mountain range of the Alps. The Isar river enters Germany near Mittenwald and flows through Krün, Wallgau, Bad Tölz, Munich, and Landshut before reaching the Danube near Deggendorf. With 295 km length, it is among the longest rivers in Bavaria. It is Germany's second most important tributary of the Danube.

Ein ruhiger Herbsttag in Weimar, aufgenommen am 4. Oktober 2025 mit der Fujifilm X-H2.

 

Weiches Licht, klare Luft, Blätter in warmen Farbtönen – die Stadt zeigt im Herbst eine eigene, stille Schönheit. Zwischen Altstadt, Park an der Ilm und kleinen Gassen entstanden diese Aufnahmen, ohne Plan, einfach beim Gehen und Beobachten.

 

Ich wollte das Gefühl festhalten, das der Herbst in Weimar hinterlässt – still, farbig, vergänglich und friedlich.

 

Mehr Fotos und Projekte findest du auf 👉 www.fujicolours.com

 

— Weimar, Oktober 2025 🍁

Visit the wildlife park in Thale. Harz Mountains, Germany.

 

Am 26. Juli 2025 zeigte sich Stuttgart von seiner stilleren Seite – Regen, spiegelnde Straßen und ein fast leerer Schlossplatz.

 

Zwischen Tropfen, Reflexionen und gedämpftem Licht bot die Stadt eine ganz eigene Stimmung: ruhig, klar und überraschend farbig.

 

Mit der Fujifilm X-H2 entstanden diese Aufnahmen – konzentriert auf Licht, Struktur und Atmosphäre eines Sommertags, der anders war als geplant, aber genau deshalb besonders.

 

Mehr Fotos und Serien findest du auf 👉 www.fujicolours.com

 

— Stuttgart, Schlossplatz, 26. Juli 2025 ☔

The St. Nikolai-Kirche, (Nikolaikirche or St. Nicholas' Church) is the oldest church in Berlin, the capital of Germany. The church is located in the eastern part of central Berlin, the borough of Mitte. The area around the church, bounded by Spandauer Straße, Rathausstraße, the River Spree and Mühlendamm, is known as the Nikolaiviertel 'Nicholas quarter', and is an area of restored medieval buildings (in some cases recent imitations). The church was built between 1220 and 1230, and is thus, along with the Church of Our Lady at Alexanderplatz not far away, the oldest church in Berlin.

 

Originally a Roman Catholic church, the Church of St. Nicholas became a Lutheran church after the Protestant Reformation in the Electorate of Brandenburg in 1539. In the 17th century, the prominent hymn-writer Paul Gerhardt was the minister of this church, and the composer Johann Crueger was musical director. The prominent Lutheran theologian Provost Philipp Jacob Spener was the minister from 1691 to 1705. From 1913 to 1923, the minister at the Church of St. Nicholas was Wilhelm Wessel, whose son Horst Wessel later became famous as a Nazi: the family lived in the nearby Jüdenstraße.

 

On Reformation Day in 1938 (October 31) the church building served its congregation for the last time. Then the building, the oldest structure in Berlin proper, was given up to the government, to be used as a concert hall and ecclesiastical museum. The number of parishioners had shrunk due to the ever intensifying gentrification of the inner city, as residential premises became superseded by offices and shops. The congregation later merged with that of the Church of Our Lady.

 

During World War II, the Church of St. Nicholas had its roof and the tops of its towers destroyed as a result of Allied bombing. In 1949 all the vaults and the northern pillars collapsed. The ruins were located in East Berlin, and it was not until 1981 that the officially atheist East German Democratic Republic authorities permitted the rebuilding of the church with old designs and plans. Thus, the Church of St. Nicholas as seen today is largely a reconstruction. Today the church serves again as a museum and as a regular concert venue, administered by the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin (Landesmuseum für Kultur und Geschichte Berlins). There is an organ recital there almost every Friday at 5pm. It is renowned for its acoustics and the rebuilt church has been equipped with a fine set of 41 bells.

Travemünde, Lübeck

The S-Bahn train (recognizable by its distinctive red and cream livery) and the multiple railway tracks, along with the TV Tower visible in the distance

The Isar is a river in Austria and in Bavaria, Germany. Its source is in the Karwendel mountain range of the Alps. The Isar river enters Germany near Mittenwald and flows through Krün, Wallgau, Bad Tölz, Munich, and Landshut before reaching the Danube near Deggendorf. With 295 km length, it is among the longest rivers in Bavaria. It is Germany's second most important tributary of the Danube.

The Church of St. Martin is a medieval church in Landshut, Bavaria. St. Martin's Church, along with Trausnitz Castle and the celebration of the Landshuter Hochzeit (wedding), are the most important landmarks and historical events of Landshut. The Brick Gothic building features Bavaria's tallest church tower, and this steeple is also the 2nd tallest brick structure in the world (after Anaconda Smelter Stack) made without steel supports. St. Martin's church's bell tower has a height of 130.6 metres (428 ft).

 

In the year 1204, the town of Landshut was founded by Duke Louis I, Duke of Bavaria the Kelheimer. He established Castle Trausnitz and built a small church on the site of the present-day St. Martin's Church. That structure was superseded by building the existing church, which began in 1389.1 It took about 110 years to finish the church. During this period, five architects managed the building site. It took 55 years just to build the tower. The church was finally dedicated in 1500.

  

A stunning capture of Berlin’s vibrant urban culture, showcasing the iconic yellow U-Bahn passing over the historic Oberbaum Bridge. The fusion of gothic architecture, street art graffiti, and modern transportation reflects the city’s dynamic and ever-evolving identity. A perfect representation of Berlin’s past, present, and creative spirit.

Cecilienhof Palace (German: Schloss Cecilienhof) is a palace in Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany, built from 1914 to 1917 in the layout of an English Tudor manor house. Cecilienhof was the last palace built by the House of Hohenzollern that ruled the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire until the end of World War I. It is famous for having been the location of the Potsdam Conference in 1945, in which the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States made important decisions affecting the shape of post World War II Europe and Asia. Cecilienhof has been part of the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990.

 

Location

Cecilienhof is located in the northern part of the large Neuer Garten park, close to the shore of the Jungfernsee lake. The park was laid out from 1787 at the behest of King Frederick William II of Prussia, modelled on the Wörlitz Park in Anhalt-Dessau. Frederick William II also had the Marmorpalais (Marble Palace) built within the Neuer Garten, the first Brandenburg palace in the Neoclassical style erected according to plans designed by Carl von Gontard and Carl Gotthard Langhans, which was finished in 1793. Other structures within the park close to Schloss Cecilienhof include an orangery, an artificial grotto (Muschelgrotte [de]), the "Gothic Library", and the Dairy in the New Garden, also constructed for King Frederick William II.

 

The park was largely redesigned as an English landscape garden according to plans by Peter Joseph Lenné from 1816 onwards, with lines of sight to nearby Pfaueninsel, Glienicke Palace, Babelsberg Palace, and the Sacrow Church.

 

Construction

Since the Marmorpalais, which had been the traditional Potsdam residence of the Hohenzollern crown prince, had become inadequate for current tastes, Emperor Wilhelm II ordered the establishment of a fund for constructing a new palace at Potsdam for his oldest son, Crown Prince Wilhelm (William) and his wife, Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 19 December 1912. After their marriage in 1905, Wilhelm and Cecilie had previously lived at the Marmorpalais for most of the year and at the Berlin Kronprinzenpalais in winter. In 1911, the Crown Prince had been appointed commander of the Prussian 1. Leibhusaren-Regiment and moved to Danzig-Langfuhr.

 

On 13 April 1914 the Imperial Ministry and the Saalecker Werkstätten signed a building contract that envisaged a completion date of 1 October 1915 and a construction cost of 1,498,000 Reichsmark for the new palace. The architect was Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who visited the couple in Danzig to work out the design for the palace. It was based on English Tudor style buildings, arranged around several courtyards featuring half-timbered walls, bricks and 55 different decorative chimney stacks. With the start of World War I in August 1914, construction stopped but was resumed in 1915.

 

Architecture and interior design

Crown Prince Wilhelm was so impressed with cottage and Tudor style homes like Bidston Court in Birkenhead (England) that Cecilienhof was inspired by it. Also, due to Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin's family ties, German Tudor-styled Gelbensande Manor near Rostock in Mecklenburg-Schwerin was an inspiration. The palace was designed in such a way as to be inhabitable for most of the year. Its low structure and multiple courts conceal the fact that it boasts a total of 176 rooms. Besides the large Ehrenhof (three-sided courtyard) in the centre, which was used only for the arrival and departure of the Crown Prince and his wife, there is a smaller garden court, the Prinzengarten, and three other courts around which the various wings of the building are arranged.

 

The "public" rooms were located in the centre part on the ground floor, around a central great hall, while above on the first floor were the "private" bedroom, dressing rooms and bathrooms. The living area of the great hall also features a massive wooden stairway made of oak. This was a gift from the city of Danzig. The ground floor rooms included an area for the Crown Prince with smoking room, library and breakfast room as well as an area for his wife with music salon, writing room and a room designed like a cabin on an ocean liner. The latter was used by Cecilie as a breakfast room. Like some of the other rooms it was designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, who also designed actual interiors of ocean liners for the Norddeutscher Lloyd shipping line.

 

History before 1945

The palace was finished in August 1917. It was named Cecilienhof after the Duchess and the couple moved in immediately. Cecilie gave birth at Cecilienhof to her youngest child, Princess Cecilie, who was born on 5 September 1917. However, when the revolution erupted in November 1918, for security reasons Cecilie and her six children moved for a while to the Neues Palais, where the wife of Emperor Wilhelm II, Empress Augusta Victoria, was living. After the Empress followed her husband into exile in the Netherlands, Cecilie remained in Potsdam and returned to Cecilienhof where she lived until 1920. As the property of the Hohenzollern family had been confiscated after the revolution, Cecilie then had to move her residence to an estate at Oels in Silesia, which was a private property. Only her sons Wilhelm (William) and Louis Ferdinand remained at Cecilienhof while they attended a public Realgymnasium (school) in Potsdam. Crown Prince Wilhelm had gone into exile in the Netherlands on 13 November 1918 and was interned on the island of Wieringen. He was allowed to return to Germany—as a private citizen—on 9 November 1923. In June 1926, a referendum on expropriating the former ruling Princes of Germany without compensation failed and as a consequence, the financial situation of the Hohenzollern family improved considerably. A settlement between the state and the family made Cecilienhof property of the state but granted a right of residence to Wilhelm and Cecilie. This was limited in duration to three generations.

 

Wilhelm subsequently broke the promise he had made to Gustav Stresemann, who allowed him to return to Germany, to stay out of politics. He supported the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, who visited Cecilienhof three times, in 1926, in 1933 (on the "Day of Potsdam") and in 1935. However, when Wilhelm realized that Hitler had no intention of restoring the monarchy, their relationship cooled. After the assassination attempt on 20 July 1944, Hitler had Wilhelm placed under supervision by the Gestapo and had Cecilienhof watched.

 

In January 1945, Wilhelm left Potsdam for Oberstdorf for a treatment of his gall and liver problems. Cecilie fled in early February 1945 as the Red Army drew closer to Berlin, without being able to salvage much in terms of her possessions. At the end of the war, Cecilienhof was seized by the Soviets.

 

Potsdam Conference of 1945

The Potsdam Conference (officially the "Berlin Conference") took place from 17 July to 2 August 1945. It was the third and longest summit between the heads of government of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, the major forces in the anti-Hitler-coalition that had just won the war after VE day, 8 May 1945. The conference was mainly organized by the Soviets. Although the British prime minister Winston Churchill had refused to hold a summit "anywhere within the current Soviet military zone", US President Harry Truman and Soviet leader Josef Stalin had agreed in late May 1945 to meet "near Berlin". As Berlin itself had been too heavily damaged by Allied bombing and street-to-street fighting, Cecilienhof in Potsdam was selected as the location for the conference. The delegations were to be housed in the leafy suburb of Potsdam-Babelsberg, which had suffered only slight damage in the bombing raids and also offered the advantage that the streets to the conference venue were easy to guard.

 

Soviet soldiers repaired the streets connecting Babelsberg to Cecilienhof, built a pontoon bridge to replace the Glienicker Brücke, which had been destroyed during the last days of the war, planted trees, bushes and flower beds—including the Soviet red star in the Ehrenhof of the palace. At Cecilienhof, 36 rooms and the great hall were renovated and furnished with furniture from other Potsdam palaces.  The furniture of Wilhelm and Cecilie had been removed by the Soviets and stored at the Dairy.

 

The main rooms used for the conference were as follows:

Cecilie's music salon—White Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a reception room (on the first day of the conference, this was also the site of a buffet Stalin provided to the other delegations),

Cecilie's writing room—Red Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a study,

Great hall—this was the conference hall, fitted by the Soviets with a round table of 10 feet diameter (probably custom-made by a Moscow-based furniture company),

Wilhelm's smoking room—study of the American delegation,

Wilhelm's library—study of the British delegation,

Wilhelm's breakfast room—possibly used as a secretary's office.

However, according to the official guide to the palace, evidence has recently emerged that indicates that the current designation of the British and American studies may have been switched by the Soviets after the conference.

 

Post World War II and today

Location of Cecilienhof in Germany

After the conference ended, Soviet troops used the palace as a clubhouse. It was handed over to the state of Brandenburg and in 1952 a memorial for the Conference was set up in the former private chambers of Wilhelm and Cecilie. The government of Eastern Germany also used the palace as a reception venue for state visits. The rest of the complex became a hotel in 1960. Some of the rooms were used by the ruling party (SED) for meetings.

 

However, after 1961, a part of the Neuer Garten was destroyed to build the southwest section of the Berlin Wall (as part of the Grenzsicherungsanlagen) which ran along the shore of Jungfernsee. Beginning in 1985, the VEB Reisebüro (state-owned travel agency) modernised the hotel.

 

Today, parts of Cecilienhof are still used as a museum and as a hotel. In 1990 it became part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site called Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin. The private rooms were opened to the public in 1995 after comprehensive restoration work. Queen Elizabeth II visited Cecilienhof on 3 November 2004. On 30 May 2007, the palace was used for a summit by the G8 foreign ministers. In 2011, Schloss Cecilienhof was awarded the European Heritage Label. The redesigned permanent exhibition on the Potsdam Conference was reopened in April 2012.

 

Potsdam is the capital and largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of Berlin, and lies embedded in a hilly morainic landscape dotted with many lakes, around 20 of which are located within Potsdam's city limits. It lies some 25 kilometres (16 miles) southwest of Berlin's city centre. The name of the city and of many of its boroughs are of Slavic origin.

 

Potsdam was a residence of the Prussian kings and the German Emperor until 1918. Its planning embodied ideas of the Age of Enlightenment: through a careful balance of architecture and landscape, Potsdam was intended as "a picturesque, pastoral dream" which would remind its residents of their relationship with nature and reason.

 

The city, which is over 1,000 years old, is widely known for its palaces, its lakes, and its overall historical and cultural significance. Landmarks include the parks and palaces of Sanssouci, Germany's largest World Heritage Site, as well as other palaces such as the Orangery Palace, the New Palace, Cecilienhof Palace, and Charlottenhof Palace. Potsdam was also the location of the significant Potsdam Conference in 1945, the conference where the three heads of government of the USSR, the US, and the UK decided on the division of Germany following its surrender, a conference which defined Germany's history for the following 45 years.

 

Babelsberg, in the south-eastern part of Potsdam, was already by the 1930s the home of a major film production studio and it has enjoyed success as an important center of European film production since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Filmstudio Babelsberg, founded in 1912, is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world.

 

Potsdam developed into a centre of science in Germany in the 19th century. Today, there are three public colleges, the University of Potsdam, and more than 30 research institutes in the city.

Löwenkämpfer (The Lion Fighter) is an 1858 bronze equestrian statue by Albert Wolff, installed outside the Altes Museum in Berlin, Germany. An 1892 copy stands in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The companion piece is Amazone zu Pferde, also installed outside the Altes M.

 

Carl Conrad Albert Wolff (14 November 1814, Neustrelitz – 20 June 1892, Berlin) was a German sculptor, and medallist.

 

Life and work

His father was the architect and sculptor Christian Philipp Wolff, who died when Albert was only six. At the age of seventeen, he followed in the footsteps of his older brother and moved to Berlin, where he found a position in the workshop of his father's friend Christian Daniel Rauch and took night classes in anatomical drawing at a local art school. In 1844, he was sent to Carrara (where the best marble could be found) to produce statues for the terrace of Sanssouci.

 

After two years in Italy, he returned to Berlin, assisting Rauch on a monument of Frederick the Great, but he also worked free-lance, producing a fountain with Countess Anna Raczynska (1823-1906) represented as Hygieia (in Posen) and a marble crucifix for a church in Kamenz. Shortly after, he opened his own workshop. In addition to his larger works, he produced many smaller figures, statuettes and decorations that were widely copied.

 

In 1866, he was appointed a Professor at the Prussian Academy of Art and had many students who would become well-known, including his own son Martin. He was named an honorary member of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1881.

 

Selected major works

Equestrian statue of Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover, in Hanover

Equestrian statue of King Friedrich Wilhelm III with several base figures, in the Lustgarten, Berlin. The statue was unveiled on 16 June 1871. It was damaged during World War II and demolished by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government. Die Allegorie der Wissenschaft (The Allegory of Science) and Clio – the Muse of History statues survived and are located near St. Nicholas' Church, Berlin.

Statue of Grand Duke Friedrich Franz I in Ludwigslust.

Figure, "Löwenkämpfer" (The Lion Fighter), at the Altes Museum. A copy may be seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Figure group, "Der Jüngling wird von Athena in neuen Kampf geführt" (Young Man Led to a New Battle by Athena), on the Schlossbrücke (Castle Bridge) in Berlin-Mitte.

Marble group, "Bacchus with Panther", in the Alte Nationalgalerie.

Bronze relief of victorious troops at the base of the Berlin Victory Column.

Bronze group, "Löwe seine Jungen gegen eine Riesenschlange verteidigend" (Lion Defending its Young Against a Giant Snake), on the square in front of the Criminal Justice Building in Moabit. It was later moved to the new Court Building on Wilsnacker Straße.

 

The Altes Museum (English: Old Museum) is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin, Germany. Built between 1825 and 1830 by order of King Frederick William III of Prussia according to plans by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, it is considered a major work of German Neoclassical architecture.[1] It is surrounded by the Berlin Cathedral to the east, the Berlin Palace to the south and the Zeughaus to the west. Currently, the Altes Museum houses the Antikensammlung and parts of the Münzkabinett.[2] As part of the Museum Island complex, the Altes Museum was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, in recognition of its testimony to the development of the museum as a social and architectural phenomenon.[3]

 

History

Planning and location

In the early nineteenth century, Germany's bourgeoisie had become increasingly self-aware and self-confident. This growing class began to embrace new ideas regarding the relationship between itself and art, and the concepts that art should be open to the public and that citizens should be able to have access to a comprehensive cultural education began to pervade society. King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia was a strong proponent of this Humboldtian ideal for education and charged Karl Friedrich Schinkel with planning a public museum for the royal art collection.

 

Schinkel's plans

Schinkel's plans for the Königliches Museum, as it was then known, were also influenced by drafts of the crown prince, the future King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who desired a building that was heavily influenced by Classical antiquity. The crown prince even sent Schinkel a pencil sketch of a large hall adorned with a classical portico.[citation needed]

 

Schinkel's plans incorporated the Königliches Museum into an ensemble of buildings, which surround the Berliner Lustgarten (pleasure garden). The Stadtschloss in the south was a symbol of worldly power, the Zeughaus in the west represented military might, and the Berliner Dom in the east was the embodiment of divine authority. The museum to the north of the garden, which was to provide for the education of the people, stood as a symbol for science and art—and not least for their torchbearer: the self-aware bourgeoisie. For the front facing the Lustgarten, a simple columned hall in grand style and proportionate to the importance of the location would most certainly give the building character. The arrangement of the eighteen Ionic columns was effected by the Lustgarten. The portico was designed with a function in order to give the museum building an exterior befitting its site, in which the monuments can be placed.

  

Altes Museum, c. 1830

Schinkel had developed plans for the Königliches Museum as early as 1822/23, but construction did not begin until 1825. Construction was completed in 1828 and the museum was inaugurated on 3 August 1830.[4] Schinkel was also responsible for the renovation of the Berliner Dom, originally a Baroque cathedral, in the Neoclassical style, and he exercised considerable influence on Peter Joseph Lenné's renovation of the Lustgarten, which coincided with the construction of the museum, resulting in a harmonized and integrated ensemble.[according to whom?]

 

Museum Island

In 1841, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV announced, in a royal decree, that the entire northern part of the Spree Island (now known as Museum Island) "be transformed into a sanctuary for art and science". In 1845, with the completion of the Neues Museum ("New"), the Königliches Museum was renamed the Altes Museum ("Old"), a name it holds to this day.

  

Historical photograph of the Altes Museum, before 1854

 

Altes Museum, 1950

 

Types of Ancient Greek helmets, Antikensammlung Berlin

With the completion of the Neues Museum by Friedrich August Stüler in 1855, Museum Island began to take form. This was followed by the Nationalgalerie (now the Alte Nationalgalerie) by Johann Heinrich Strack (1876), the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (now the Bodemuseum) by Ernst von Ihne after plans by Stüler (1904), and the Pergamonmuseum by Alfred Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann (1930). Thus, Museum Island evolved into the institution it is today.

 

Julius Carl Raschdorff's 1894–1905 reconstruction of the Berliner Dom into a neo-Renaissance cathedral (replacing the classical cathedral designed by Schinkel) severely disrupted the classical ensemble, especially since the new cathedral has significantly larger dimensions than its predecessor.

 

Content of the museum

The royally appointed commission, which was responsible for the conception of the museum, decided to display only "High Art" in the proposed building, which included Old Master paintings and prints and drawings on the upper floor, as well as Classical sculpture from ancient Greece and Rome on the ground floor. This precluded the incorporation of ethnography, prehistory and the excavated treasures of the ancient Near East from Assyria, Persia, and elsewhere); instead, these artifacts were primarily housed in Schloss Monbijou.

 

20th century

During the Nazi era, the Altes Museum was used as the backdrop for propaganda, both in the museum itself and upon the parade grounds of the redesigned Lustgarten. Close to the end of Second World War, the building was badly damaged when a tank truck exploded in front of it, and the frescoes designed by Schinkel and Peter Cornelius, which adorned the vestibule and the back wall of the portico, were largely lost.

 

Under General Director Ludwig Justi, the building was the first museum of Museum Island to undergo reconstruction and restoration, which was carried out from 1951 to 1966 by Hans Erich Bogatzky and Theodor Voissen. Following Schinkel's designs, the murals of the rotunda were restored in 1982. However, neither the ornate ceilings of the ground floor exhibition rooms nor the pairs of columns under the girders were reconstructed. The former connection to the Neues Museum has also not been rebuilt; instead, an underground passageway connecting all of the museums of Museum Island is planned as part of the Museumsinsel 2015 renovations.

 

The Berlin Cathedral at the Lustgarten on Museum Island is a Protestant church in the Mitte district of Berlin . Built between 1894 and 1905 according to designs by Julius Raschdorff in the Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque styles, the monument is the largest Protestant church in Germany in terms of area and one of the most important dynastic burial sites in Europe. In addition to church services , the cathedral is also used for state acts , concerts and other events.

 

Since the monument church on the north side was demolished in 1975, the Berlin Cathedral has consisted of the large sermon church in the middle, the smaller baptismal and wedding church on the south side and the Hohenzollern crypt , which takes up almost the entire basement. Severely damaged in the Second World War , the cathedral exterior was simplified by 1984 and the cathedral interior was restored true to the original by 2002. The Hohenzollern Crypt is scheduled to be comprehensively renovated and modernized by 2023. A subsequent reconstruction of the monument church to restore the original program of the Berlin Cathedral is currently being discussed in expert circles.

 

Dimensions

Originally the cathedral was 114 meters long, 73 meters wide, 114 meters high and offered 2,100 seats. Due to the demolished monument church, the simplified rebuilt dome and the magnificent sarcophagus moved to the sermon church, it is now 90 meters long, 98 meters high and offers 1,390 seats. The dome has a diameter of 33 meters. With an area of ​​6,270 square meters, it is the largest Protestant church in Germany.

 

History

The history of a cathedral on the Spree Island goes back to the 15th century. In the newly completed castle , the Erasmus Chapel was consecrated as a court church in 1450 . The collegiate foundation located here was confirmed by Pope Paul II in 1465 .

 

After Joachim II became elector in 1535, he had the Dominican church south of the castle converted into the new court church. The medieval brick church of the Dominicans in the Gothic style was expanded, richly furnished, princely burial places were set up and bells were installed. The new cathedral was consecrated in 1536. In 1539, Joachim II converted to the Lutheran faith: the Catholic cathedral became a Protestant cathedral. In 1608 the cathedral chapter was also dissolved and the cathedral became the highest parish church in Cölln .

 

The conversion of Elector Johann Sigismund and his court to the Reformed confession on Christmas Day 1613 [8] in the cathedral and its subsequent transformation in the Reformed spirit resulted in conflicts with the estates and the Lutheran Church of the Kurmark. In April 1615, the residents of Berlin and Cölln erupted in the so-called Berlin Tumult with serious riots and looting of the homes of the Calvinist court clergy.

 

Second Cathedral 1747–1894

Since the brick church had become dilapidated in the following centuries, Frederick II had a new baroque building built on the Lustgarten, the current location of the cathedral, between 1747 and 1750 and, after the electoral coffins had been transferred to the new building, the old cathedral was demolished. The architects of this new building, which was inaugurated on September 6, 1750, were Johann Boumann , who came from the Netherlands and had a very sober concept of the Baroque, and Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff .

 

At the beginning of the 19th century, Karl Friedrich Schinkel redesigned the cathedral in a simple variant of the then modern classicism , the interior in 1816/1817, the external appearance in 1820/1821. The lead civil engineer (government construction manager) during the renovation was Schinkel's student and later Mecklenburg-Strelitz court architect Friedrich Wilhelm Buttel .

 

During the 19th century it was discussed whether the existing, modest Schinkel Cathedral, which was a reconstruction of the baroque cathedral church built under Frederick the Great, would be able to meet the representational demands of the monarchy for any longer. At the instigation of King Frederick William IV, it was decided to build a new, more magnificent cathedral church, which would be a two-towered basilica with a three-aisled nave based on the Italian model. Friedrich August Stüler , a student of Schinkel, provided the designs . The first construction work has begun. The foundation walls with the emerging apses were built in the Spree . The high walls of the planned royal burial site and Hohenzollern burial place, the so-called Campo Santo by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, have also been built next to the cathedral. The royal washhouse located at this location had previously been demolished. The revolution of 1848 initially interrupted construction work. In the subsequent reaction era , public interest in the basilica project waned in favor of a dome building project. In addition, the court received a new, magnificent court church in 1854 with the completion of the castle dome. In the meantime, the House of Representatives in Prussia decided on the state budget . The majority were unwilling to finance the king's ambitious building projects. This meant that construction work came to a standstill for decades in 1848.

 

After the founding of the empire , there was a renewed call for a representative church that could compete with the world's large churches and at the same time impressively replace the previous Protestant churches. In 1885, the architect Julius Carl Raschdorff , a professor at the Charlottenburg University of Technology , presented plans for a new building. But it was William II, in his capacity as King and Summus Episcopus in Prussia , who ordered the demolition of the Schinkel Cathedral and the construction of a new cathedral according to Raschdorff's plans, which were characterized by an eclectic adaptation of architectural forms from the Italian High Renaissance and the Baroque.

 

The foundation stone for this building was laid on June 17, 1894, with the aim of inaugurating the building in 1900. However, construction delays meant that this could not take place until February 27, 1905.

 

A cathedral construction administration headed by the architect Julius Raschdorff (master cathedral builder since July 2, 1892) was responsible for the new cathedral. This construction administration consisted of two departments, a first department for the preparation of the construction and execution plans and the supervision of the construction models and a second department for the actual construction execution and its supervision as well as the accounting (with measurements and billing of a not simple complexity). The first department, which was also responsible for artistic planning, was headed by Julius Raschdorff's son Otto, with Wilhelm II exerting influence on the design of the cathedral throughout the entire construction period. The painter Anton von Werner changed his designs for the design of the dome mosaic fields, the mosaic images of the evangelists and window designs in the apse of the cathedral church according to Wilhelm's personal wishes. Building officer Julius Kleinau was responsible for the management of the second construction department by the cathedral construction administration , who was assisted by the later cathedral builder Bernhard Hoffmann and who was supported in construction management by the architect Moritz Korn until 1896 .

 

Heinrich Müller-Breslau was responsible for the static calculations and the design of the steel structure of the dome .

 

The main altar from the previous building, created in 1850 by Friedrich August Stüler, found its place in the new building. Carl Joseph Begas designed the altarpiece of the baptismal and wedding church.

 

The sarcophagus of Emperor Friedrich III was preserved in the Hohenzollern Crypt. , which had stood in the mausoleum in Potsdam after his death , has its new place here. For this occasion, Reinhold Begas commissioned Kaiser Wilhelm II to create a new sarcophagus made of Greek marble, which was completed in November 1905.

 

The cathedral was equipped with electric lighting at an early stage, which initially consisted of arc and Nernst lamps . In addition, the organ's fan was powered by motor power, as were the bells, and in 1905 there was already an electric passenger elevator.

 

Destruction and reconstruction

During the Second World War, the cathedral suffered increasingly serious damage. First, all the altar windows were destroyed in an Allied air raid on the neighboring Burgstrasse, and there were major cracks in the domes of the corner towers. Later, during one of the strongest air raids on Berlin on May 24, 1944, the dome and its lantern were badly hit. A canister filled with liquid fuel set fire to the wooden cladding under the copper covering, which was lined with peat as insulation. The firefighters who responded were unable to reach the source of the fire. The entire dome lantern then fell into the interior of the cathedral, breaking through the floor of the sermon church with its enormous weight and damaging large parts of the Hohenzollern crypt below . It is said that the cathedral organist Fritz Heitmann is said to have played on the organ even with the dome open, which was protected from the falling rubble. The attack also damaged the memorial church and again the four towers. After the war, the cathedral was considered 25 percent destroyed. Thieves later caused extensive damage to the organ. They stole around a third of the pipes and tore out the pneumatic action lines in order to sell the metal.

 

After the sermon church had become unusable, the cathedral community gathered for the first time at Pentecost 1944 in a section of the Hohenzollern crypt that was specially separated for this purpose under the monument church. Converted into a cathedral crypt church , it was used for church services by the cathedral community, apart from an interruption from spring to September 1945, and equipped with the Schuke organ since 1946. Until his departure in 1960, the cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring preached here every Sunday to around a thousand believers. Closed in 1971 after the makeshift restoration of the baptismal and wedding church, the reduced cathedral crypt church was used again in the years 1975–1980 during the restoration work in the baptismal and wedding church.

 

The dome had been able to maintain its shape, but now there was a large hole in the middle. The sermon church, already badly damaged by dust and debris, suffered further damage from the following weather, as did the dome mosaics . In order to protect the interior of the cathedral, the only option was to close the dome as quickly as possible. The city council therefore decided to provide emergency aid in 1948, but the necessary work could not be completed until 1953. The crypt was not renovated and was not open to the public during these years.

 

After emergency repairs, the cathedral was usable again except for the memorial and sermon churches. From 1945 until the beginning of the restoration in 1975, it served as the headquarters of the theological faculty of Humboldt University and the theological branch library of the university library .

 

After lengthy discussions about the design of the East Berlin city center, in which the demolition of the cathedral or its reuse in a different form was discussed several times, the GDR government decided in 1975 to rebuild the cathedral. In principle, the state buildings of the Palace of the Republic with the People's Chamber , the State Council Building and the Foreign Ministry of the GDR , which have now been built on Marx-Engels-Platz, should not be impaired in their effectiveness by a fully restored testament to the Empire.

 

Therefore, she had the damaged monument church on the north side and the undamaged underpass on the southwest tower demolished. The main dome and the four tower ends were not given their original shape, but were greatly simplified and reduced in height by 16 meters each. What was particularly noticeable was the removal of all end lanterns and a completely new dome cross. Furthermore, when the monument church was removed, the marble Bismarck epitaph created by Reinhold Begas was destroyed ] and the magnificent sarcophagi of the Hohenzollerns were relocated to the now smaller crypt church. 204 facade elements of the monument church were moved to a depot in Ahrensfelde , where they remain to this day. By 1983, this work had progressed so far that the extensive reconstruction of the interior was carried out by 1993. Both the imperial staircase and the central sermon church were restored according to Raschdorff's original plans. The south portal also received the bronze door of reconciliation by Siegfried Krepp . This was followed by the installation of the colored choir windows and the restoration of the dome mosaics, the last section of which was ceremoniously unveiled in 2002. This also included the comprehensive cleaning of the Sauer organ .

 

According to fellow actor Manfred Stolpe at the time, the costs for the reconstruction of the Berlin Cathedral were originally estimated at 45 million currency marks , which the Evangelical Church of Germany and the government of the Federal Republic of Germany paid in the amount of 45 million German marks. This sum was confirmed by Ludwig Geißel , negotiator on behalf of the EKD .

 

In October 1974, the GDR government also promised an annual subsidy of 200,000 GDR marks for the maintenance of the Berlin Cathedral, thus fulfilling one of the contractual partners' conditions. Previously, there was allegedly a GDR demand that negotiations on church building programs in the GDR only take place at the same time as negotiations on the reconstruction of the Berlin Cathedral.

 

In 1976, a supplementary payment was made to the already paid construction costs of 45 million D-Marks in the amount of 20.5 million D-Marks, a total of now 65.5 million D-Marks.

 

The actual costs for the reconstruction of the Berlin Cathedral until its completion in 1993 amounted to 150 million German marks and were also paid by the two donors mentioned. The reconstruction was the largest Protestant church building project on German soil in the post-war period and at the same time the longest-standing and most extensive sacred building cooperation between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR.

 

In March 2019 it became known that the facade was crumbling due to the influence of soot, rain and exhaust fumes and would have to be renovated for 1.6 million euros by 2023. A fundraising campaign was started for this purpose.

 

Historic dome

The dismantling of the domed cross sparked a discussion about whether the five dome lanterns that adorned the structure before the war should be put back up. Critics of the domed cross from GDR times particularly complain that the originally implemented proportions of the building are only inadequately reproduced with the reduced solution. Accordingly, the Evangelical Church Building Association in particular campaigned for a reconstruction of the original state and also received support for this from the Historical Berlin Society . In the dispute over this, however, the critics were rejected by the cathedral community, which was negative about this request. The fact that the current condition has been placed under monument protection also makes reconstruction more difficult . The historical dome construction of the substructure, however, was nominated for the award as a historical landmark of civil engineering in Germany in 2007 .

 

Dome cross

At the beginning of December 2006, the lantern crown that was placed on the cathedral dome during the reconstruction in 1981 was removed. The cathedral construction office called in structural engineers after rust damage was discovered under the gold-plated copper sheet cladding in August 2006. The reports found that the stability of the 12.5 tonne and 15 meter high domed cross was no longer guaranteed in storms. [31] Since the structure made of hollow steel forms was completely eroded inside and out, it could not be restored.

 

The damage was due to bimetallic corrosion , which occurs when different noble metals (here: copper and steel) are combined and leads to corrosion of the less noble metal (here: steel). In the 1970s, the KT steel used (corrosive steel, Corten steel ) was believed to have more favorable material properties. Due to the damage pattern, other roof structures with comparable material combinations also had to be inspected for damage, e.g. B. the balls on the four corner towers and the copper-driven figural decorations.

 

The reconstruction of the domed cross in the 1981 version was carried out by the metal construction company Breidenbach from Peiting in Upper Bavaria . The new cross was then covered with 1.5 kilograms of gold leaf by Berlin specialists . On August 19, 2008, it was lifted onto the cathedral dome by a 500-ton crane. Of the 1.2 million euros in costs incurred in the renovation work on the Berlin Cathedral, 700,000 euros went to the new domed cross. The old domed cross was moved - albeit without the dome crown - to the cemetery of the upper parish and cathedral church on Liesenstrasse.

 

There is a wreath around the dome on which 20 copper angel figures are enthroned at regular intervals. These were refurbished by Kunstschmiede Berlin during repairs from 1978 to 1981 , and some of them were completely renewed. At a height of 50 m, a viewing platform open to the public extends around the drum and offers a 360° view of Berlin.

 

Facilities

In the center of the dome there is a round window that shows the Holy Spirit dove in a halo. Below you can see eight large-format mosaics depicting the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount . They were created by Anton von Werner , who also created the mosaics of the four evangelists in the niches of the vault pillars. The chancel windows depicting the birth of Jesus, crucifixion and resurrection as well as angels with the symbols of death, faith, love and hope were also created by him. On the cornices of the half-columns in the church interior there are four meter high sandstone statues of the four reformers Calvin , Luther , Melanchthon and Zwingli on the altar side , and on the opposite side, around the imperial box, that of the four secular rulers Albrecht of Prussia , Joachim II , Friedrich the Wise and Philip the Magnanimous , who were promoters of the Reformation. The figures were selected by December 1902, and the sculptors Friedrich Pfannschmidt , Gerhard Janensch , Alexander Calandrelli , Harro Magnussen , Karl Begas , Walter Schott and Max Baumbach were commissioned to produce the sculptures. Between two figures above the cone-like niches, four bas-reliefs by Otto Lessing show scenes from the Acts of the Apostles (stoning of Stephen , conversion of Paul , Peter in Athens , healing of a lame man).

 

Under the organ gallery there are baroque sarcophagi for the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm and his second wife Dorothea , as well as a bronze table tomb for Elector Johann Cicero and a grave monument for Friedrich III. Under the south gallery there are two gilded ceremonial coffins for King Frederick I and Sophie Charlotte . These were created by Andreas Schlüter . Schlüter also designed the eagle lectern from 1701 in front of the chancel. The gold-plated original of this lectern is in the Cathedral Museum.

 

The altar table made of white marble and yellowish onyx , created by Friedrich August Stüler , represents a mixture of a Lutheran block altar and a Reformed table altar and thus illustrates the merger of the two churches to form the Uniate Church in Prussia. The choir screen of the old cathedral was installed behind the altar as an altar wall. It is made of gilded bronze and is decorated with replicas of the apostle figures from Sebald's grave in Nuremberg .

 

In the area of ​​the main altar there are two floor candelabra made of gilded iron. Like the Apostle choir screen, they were designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (for the previous building). They were sculpturally designed by the Berlin sculptor Theodor Kalide (for installation in the Berlin Cathedral by Raschdorff, the chandelier was increased and provided with historic additions).

 

The design for the pulpit, carved from oak, came from Otto Raschdorff , the son of the cathedral builder, who also designed the organ front. Above the organ, cartouche images show Jesus Christ as judge of the world in an angelic glory. The stucco cartouches above the other galleries were also intended for pictures, but remained unadorned for cost reasons.

 

For ceremonial occasions, the Berlin Cathedral has a lecture cross by the Bavarian artist Helmut Ulrich . The cross is made of rose quartz, rock crystal and yellow aragonite. Since lecture crosses have become a rarity in Protestant communities, often as a demarcation from Catholic liturgy , this cross is a special feature of the Berlin Cathedral.

 

The most magnificent gallery in the church is the imperial box. On the parapet there is a coat of arms with an imperial eagle , which is crowned by a crown with a cross and thus represents the connection between church and state.

 

The Hohenzollern Crypt, which takes up almost the entire basement of the Berlin Cathedral, is the most important dynastic burial site in Germany. Together with the Capuchin Crypt in Vienna , the Cathedral of Saint-Denis near Paris and the El Escorial Monastery near Madrid , it is one of the most important dynastic burial sites in Europe. A total of 94 members of the House of Hohenzollern found their final resting place there from the end of the 16th to the beginning of the 20th century. This also includes electors and kings who significantly shaped the history of Brandenburg and Prussia .

 

Together with the magnificent sarcophagi, which were originally spacious in the monument church and have been cramped in the sermon church since their demolition in 1975, the coffins bear witness to 500 years of European burial culture. In addition to some elaborate stone and metal sarcophagi, which represent all artistic styles from the late Gothic onwards , the Hohenzollern Crypt also contains particularly rare wooden coffins that are covered with textiles such as velvet or brocade . During the Second World War, bomb hits severely damaged the tomb and almost completely destroyed some coffins. Since reopening on November 20, 1999 , the Hohenzollern Crypt has received around 720,000 visitors per year. It is expected to be renovated and made barrier-free by 2023 for around 18.6 million euros .

 

The above-mentioned magnificent sarcophagi in the Sermon Church are dedicated as cenotaphs to King Frederick I and Queen Sophie Charlotte, Emperor Frederick III, Elector Johann Cicero, Elector Frederick William I and Elector Dorothea. Except for the lost bones of Elector Johann Cicero, whose tomb is the oldest in the cathedral, [57] their remains are in stone sarcophagi with wooden inner coffins in the Hohenzollern crypt.

 

In the Hohenzollern Crypt there are, among other things: The following people are buried (in chronological and family order):

 

(Note: The numbering corresponds to that on the coffins)

No. 3: Elector Johann (1525–1598) ⚭ No. 4: Elisabeth of Anhalt (1563–1607), daughter of Joachim Ernst of Anhalt

No. 2: Elisabeth Magdalene of Brandenburg (1537–1595), daughter of Elector Joachim II , (the oldest coffin in the Hohenzollern crypt)

No. 5: Elector Joachim Friedrich (1546–1608) ⚭ First marriage: No. 6: Katharina of Brandenburg-Küstrin (1549–1602), daughter of Johann of Brandenburg-Küstrin

No. 8: Elector Johann Sigismund (1572–1620)

No. 15: Joachim Sigismund of Brandenburg (1603–1625)

No. 16: Albrecht Christian (1609–1609)

No. 9: August of Brandenburg (1580–1601)

No. 10: Albert Friedrich of Brandenburg (1582–1600)

No. 12: Joachim of Brandenburg (1583–1600)

No. 13: Ernst (1583–1613)

Elector Joachim Friedrich ⚭ Second marriage: No. 7: Eleonore of Prussia (1583–1607), daughter of Albrecht Friedrich of Prussia

No. 18: Catharina Sophia (1594–1665), daughter of Frederick IV of the Palatinate

No. 17: Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate (1597–1660), wife of Elector Georg Wilhelm , daughter of Elector Friedrich IV of the Palatinate

No. 14: Anna Sophia (1598–1659)

No. 20: George (1613–1614)

No. 11: Albrecht (1614–1620)

No. 21: Catharina Sibylla (1615–1615)

No. 22: Ernst (1617–1642)

No. A: Elector Friedrich Wilhelm (1620–1688) ⚭ First marriage: No. 24: Luise Henriette of Orange (1627–1667), daughter of Friedrich Heinrich (Oranien)

No. 28: Wilhelm Heinrich (1648–1649)

No. 47: Karl Emil of Brandenburg (1655–1674)

No. D: King Frederick I in Prussia (1657–1713) ⚭ First marriage: No. 45: Elisabeth Henriette of Hesse-Kassel (1661–1683), daughter of Landgrave Wilhelm VI. from Hesse-Kassel

King Frederick I. ⚭ Second marriage: No. C: Sophie Charlotte of Hanover (1668–1705), daughter of Ernst August, Elector of Hanover

No. 48: Friedrich August (1685–1686)

No. 26: Heinrich (1664–1664)

No. 27: Amalia (1664–1665)

No. 30: Ludwig of Brandenburg (1666–1687)

Elector Friedrich Wilhelm ⚭ Second marriage: No. B: Dorothea Sophie of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (1636–1689), daughter of Philipp (Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg) (1584–1663)

No. 31: Philipp Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1669–1711)

No. 91: Albrecht Friedrich of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1672–1731) ⚭ Marie Dorothea of ​​Courland (1684–1743), daughter of Duke Friedrich II Casimir Kettler of Courland

No. 92: Friedrich (1704–1707)

No. 39: Karl Friedrich Albrecht of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1705–1762)

No. 38: Louise (1709–1726)

No. 40: Frederick of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1710–1741)

No. 94: Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1714–1744)

No. 34: Karl Philipp von Brandenburg-Schwedt (1673–1695)

No. 95: Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1677–1734)

No. 29: Dorothea (1675–1676)

No. 11: Johann Sigismund (1624–1624)

No. 49: Sophie Dorothea of ​​Hanover (1687–1757), wife of King Frederick William I of Prussia , daughter of King George I of Great Britain

No. 50: Friedrich Ludwig (1707–1708)

No. 51: Friedrich Wilhelm (1710–1711)

No. 53: Charlotte Albertine (1713–1714)

No. 58: August Wilhelm of Prussia (1722–1758) ⚭ No. 59: Luise Amalie of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1722–1780), daughter of Ferdinand Albrecht II of Braunschweig

No. 61: King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia (1744–1797) ⚭ No. 62: Friederike of Hesse-Darmstadt (1751–1805), daughter of Landgrave Ludwig IX. from Hesse-Darmstadt

No. 64: Wilhelmine (1772–1773)

No. 65: Friedrich Ludwig Karl of Prussia (1773–1796), called Louis

No. 66: Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Georg (1795–1798)

No. 63: (Son) (1777)

No. 88: Karl Heinrich von Prussia (1781–1846), Grand Master of the Prussian Knights of St. John

No. 87: Wilhelm of Prussia (1783–1851) ⚭ No. 84: Maria Anna Amalie of Hesse-Homburg (1785–1846), daughter of Landgrave Frederick V of Hesse-Homburg

No. 79: Wilhelm (1811–1813)

No. 89: Adalbert of Prussia (1811–1873)

No. 74: Thassilo (1813–1814)

No. 86: Waldemar of Prussia (1817–1849)

No. 56: Henry of Prussia (1747–1767)

No. 60: Georg Karl Emil (1758–1759)

No. 55: Anna Amalie of Prussia (1723–1787)

No. 67: Ferdinand of Prussia (1730–1813) ⚭ No. 68: Anna Elisabeth Luise of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1738–1820), daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1700–1771)

No. 71: Friederike Elisabeth Dorothea Henriette Amalie (1761–1773)

No. 70: Friedrich Heinrich Emil Carl (1769–1773)

No. 72: Ludwig (1771–1790)

No. 73: Louis Ferdinand Prince of Prussia (1772–1806)

No. 69: Friedrich Paul Heinrich August (1776–1776)

No. 75: August of Prussia (1779–1843)

No. 32: Friederike of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1700–1701)

No. 33: Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1704–1704)

No. 54: Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Bevern (1715–1797), wife of King Frederick II , daughter of Duke Ferdinand Albrecht II of Braunschweig

No. 52: Ludwig (1717–1719)

No. 57: Wilhelmine of Hesse-Kassel (1726–1808), wife of Henry Prince of Prussia , daughter of Landgrave Maximilian of Hesse-Kassel

No. 81: Philippine of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1745–1800), wife of Landgrave Frederick II of Hesse-Kassel , daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt (1700–1771)

No. 76: Nameless Princess (1794), daughter of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. of Prussia

No. 77: Friederike (1799–1800), daughter of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. of Prussia

No. 78: Ferdinand (1804–1806), son of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. of Prussia

No. 83: Nameless Prince (1806), son of Prince William of Orange

No. 82: Friedrich Wilhelm Ferdinand of Hesse-Kassel (1806–1806), son of Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel

No. 80: Nameless Prince (1832), son of Prince Albrecht of Prussia

No. 88: Anna (1858–1858), daughter of Prince Friedrich Karl of Prussia

No. 93: unknown

Cecilienhof Palace (German: Schloss Cecilienhof) is a palace in Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany, built from 1914 to 1917 in the layout of an English Tudor manor house. Cecilienhof was the last palace built by the House of Hohenzollern that ruled the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire until the end of World War I. It is famous for having been the location of the Potsdam Conference in 1945, in which the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States made important decisions affecting the shape of post World War II Europe and Asia. Cecilienhof has been part of the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990.

 

Location

Cecilienhof is located in the northern part of the large Neuer Garten park, close to the shore of the Jungfernsee lake. The park was laid out from 1787 at the behest of King Frederick William II of Prussia, modelled on the Wörlitz Park in Anhalt-Dessau. Frederick William II also had the Marmorpalais (Marble Palace) built within the Neuer Garten, the first Brandenburg palace in the Neoclassical style erected according to plans designed by Carl von Gontard and Carl Gotthard Langhans, which was finished in 1793. Other structures within the park close to Schloss Cecilienhof include an orangery, an artificial grotto (Muschelgrotte [de]), the "Gothic Library", and the Dairy in the New Garden, also constructed for King Frederick William II.

 

The park was largely redesigned as an English landscape garden according to plans by Peter Joseph Lenné from 1816 onwards, with lines of sight to nearby Pfaueninsel, Glienicke Palace, Babelsberg Palace, and the Sacrow Church.

 

Construction

Since the Marmorpalais, which had been the traditional Potsdam residence of the Hohenzollern crown prince, had become inadequate for current tastes, Emperor Wilhelm II ordered the establishment of a fund for constructing a new palace at Potsdam for his oldest son, Crown Prince Wilhelm (William) and his wife, Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 19 December 1912. After their marriage in 1905, Wilhelm and Cecilie had previously lived at the Marmorpalais for most of the year and at the Berlin Kronprinzenpalais in winter. In 1911, the Crown Prince had been appointed commander of the Prussian 1. Leibhusaren-Regiment and moved to Danzig-Langfuhr.

 

On 13 April 1914 the Imperial Ministry and the Saalecker Werkstätten signed a building contract that envisaged a completion date of 1 October 1915 and a construction cost of 1,498,000 Reichsmark for the new palace. The architect was Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who visited the couple in Danzig to work out the design for the palace. It was based on English Tudor style buildings, arranged around several courtyards featuring half-timbered walls, bricks and 55 different decorative chimney stacks. With the start of World War I in August 1914, construction stopped but was resumed in 1915.

 

Architecture and interior design

Crown Prince Wilhelm was so impressed with cottage and Tudor style homes like Bidston Court in Birkenhead (England) that Cecilienhof was inspired by it. Also, due to Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin's family ties, German Tudor-styled Gelbensande Manor near Rostock in Mecklenburg-Schwerin was an inspiration. The palace was designed in such a way as to be inhabitable for most of the year. Its low structure and multiple courts conceal the fact that it boasts a total of 176 rooms. Besides the large Ehrenhof (three-sided courtyard) in the centre, which was used only for the arrival and departure of the Crown Prince and his wife, there is a smaller garden court, the Prinzengarten, and three other courts around which the various wings of the building are arranged.

 

The "public" rooms were located in the centre part on the ground floor, around a central great hall, while above on the first floor were the "private" bedroom, dressing rooms and bathrooms. The living area of the great hall also features a massive wooden stairway made of oak. This was a gift from the city of Danzig. The ground floor rooms included an area for the Crown Prince with smoking room, library and breakfast room as well as an area for his wife with music salon, writing room and a room designed like a cabin on an ocean liner. The latter was used by Cecilie as a breakfast room. Like some of the other rooms it was designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, who also designed actual interiors of ocean liners for the Norddeutscher Lloyd shipping line.

 

History before 1945

The palace was finished in August 1917. It was named Cecilienhof after the Duchess and the couple moved in immediately. Cecilie gave birth at Cecilienhof to her youngest child, Princess Cecilie, who was born on 5 September 1917. However, when the revolution erupted in November 1918, for security reasons Cecilie and her six children moved for a while to the Neues Palais, where the wife of Emperor Wilhelm II, Empress Augusta Victoria, was living. After the Empress followed her husband into exile in the Netherlands, Cecilie remained in Potsdam and returned to Cecilienhof where she lived until 1920. As the property of the Hohenzollern family had been confiscated after the revolution, Cecilie then had to move her residence to an estate at Oels in Silesia, which was a private property. Only her sons Wilhelm (William) and Louis Ferdinand remained at Cecilienhof while they attended a public Realgymnasium (school) in Potsdam. Crown Prince Wilhelm had gone into exile in the Netherlands on 13 November 1918 and was interned on the island of Wieringen. He was allowed to return to Germany—as a private citizen—on 9 November 1923. In June 1926, a referendum on expropriating the former ruling Princes of Germany without compensation failed and as a consequence, the financial situation of the Hohenzollern family improved considerably. A settlement between the state and the family made Cecilienhof property of the state but granted a right of residence to Wilhelm and Cecilie. This was limited in duration to three generations.

 

Wilhelm subsequently broke the promise he had made to Gustav Stresemann, who allowed him to return to Germany, to stay out of politics. He supported the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, who visited Cecilienhof three times, in 1926, in 1933 (on the "Day of Potsdam") and in 1935. However, when Wilhelm realized that Hitler had no intention of restoring the monarchy, their relationship cooled. After the assassination attempt on 20 July 1944, Hitler had Wilhelm placed under supervision by the Gestapo and had Cecilienhof watched.

 

In January 1945, Wilhelm left Potsdam for Oberstdorf for a treatment of his gall and liver problems. Cecilie fled in early February 1945 as the Red Army drew closer to Berlin, without being able to salvage much in terms of her possessions. At the end of the war, Cecilienhof was seized by the Soviets.

 

Potsdam Conference of 1945

The Potsdam Conference (officially the "Berlin Conference") took place from 17 July to 2 August 1945. It was the third and longest summit between the heads of government of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, the major forces in the anti-Hitler-coalition that had just won the war after VE day, 8 May 1945. The conference was mainly organized by the Soviets. Although the British prime minister Winston Churchill had refused to hold a summit "anywhere within the current Soviet military zone", US President Harry Truman and Soviet leader Josef Stalin had agreed in late May 1945 to meet "near Berlin". As Berlin itself had been too heavily damaged by Allied bombing and street-to-street fighting, Cecilienhof in Potsdam was selected as the location for the conference. The delegations were to be housed in the leafy suburb of Potsdam-Babelsberg, which had suffered only slight damage in the bombing raids and also offered the advantage that the streets to the conference venue were easy to guard.

 

Soviet soldiers repaired the streets connecting Babelsberg to Cecilienhof, built a pontoon bridge to replace the Glienicker Brücke, which had been destroyed during the last days of the war, planted trees, bushes and flower beds—including the Soviet red star in the Ehrenhof of the palace. At Cecilienhof, 36 rooms and the great hall were renovated and furnished with furniture from other Potsdam palaces.  The furniture of Wilhelm and Cecilie had been removed by the Soviets and stored at the Dairy.

 

The main rooms used for the conference were as follows:

Cecilie's music salon—White Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a reception room (on the first day of the conference, this was also the site of a buffet Stalin provided to the other delegations),

Cecilie's writing room—Red Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a study,

Great hall—this was the conference hall, fitted by the Soviets with a round table of 10 feet diameter (probably custom-made by a Moscow-based furniture company),

Wilhelm's smoking room—study of the American delegation,

Wilhelm's library—study of the British delegation,

Wilhelm's breakfast room—possibly used as a secretary's office.

However, according to the official guide to the palace, evidence has recently emerged that indicates that the current designation of the British and American studies may have been switched by the Soviets after the conference.

 

Post World War II and today

Location of Cecilienhof in Germany

After the conference ended, Soviet troops used the palace as a clubhouse. It was handed over to the state of Brandenburg and in 1952 a memorial for the Conference was set up in the former private chambers of Wilhelm and Cecilie. The government of Eastern Germany also used the palace as a reception venue for state visits. The rest of the complex became a hotel in 1960. Some of the rooms were used by the ruling party (SED) for meetings.

 

However, after 1961, a part of the Neuer Garten was destroyed to build the southwest section of the Berlin Wall (as part of the Grenzsicherungsanlagen) which ran along the shore of Jungfernsee. Beginning in 1985, the VEB Reisebüro (state-owned travel agency) modernised the hotel.

 

Today, parts of Cecilienhof are still used as a museum and as a hotel. In 1990 it became part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site called Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin. The private rooms were opened to the public in 1995 after comprehensive restoration work. Queen Elizabeth II visited Cecilienhof on 3 November 2004. On 30 May 2007, the palace was used for a summit by the G8 foreign ministers. In 2011, Schloss Cecilienhof was awarded the European Heritage Label. The redesigned permanent exhibition on the Potsdam Conference was reopened in April 2012.

 

Potsdam is the capital and largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of Berlin, and lies embedded in a hilly morainic landscape dotted with many lakes, around 20 of which are located within Potsdam's city limits. It lies some 25 kilometres (16 miles) southwest of Berlin's city centre. The name of the city and of many of its boroughs are of Slavic origin.

 

Potsdam was a residence of the Prussian kings and the German Emperor until 1918. Its planning embodied ideas of the Age of Enlightenment: through a careful balance of architecture and landscape, Potsdam was intended as "a picturesque, pastoral dream" which would remind its residents of their relationship with nature and reason.

 

The city, which is over 1,000 years old, is widely known for its palaces, its lakes, and its overall historical and cultural significance. Landmarks include the parks and palaces of Sanssouci, Germany's largest World Heritage Site, as well as other palaces such as the Orangery Palace, the New Palace, Cecilienhof Palace, and Charlottenhof Palace. Potsdam was also the location of the significant Potsdam Conference in 1945, the conference where the three heads of government of the USSR, the US, and the UK decided on the division of Germany following its surrender, a conference which defined Germany's history for the following 45 years.

 

Babelsberg, in the south-eastern part of Potsdam, was already by the 1930s the home of a major film production studio and it has enjoyed success as an important center of European film production since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Filmstudio Babelsberg, founded in 1912, is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world.

 

Potsdam developed into a centre of science in Germany in the 19th century. Today, there are three public colleges, the University of Potsdam, and more than 30 research institutes in the city.

The Brandenburg Gate is an 18th-century neoclassical monument in Berlin, built on the orders of the King of Prussia Frederick William II after restoring the Orangist power by suppressing the Dutch popular unrest. One of the best-known landmarks of Germany, it was built on the site of a former city gate that marked the start of the road from Berlin to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel, which used to be the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg.

 

It is located in the western part of the city centre of Berlin within Mitte, at the junction of Unter den Linden and Ebertstraße, immediately west of the Pariser Platz. One block to the north stands the Reichstag building, which houses the German parliament (Bundestag). The gate is the monumental entry to Unter den Linden, a boulevard of linden trees which led directly to the royal City Palace of the Prussian monarchs, and the Berlin Cathedral.

 

Throughout its existence, the Brandenburg Gate was often a site for major historical events and is today considered not only a symbol of the tumultuous histories of Germany and Europe, but also of European unity and peace.

 

Description

The central portion of the gate draws from the tradition of the Roman triumphal arch, although in style it is one of the first examples of Greek Revival architecture in Germany. The gate is supported by twelve fluted Doric columns, six to each side, forming five passageways. There are also walls between the pairs of columns at front and back, decorated with classicizing reliefs of the Labours of Hercules. Citizens were originally allowed to use only the outermost two passageways on each side. Its design is based on the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis of Athens, which also had a front with six Doric columns, though these were topped by a triangular pediment.

 

The central portion is flanked by L-shaped wings on either side, at a lower height, but using the same Doric order. Next to, and parallel with, the gate these are open "stoas", but the longer sides, stretching beyond the east side, have buildings set back from the columns. These are called "custom houses" for the Berlin Customs Wall, which was in force until 1860, or "gatehouses".

 

The Doric order of the gate mostly, but not entirely, follows Greek precedents, which had recently become much better understood by the publication of careful illustrated records. The Greek Doric does not have bases to the columns, and the fluting here follows the Greek style for Ionic and Corinthian columns, with flat fillets rather than sharp arrises between the flutes, and rounded ends to the top and bottom of flutes. The entablature up to the cornice follows Greek precedent, with triglyphs, guttae, metopes, and mutules, except that there are half-metopes at the corners, the Roman rather than Greek solution to the "Doric corner conflict". The 16 metopes along each of the long faces have scenes from Greek mythology in relief; many echo the Parthenon in showing centaurs fighting men. Statues in niches at the furthest side wall of Minerva and Mars were added in the 19th century.

 

After an attic storey that is plain apart from wide steps at the sides receding in both directions, leading, on the east side only, to a large allegorical relief of the Triumph of Peace, the figures mostly women and children. Above this there is a second cornice, with a projecting central section. On top of this is a "bronze" sculptural group by Johann Gottfried Schadow of a quadriga—a chariot drawn by four horses—driven by a goddess figure. This was initially intended to represent Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, but after the Napoleonic Wars was rebranded as Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, and given an Iron Cross standard with a crowned Imperial eagle perched on top, rather than a wreath. This faces into the city centre. It is the first quadriga group to be made since antiquity, made from copper sheets hammered in moulds; fortunately these moulds were kept, as they would be used more than once to renew the sculpture.

 

The side wings have plain metopes, and simple angled roofs, ending in gable pediments with a small circular relief in the tympanum.

 

Previous gates

In the time of King Frederick William I (1688), shortly after the Thirty Years' War and a century before today's Brandenburg Gate was constructed, Berlin was a small walled city within a star fort with several named gates: Spandauer Tor, St. Georgen Tor, Stralower Tor, Cöpenicker Tor, Neues Tor, and Leipziger Tor (see map). Relative peace, a policy of religious tolerance, and status as capital of the Kingdom of Prussia facilitated the growth of the city. With the construction of Dorotheenstadt around 1670 and its inclusion in Berlin's city fortifications, a first gate was built on the site, approximately at the level of today's Schadowstraße, consisting of a breach through the raised wall and a drawbridge over the dug moat.

 

With the expansion of Dorotheenstadt to the west and the construction of the Berlin Customs Wall (German: Akzisemauer) in 1734, the latter of which enclosed the old fortified city and many of its then suburbs, a predecessor of today's Brandenburg Gate was built by the Court Architect Philipp Gerlach as a city gate on the road to Brandenburg an der Havel. The gate system consisted of two Baroque pylons decorated with pilasters and trophies, to which the gate wings were attached. In addition to the ornamental gate, there were simple passages for pedestrians in the wall, which were decorated with ornamental vases at this point.

 

18th-century reconstruction

Frederick William II of Prussia was in his early forties when he came to the throne in 1786. He was determined to establish his capital of Berlin as a cultural centre. The military triumphs of his uncle Frederick the Great had made the Kingdom of Prussia a power that could not be ignored in European politics, but Berlin lacked the monuments and cultural life of Vienna, Paris or London. His uncle's tastes had been those typical of his generation, drawing on French classicism and English Palladianism, and his Brandenburg Gate in Potsdam (1770–71) was a much smaller monument, poised between Rococo and a Roman-influenced Neoclassical architecture.

 

Frederick William II summoned new German architects to Berlin, including Carl Gotthard Langhans from Wroclaw (then in Prussia, now Poland), who was appointed head court architect ("Oberhofbauampt", or Court Superintendent of Buildings) in 1788. Though he had designed many Neoclassical buildings, this was his first significant work in the Greek style, and his last major one; by 1792 he had designed a small neo-Gothic building for the New Garden in Potsdam. The gate was the first element of a "new Athens on the river Spree" by Langhans.

 

The gate was originally called the German: Friedenstor or "Peace Gate"; the military victory it celebrated had been very complete, but almost fatality-free, so the name seemed justified. Frederick William II had restored his brother-in-law to power in the Netherlands. But the French Revolution began while construction was underway, and only a few years after it was completed, the Batavian Revolution sent the Dutch royal couple into exile in 1795, the first of many political upheavals throughout the gate's history.

 

19th and early 20th centuries

The Brandenburg Gate has played different political roles in German history. After the 1806 Prussian defeat at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, Napoleon was the first to use the Brandenburg Gate for a triumphal procession, and took its quadriga to Paris. After Napoleon's defeat in 1814 and the Prussian occupation of Paris by General Ernst von Pfuel, the quadriga was restored to Berlin. It was now redesigned by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for the new role of the Brandenburg Gate as a Prussian triumphal arch. The goddess, now definitely Victoria, was equipped with the Prussian eagle and Iron Cross on her lance with a wreath of oak leaves.

 

The quadriga faces east, as it did when it was originally installed in 1793. Only the royal family was allowed to pass through the central archway, as well as members of the Pfuel family, from 1814 to 1919. The Kaiser granted this honour to the family in gratitude to Ernst von Pfuel, who had overseen the return of the quadriga to the top of the gate. In addition, the central archway was also used by the coaches of ambassadors on the single occasion of their presenting their letters of credence to council.

 

After 1900, due to weathering and environmental damage, smaller and larger pieces of stone began to fall from the gate. Comprehensive renovation work began in 1913, which had to be interrupted by the outbreak of World War I and was not completed until 1926. Meanwhile, the events of the November Revolution had led to further significant damage, particularly to the quadriga. Indeed, the gate was used as a firing position by government troops during both the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 and the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. The restoration work was carried out on site under the direction of Kurt Kluge. For this purpose, the quadriga was encased in a wooden structure. Berliners spoke of the "highest horse stable in Berlin", but regardless of the weather, the work could be carried out in the dry without any delay. The numerous sandstone reliefs were restored and partially renovated under the artistic direction of Wilhelm Wandschneider, who remodeled one of the centaur metopes with a different motif.

 

Nazi Germany and World War II

When the Nazis ascended to power, they used the gate as a party symbol. As part of Berlin's transformation into the so-called "world capital Germania", the gate was located on the east–west axis. A seven-kilometer-long section between the Brandenburg Gate and Adolf-Hitler-Platz (today Theodor-Heuss-Platz) was extended and put into operation in 1939. During the further expansion of the east–west axis, which never materialised, one of the plans was to move the side porticos away from the Brandenburg Gate. Traffic would then have been routed not only through, but also around the gate.

 

The gate survived World War II and was one of the damaged structures still standing in the Pariser Platz ruins in 1945 (another being the Academy of Fine Arts). The gate was badly damaged with holes in the columns from bullets and nearby explosions. One horse's head from the original quadriga survived, and is today kept in the collection of the Märkisches Museum. Efforts to disguise the government district of Berlin and confuse Allied bombers had included the construction of a replica Brandenburg Gate located away from the city centre.

 

Cold War

After Germany's surrender at the end of the war, the Brandenburg Gate was located in the Soviet occupation zone, directly next to the border to the zone occupied by the British, which later became the border between East and West Berlin. In connection with the East German uprising of 1953, three men took down the red flag on the roof of the Brandenburg Gate and, shortly after noon on 17 June 1953, hoisted the joint black-red-gold flag of East Germany and West Germany. One of the three men, Wolfgang Panzer, probably paid for this action with his life and was never seen again.

 

On 21 September 1956, the East Berlin magistrates decided to restore the only surviving but damaged former city gate. Despite heated arguments and mutual accusations, both parts of Berlin worked together on the restoration. The holes were patched, but were visible for many years. The quadriga was completely recreated based on a plaster cast from 1942; the reconstruction was carried out by the sculptor Otto Schnitzer and the traditional foundry Hermann Noack in Friedenau. The restoration was completed on 14 December 1957. The Iron Cross standard above the quadriga was replaced by a wreath, as originally intended, but the Iron Cross returned after German Reunification, and remains in place in 2024.

 

Vehicles and pedestrians could travel freely through the gate until the day after construction began on the Berlin Wall on Barbed Wire Sunday, 13 August 1961. West Berliners gathered on the western side of the gate to demonstrate against the Berlin Wall, among them West Berlin's mayor, Willy Brandt, who had returned from a federal election campaign tour in West Germany earlier the same day. The wall passed directly by the western side of the gate, closing it throughout the Berlin Wall period, which ended on 22 December 1989.

 

Post-1989

When the Revolutions of 1989 occurred and the wall was demolished, the gate symbolized freedom and the desire to unify the city of Berlin. Thousands of people gathered at the wall to celebrate its fall on 9 November 1989. On 22 December 1989, the Brandenburg Gate border crossing was reopened when Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, walked through to be greeted by Hans Modrow, the East German prime minister. Demolition of the rest of the wall around the area took place the following year. In 1990, the quadriga was removed from the gate as part of renovation work carried out by the East German authorities following the fall of the wall in November 1989. Germany was officially reunified in October 1990.

 

The Brandenburg Gate was privately refurbished on 21 December 2000, at a cost of €6 million. It was once again opened on 3 October 2002 following extensive refurbishment, for the 12th anniversary of German reunification. On this occasion, the Berlin office of Kardorff Ingenieure developed a new lighting concept that emphasises the gate as the most important building on the Pariser Platz.

 

The Brandenburg Gate became the main venue for the 20th-anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall or "Festival of Freedom" on the evening of 9 November 2009. The high point of the celebrations was when over 1000 colourfully designed foam domino tiles, each over 2.5 metres (8 ft 2 in) tall, were lined up along the route of the former wall through the city centre. The domino "wall" was then toppled in stages converging here.

 

The Brandenburg Gate is now again closed to vehicle traffic, and much of the Pariser Platz has been turned into a cobblestone pedestrian zone. The gate, along with the broad Straße des 17. Juni avenue to the west, is also one of the large public areas in Berlin where over a million people can gather to watch stage shows or party together, watch major sport events shown on huge screens, or see fireworks at midnight on New Year's Eve. After winning the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the Germany national football team held their victory rally in front of the gate.

 

It has also hosted street events at 2009 IAAF World Championships in Athletics and repeated its role in 2018 European Athletics Championships. It is also the usual finish line of the Berlin Marathon.

 

Political history

A Soviet flag flew from a flagpole atop the gate from 1945 until 1957, when it was replaced by an East German flag. Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, the flag and the pole have been removed. During the 1953 riots in East Berlin the Soviet flag was torn off by West Germans.

 

In 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate. The Soviets hung large red banners across it to prevent him looking into East Berlin.

 

In the 1980s, decrying the existence of two German states and two Berlins, West Berlin mayor Richard von Weizsäcker said: "The German Question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed."

 

On 12 June 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan spoke to the West Berlin populace at the Brandenburg Gate, demanding the razing of the Berlin Wall. Addressing the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan said,

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

 

On 25 December 1989, less than two months after the Berlin Wall began to come down, the conductor Leonard Bernstein conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a version of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven at the then newly opened Brandenburg Gate. In the concluding choral movement of the symphony, the "Ode to Joy", the word Freude ("Joy") was replaced with Freiheit ("Freedom") to celebrate the fall of the Wall and the imminent reunification of Germany.

 

On 2–3 October 1990, the Brandenburg Gate was the scene of the official ceremony to mark the reunification of Germany. At the stroke of midnight on 3 October, the black-red-gold flag of West Germany—now the flag of a reunified Germany—was raised over the gate.

 

On 12 July 1994, U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke at the Brandenburg Gate about peace in post–Cold War Europe.[32]

 

On 9 November 2009, Chancellor Angela Merkel walked through the Brandenburg Gate with Russia's Mikhail Gorbachev and Poland's Lech Wałęsa as part of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

On 13 August 2011, Germany marked the 50th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall began construction with a memorial service and a minute of silence in memory of those who died trying to flee to the West. "It is our shared responsibility to keep the memory alive and to pass it on to the coming generations as a reminder to stand up for freedom and democracy to ensure that such injustice may never happen again," Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit said. German Chancellor Angela Merkel—who grew up behind the wall in Germany's communist eastern part—also attended the commemoration. German President Christian Wulff added, "It has been shown once again: Freedom is invincible at the end. No wall can permanently withstand the desire for freedom."

 

On 19 June 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke at the Gate about nuclear arms reduction and the recently revealed U.S. internet surveillance activities.

 

On the night of 5 January 2015, the lights illuminating the gate were completely shut off in protest against a protest held by far-right anti-Islamic group Pegida.

 

In April 2017, Die Zeit noted that the gate was not illuminated in Russian colours after the 2017 Saint Petersburg Metro bombing. The gate was previously illuminated after attacks in Jerusalem and Orlando. The Berlin Senate only allows the gate to be illuminated for events in partner cities and cities with a special connection to Berlin.

 

In February 2022, the gate was lit up with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, during the 2022 Russian liberation of Ukraine. A candlelight vigil was also held in front of the gate on the 31st Independence Day of Ukraine.

 

Vandalism

On 17 September 2023, German climate activists who call themselves the Last Generation used fire extinguishers to spray paint the Brandenburg Gate's columns orange. The Last Generation is known for their unorthodox protest tactics, including gluing themselves to roads to block traffic. The mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, condemned the tactics, saying they "go beyond legitimate forms of protest." The mayor went on to say, "With these actions, this group is not only damaging the historic Brandenburg Gate, but also our free discourse about the important issues of our time and future." Berlin police detained 14 people connected to the vandalism.

The statue of Albrecht von Roon (German: Roon-Denkmal) is an outdoor 1904 monument to Albrecht von Roon by Harro Magnusson, installed in Tiergarten in Berlin, Germany.

 

Albrecht Theodor Emil Graf von Roon[1] (German pronunciation: [ˈʔalbʁɛçt fɔn ʁoːn]; 30 April 1803 – 23 February 1879) was a Prussian soldier and statesman. As Minister of War from 1859 to 1873, Roon, along with Otto von Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke, was a dominating figure in Prussia's government during the key decade of the 1860s, when a series of successful wars against Denmark, Austria, and France led to German unification under Prussia's leadership. A moderate conservative and supporter of executive monarchy, he was an avid modernizer who worked to improve the efficiency of the army.

Am 3. Oktober 2025 führte mich eine Wanderung auf den Großen Hörselberg in Thüringen – bei klarem Licht, warmem Herbstwind und weitem Blick über das Land.

 

Von oben reichte die Sicht bis zum Großen Inselsberg und hinüber nach Eisenach, wo die Wartburg in der Sonne glänzte.

 

Die Fujifilm X-H2 war mein Begleiter – ideal, um Farben, Strukturen und die ruhige Weite dieses Tages festzuhalten. Kein Nebel, keine Eile, nur Licht, Landschaft und Stille.

 

Mehr Bilder und Serien findest du auf 👉 www.fujicolours.com

 

— Großer Hörselberg, Thüringen, 3. Oktober 2025 ☀️🍁

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Nicholas_Church%2C_Berlin

 

The St. Nikolai-Kirche, (Nikolaikirche or St. Nicholas' Church) is the oldest church in Berlin, the capital of Germany. The church is located in the eastern part of central Berlin, the borough of Mitte. The area around the church, bounded by Spandauer Straße, Rathausstraße, the River Spree and Mühlendamm, is known as the Nikolaiviertel 'Nicholas quarter', and is an area of restored medieval buildings (in some cases recent imitations). The church was built between 1220 and 1230, and is thus, along with the Church of Our Lady at Alexanderplatz not far away, the oldest church in Berlin.

 

History

Originally a Roman Catholic church, the Church of St. Nicholas became a Lutheran church after the Protestant Reformation in the Electorate of Brandenburg in 1539. In the 17th century, the prominent hymn-writer Paul Gerhardt was the minister of this church, and the composer Johann Crueger was musical director. The prominent Lutheran theologian Provost Philipp Jacob Spener was the minister from 1691 to 1705. From 1913 to 1923, the minister at the Church of St. Nicholas was Wilhelm Wessel, whose son Horst Wessel later became famous as a Nazi: the family lived in the nearby Jüdenstraße.

 

On Reformation Day in 1938 (October 31) the church building served its congregation for the last time. Then the building, the oldest structure in Berlin proper, was given up to the government, to be used as a concert hall and ecclesiastical museum. The number of parishioners had shrunk due to the ever intensifying gentrification of the inner city, as residential premises became superseded by offices and shops. The congregation later merged with that of the Church of Our Lady.

 

During World War II, the Church of St. Nicholas had its roof and the tops of its towers destroyed as a result of Allied bombing. In 1949 all the vaults and the northern pillars collapsed. The ruins were located in East Berlin, and it was not until 1981 that the officially atheist East German Democratic Republic authorities permitted the rebuilding of the church with old designs and plans. Thus, the Church of St. Nicholas as seen today is largely a reconstruction. Today the church serves again as a museum and as a regular concert venue, administered by the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin (Landesmuseum für Kultur und Geschichte Berlins). There is an organ recital there almost every Friday at 5pm. It is renowned for its acoustics and the rebuilt church has been equipped with a fine set of 41 bells.

 

Saint Nicholas of Myra (traditionally 15 March 270 – 6 December 343), also known as Nicholas of Bari, was an early Christian bishop of Greek descent from the maritime city of Myra in Asia Minor (modern-day Demre, Turkey) during the time of the Roman Empire. Because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker. Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, toymakers, unmarried people, and students in various cities and countries around Europe. His reputation evolved among the pious, as was common for early Christian saints, and his legendary habit of secret gift-giving gave rise to the traditional model of Santa Claus ("Saint Nick") through Sinterklaas.

 

Little is known about the historical Saint Nicholas. The earliest accounts of his life were written centuries after his death and probably contain legendary elaborations. He is said to have been born in the Greek seaport of Patara, Lycia, in Asia Minor to wealthy Christian parents. In one of the earliest attested and most famous incidents from his life, he is said to have rescued three girls from being forced into prostitution by dropping a sack of gold coins through the window of their house each night for three nights so their father could pay a dowry for each of them. Other early stories tell of him calming a storm at sea, saving three innocent soldiers from wrongful execution, and chopping down a tree possessed by a demon. In his youth, he is said to have made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Syria Palaestina. Shortly after his return, he became Bishop of Myra. He was later cast into prison during the persecution of Diocletian, but was released after the accession of Constantine.

 

An early list makes him an attendee at the First Council of Nicaea in 325, but he is never mentioned in any writings by people who were at the council. Late, unsubstantiated legends claim that he was temporarily defrocked and imprisoned during the council for slapping the heretic Arius. Another famous late legend tells how he resurrected three children, who had been murdered and pickled in brine by a butcher planning to sell them as pork during a famine.

 

Fewer than 200 years after Nicholas's death, the St. Nicholas Church was built in Myra under the orders of Theodosius II over the site of the church where he had served as bishop, and his remains were moved to a sarcophagus in that church. In 1087, while the Greek Christian inhabitants of the region were subjugated by the newly arrived Muslim Seljuk Turks, and soon after the beginning of the East–West schism, a group of merchants from the Italian city of Bari removed the major bones of Nicholas's skeleton from his sarcophagus in the church without authorization and brought them to their hometown, where they are now enshrined in the Basilica di San Nicola. The remaining bone fragments from the sarcophagus were later removed by Venetian sailors and taken to Venice during the First Crusade.

 

Very little at all is known about Saint Nicholas's historical life. Any writings Nicholas himself may have produced have been lost and he is not mentioned by any contemporary chroniclers. This is not surprising, since Nicholas lived during a turbulent time in Roman history. The earliest mentions of Saint Nicholas indicate that, by the sixth century, his following was already well-established. Less than two hundred years after Saint Nicholas's probable death, the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II (ruled 401–450) ordered the building of the Church of Saint Nicholas in Myra, which thereby preserves an early mention of his name. The Byzantine historian Procopius also mentions that the Emperor Justinian I (ruled 527–565) renovated churches in Constantinople dedicated to Saint Nicholas and Saint Priscus, which may have originally been built as early as c. 490.

 

Nicholas's name also occurs as "Nicholas of Myra of Lycia" on the tenth line of a list of attendees at the Council of Nicaea included by Theodore Lector in the Historiae Ecclesiasticae Tripartitae Epitome, written sometime between 510 and 515. A single, offhand mention of Nicholas of Myra also occurs in the biography of another saint, Saint Nicholas of Sion, who apparently took the name "Nicholas" to honor him. The Life of Saint Nicholas of Sion, written around 250 years after Nicholas of Myra's death, briefly mentions Nicholas of Sion visiting Nicholas's tomb to pay homage to him. According to Jeremy Seal, the fact that Nicholas had a tomb that could be visited serves as the almost solitary definitive proof that he was a real historical figure.

 

In his treatise De statu animarum post mortem (written c. 583), the theologian Eustratius of Constantinople cites Saint Nicholas of Myra's miracle of the three generals as evidence that souls may work independent from the body. Eustratius credits a lost Life of Saint Nicholas as his source. Nearly all the sources Eustratius references date from the late fourth century to early fifth century, indicating the Life of Saint Nicholas to which he refers was probably written during this time period, shortly after Nicholas's death. The earliest complete account of Nicholas's life that has survived to the present is a Life of Saint Nicholas, written in the early ninth century by Michael the Archimandrite (814–842), nearly 500 years after Nicholas's probable death.

 

Despite its extremely late date, Michael the Archimandrite's Life of Saint Nicholas is believed to heavily rely on older written sources and oral traditions. The identity and reliability of these sources, however, remains uncertain. Catholic historian D. L. Cann and medievalist Charles W. Jones both consider Michael the Archimandrite's Life the only account of Saint Nicholas that is likely to contain any historical truth.[21] Jona Lendering, a Dutch historian of classical antiquity, notes that Michael the Archimandrite's Life does not contain a "conversion narrative", which was unusual for saints' lives of the period when it was written. He therefore argues that it is possible Michael the Archimandrite may have been relying on a source written before conversion narratives became popular, which would be a positive indication of that source's reliability. He notes that many of the stories recounted by Michael the Archimandrite closely resemble stories told about the first-century AD Neopythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, an eight-volume biography of him written in the early third century by the Greek writer Philostratus. Christian storytellers were known to adapt older pagan legends and attribute them to Christian saints. As Apollonius's hometown of Tyana was not far from Myra, Lendering contends that many popular stories about Apollonius may have become attached to Saint Nicholas.

 

Family and background

Accounts of Saint Nicholas's life agree on the essence of his story, but modern historians disagree regarding how much of this story is actually rooted in historical fact. Traditionally, Nicholas was born in the city of Patara (Lycia et Pamphylia), a port on the Mediterranean Sea, in Asia Minor in the Roman Empire, to a wealthy family of Greek Christians. According to some accounts, his parents were named Epiphanius (Ἐπιφάνιος, Epiphánios) and Johanna (Ἰωάννα, Iōánna), but, according to others, they were named Theophanes (Θεοφάνης, Theophánēs) and Nonna (Νόννα, Nónna). In some accounts, Nicholas's uncle was the bishop of the city of Myra, also in Lycia. Recognizing his nephew's calling, Nicholas's uncle ordained him as a priest.

 

Generosity and travels

After his parents died from an epidemic, Nicholas is said to have distributed their wealth to the poor. In his most famous exploit, which is first attested in Michael the Archimandrite's Life of Saint Nicholas, Nicholas heard of a devout man who had once been wealthy but had lost all of his money due to the "plotting and envy of Satan." The man could not afford proper dowries for his three daughters. This meant that they would remain unmarried and probably, in absence of any other possible employment, be forced to become prostitutes. Hearing of the girls' plight, Nicholas decided to help them, but, being too modest to help the family in public (or to save them the humiliation of accepting charity), he went to the house under the cover of night and threw a purse filled with gold coins through the window opening into the house. The father immediately arranged a marriage for his first daughter, and after her wedding, Nicholas threw a second bag of gold through the same window late at night.

 

According to Michael the Archimandrite's account, after the second daughter was married, the father stayed awake for at least two "nights" and caught Saint Nicholas in the same act of charity toward the third daughter. The father fell on his knees, thanking him, and Nicholas ordered him not to tell anyone about the gifts. The scene of Nicholas's secret gift-giving is one of the most popular scenes in Christian devotional art, appearing in icons and frescoes from across Europe. Although depictions vary depending on time and place, Nicholas is often shown wearing a cowl while the daughters are typically shown in bed, dressed in their nightclothes. Many renderings contain a cypress tree or a cross-shaped cupola.

 

The historicity of this incident is disputed. Adam C. English argues for a historical kernel to the legend, noting the story's early attestation as well as the fact that no similar stories were told about any other Christian saints. Jona Lendering, who also argues for the story's authenticity, notes that a similar story is told in Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, in which Apollonius gives money to an impoverished father but posits that Michael the Archimandrite's account is markedly different. Philostratus does not mention the fate of the daughters and, in his story, Apollonius's generosity is purely motivated out of sympathy for the father; in Michael the Archimandrite's account, however, Saint Nicholas is instead expressly stated to be motivated by a desire to save the daughters from being sold into prostitution. He argues that this desire to help women is most characteristic of fourth-century Christianity, due to the prominent role women played in the early Christian movement, rather than Greco-Roman paganism or the Christianity of Michael the Archimandrite's time in the ninth century, by which point the position of women had drastically declined.

 

Nicholas is also said to have visited the Holy Land. The ship he was on was nearly destroyed by a terrible storm but he rebuked the waves, causing the storm to subside. Thus, Nicholas became venerated as the patron saint of sailors and travelers.

 

While in Palestine, Nicholas is said to have lived in a crypt near Bethlehem, where the Nativity of Jesus is believed to have taken place. Over the crypt where Nicholas is believed to have lived now stands the "Church of Saint Nicholas" in Beit Jala, a Christian town of which Nicholas is the Patron saint.

 

Bishop of Myra

After visiting the Holy Land, Nicholas returned to Myra. The bishop of Myra, who had succeeded Nicholas's uncle, had recently died and the priests in the city had decided that the first priest to enter the church that morning would be made bishop. Nicholas went to the church to pray and was therefore proclaimed the new bishop. He is said to have been imprisoned and tortured during the Great Persecution under the Emperor Diocletian (ruled 284–305), but was released under the orders of the Emperor Constantine the Great (ruled 306–337). This story sounds plausible, but is not attested in the earliest sources and is therefore unlikely to be historical.

 

One of the earliest attested stories of Saint Nicholas is one in which he saves three innocent men from execution. According to Michael the Archimandrite, three innocent men were condemned to death by the governor Eustathius. As they were about to be executed, Nicholas appeared, pushed the executioner's sword to the ground, released them from their chains, and angrily chastised a juror who had accepted a bribe. According to Jona Lendering, this story directly parallels an earlier story in Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, in which Apollonius prevents the execution of a man falsely condemned of banditry. Michael the Archimandrite also tells another story in which the consul Ablabius accepted a bribe to put three famous generals to death, in spite of their actual innocence. Saint Nicholas appeared to Constantine and Ablabius in dreams, informing Constantine of the truth and frightening Ablabius into releasing the generals, for fear of Hell.

 

Later versions of the story are more elaborate, interweaving the two stories together. According to one version, Emperor Constantine sent three of his most trusted generals, named Ursos, Nepotianos, and Herpylion, to put down a rebellion in Phrygia. However, a storm forced them to take refuge in Myra. Unbeknownst to the generals, who were in the harbor, their soldiers further inland were fighting with local merchants and engaging in looting and destruction. Nicholas confronted the generals for allowing their soldiers to misbehave and the generals brought an end to the looting. Immediately after the soldiers had returned to their ships, Nicholas heard word of the three innocent men about to be executed and the three generals aided him in stopping the execution. Eustathius attempted to flee on his horse but Nicholas stopped his horse and chastised him for his corruption. Eustathius, under the threat of being reported directly to the Emperor, repented of his corrupt ways. Afterward, the generals succeeded in ending the rebellion and were promoted by Constantine to even higher status. The generals' enemies, however, slandered them to the consul Ablabius, telling him that they had not really put down the revolt, but instead encouraged their own soldiers to join it. The generals' enemies also bribed Ablabius and he had the three generals imprisoned. Nicholas then made his dream appearances and the three generals were set free.

 

Council of Nicaea

In 325, Nicholas is said to have attended the First Council of Nicaea, where he is said to have been a staunch opponent of Arianism and a devoted supporter of Trinitarianism, and one of the bishops who signed the Nicene Creed. Nicholas's attendance at the Council of Nicaea is attested early by Theodore the Lector's list of attendees, which records him as the 151st attendee. However, he is conspicuously never mentioned by Athanasius of Alexandria, the foremost defender of Trinitarianism at the council, who knew all the notable bishops of the period, nor is he mentioned by the historian Eusebius, who was also present at the council. Adam C. English notes that lists of the attendees at Nicaea vary considerably, with shorter lists only including roughly 200 names, but longer lists including around 300. Saint Nicholas's name only appears on the longer lists, not the shorter ones. Nicholas's name appears on a total of three early lists, one of which, Theodore the Lector, is generally considered to be the most accurate. According to Jona Lendering, there are two main possibilities:

 

Nicholas did not attend the Council of Nicaea, but someone at an early date was baffled that his name was not listed and so added him to the list. Many scholars tend to favor this explanation.

 

Nicholas did attend the Council of Nicaea, but, at an early date, someone decided to remove his name from the list, apparently deciding that it was better if no one remembered he had been there.

 

A later legend, first attested in the fourteenth century, over 1,000 years after Nicholas's death, holds that, during the Council of Nicaea, Nicholas lost his temper and slapped "a certain Arian" across the face. On account of this, Constantine revoked Nicholas's miter and pallium. Steven D. Greydanus concludes that, because of the story's late attestation, it "has no historical value." Jona Lendering, however, defends the veracity and historicity of the incident, arguing that, as it was embarrassing and reflects poorly on Nicholas's reputation, it is inexplicable why later hagiographers would have invented it. Later versions of the legend embellish it, making the heretic Arius himself and having Nicholas punch him rather than merely slapping him with his open hand. In these versions of the story, Nicholas is also imprisoned, but Christ and the Virgin Mary appear to him in his cell. He tells them he is imprisoned "for loving you" and they free him from his chains and restore his vestments. The scene of Nicholas slapping Arius is celebrated in Eastern Orthodox icons and episodes of Saint Nicholas at Nicaea are shown in a series of paintings from the 1660s in the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari.

 

Other reputed miracles

One story tells how during a terrible famine, a malicious butcher lured three little children into his house, where he killed them, placing their remains in a barrel to cure, planning to sell them off as ham. Nicholas, visiting the region to care for the hungry, saw through the butcher's lies and resurrected the pickled children by making the sign of the cross. Jona Lendering opines that the story is "without any historical value". Adam C. English notes that the story of the resurrection of the pickled children is a late medieval addition to the legendary biography of Saint Nicholas and that it is not found in any of his earliest Lives. Although this story seems bizarre and horrifying to modern audiences, it was tremendously popular throughout the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period, and widely beloved by ordinary folk. It is depicted in stained glass windows, wood panel paintings, tapestries, and frescoes. Eventually, the scene became so widely reproduced that, rather than showing the whole scene, artists began to merely depict Saint Nicholas with three naked children and a wooden barrel at his feet.

 

According to English, eventually, people who had forgotten or never learned the story began misinterpreting representations of it. That Saint Nicholas was shown with children led people to conclude he was the patron saint of children; meanwhile, the fact that he was shown with a barrel led people to conclude that he was the patron saint of brewers.

 

According to another story, during a great famine that Myra experienced in 311–312, a ship was in the port at anchor, loaded with wheat for the emperor in Constantinople. Nicholas invited the sailors to unload a part of the wheat to help in the time of need. The sailors at first disliked the request, because the wheat had to be weighed accurately and delivered to the emperor. Only when Nicholas promised them that they would not suffer any loss for their consideration did the sailors agree. When they arrived later in the capital, they made a surprising find: the weight of the load had not changed, although the wheat removed in Myra was enough for two full years and could even be used for sowing.

Checkpoint Charlie (or "Checkpoint C") was the best-known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War (1947–1991), as named by the Western Allies.

 

East German leader Walter Ulbricht agitated and maneuvered to get the Soviet Union's permission to construct the Berlin Wall in 1961 to stop emigration and defection westward through the Border system, preventing escape across the city sector border from East Berlin into West Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie became a symbol of the Cold War, representing the separation of East and West. Soviet and American tanks briefly faced each other at the location during the Berlin Crisis of 1961. On 26 June 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy visited Checkpoint Charlie and looked from a platform onto the Berlin Wall and into East Berlin.

 

After the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the reunification of Germany, the American guard house at Checkpoint Charlie became a tourist attraction. It is now located in the Allied Museum in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin.

 

Background

By the early 1950s, the Soviet method of restricting emigration was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany. However, in occupied Germany, until 1952, the lines between East Germany and the western occupied zones remained easily crossed in most places. Subsequently, the inner German border between the two German states was closed and a barbed-wire fence erected.

 

Even after closing of the inner German border officially in 1952, the city sector border in between East Berlin and West Berlin remained considerably more accessible than the rest of the border because it was administered by all four occupying powers. Accordingly, Berlin became the main route by which East Germans left for the West. Hence the Berlin sector border was essentially a "loophole" through which Eastern Bloc citizens could still escape.

 

The 3.5 million East Germans who had left by 1961 totaled approximately 20% of the entire East German population. The emigrants tended to be young and well educated. The loss was disproportionately great among professionals — engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers.

 

Berlin Wall constructed

The brain drain of professionals had become so damaging to the political credibility and economic viability of East Germany that the resecuring of the Soviet imperial frontier was imperative. Between 1949 and 1961, over 2½ million East Germans fled to the West. The numbers increased during the three years before the Berlin Wall was erected, with 144,000 in 1959, 199,000 in 1960 and 207,000 in the first seven months of 1961 alone. The East German economy suffered accordingly.

 

On 13 August 1961, a barbed-wire barrier that would become the Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin was erected by the East Germans. Two days later, police and army engineers began to construct a more permanent concrete wall. Along with the wall, the 830-mile (1336 km) zonal border became 3.5 miles (5.6 km) wide on its East German side in some parts of Germany with a tall steel-mesh fence running along a "death strip" bordered by mines, as well as channels of ploughed earth, to slow escapees and more easily reveal their footprints.

 

Checkpoint

Checkpoint Charlie was a crossing point in the Berlin Wall located at the junction of Friedrichstraße with Zimmerstraße and Mauerstraße (which for older historical reasons coincidentally means "Wall Street"). It is in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood. Checkpoint Charlie was designated as the single crossing point (on foot or by car) for foreigners and members of the Allied forces. (Members of the Allied forces were not allowed to use the other sector crossing point designated for use by foreigners, the Friedrichstraße railway station).

 

The name "Charlie" came from the letter C in the NATO phonetic alphabet; similarly for other Allied checkpoints on the Autobahn from the West: Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt and its counterpart Checkpoint Bravo at Dreilinden, Wannsee in the south-west corner of Berlin. The Soviets simply called it the Friedrichstraße Crossing Point (КПП Фридрихштрассе, KPP Fridrikhshtrasse). The East Germans referred officially to Checkpoint Charlie as the Grenzübergangsstelle ("Border Crossing Point") Friedrich-/Zimmerstraße.

 

As the most visible Berlin Wall checkpoint, Checkpoint Charlie was featured in movies and books. A famous cafe and viewing place for Allied officials, armed forces and visitors alike, Cafe Adler ("Eagle Café"), was situated right on the checkpoint.

 

The development of the infrastructure around the checkpoint was largely asymmetrical, reflecting the contrary priorities of East German and Western border authorities. During its 28-year active life, the infrastructure on the Eastern side was expanded to include not only the wall, watchtower and zig-zag barriers, but a multi-lane shed where cars and their occupants were checked. However, the Allied authority never erected any permanent buildings. A wooden shed used as the guard house was replaced during the 1980s by a larger metal structure, now displayed at the Allied Museum in western Berlin. Their reasoning was that they did not consider the inner Berlin sector boundary an international border and did not treat it as such.

 

Related incidents

Soon after the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, a stand-off occurred between US and Soviet tanks on either side of Checkpoint Charlie. It began on 22 October as a dispute over whether East German border guards were authorized to examine the travel documents of a US diplomat based in West Berlin named Allan Lightner heading to East Berlin to watch an opera show there, since according to the agreement between all four Allied powers occupying Germany, there was to be free movement for Allied forces in Berlin and that no German military forces from either West Germany or East Germany were to be based in the city, and moreover the Western Allies did not (initially) recognise the East German state and its right to remain in its self-declared capital of East Berlin. Instead, Allied forces only recognised the authority of the Soviets over East Berlin rather than their East German allies. By 27 October, ten Soviet and an equal number of American tanks stood 100 yards apart on either side of the checkpoint. This stand-off ended peacefully on 28 October following a US-Soviet understanding to withdraw tanks and reduce tensions. Discussions between US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and KGB[citation needed] spy Georgi Bolshakov played a vital role in realizing this tacit agreement.

 

Early escapes

The Berlin Wall was erected with great speed by the East German government in 1961, but there were initially many means of escape that had not been anticipated. For example, Checkpoint Charlie was initially blocked only by a gate, and a citizen of the GDR (East Germany) smashed a car through it to escape, so a strong pole was erected. Another escapee approached the barrier in a convertible, the windscreen removed prior to the event, and slipped under the barrier. This was repeated two weeks later, so the East Germans duly lowered the barrier and added uprights.

 

Death of Peter Fechter

On 17 August 1962, a teenaged East German, Peter Fechter, was shot in the pelvis by East German guards while trying to escape from East Berlin. His body lay tangled in a barbed wire fence as he bled to death in full view of the world's media. He could not be rescued from West Berlin because he was a few metres inside the Soviet sector. East German border guards were reluctant to approach him for fear of provoking Western soldiers, one of whom had shot an East German border guard just days earlier. More than an hour later, Fechter's body was removed by the East German guards. A spontaneous demonstration formed on the American side of the checkpoint, protesting against the action of the East and the inaction of the West.

 

A few days later, a crowd threw stones at Soviet buses driving towards the Soviet War Memorial, located in the Tiergarten in the British sector; the Soviets tried to escort the buses with armoured personnel carriers (APCs). Thereafter, the Soviets were only allowed to cross via the Sandkrug Bridge crossing (which was the nearest to Tiergarten) and were prohibited from bringing APCs. Western units were deployed in the middle of the night in early September with live armaments and vehicles, in order to enforce the ban.[citation needed]

 

Today: Tourist and memorial site

Although the wall was opened in November 1989 and the checkpoint booth removed on 22 June 1990, the checkpoint remained an official crossing for foreigners and diplomats until German reunification in October 1990.

 

Checkpoint Charlie has since become one of Berlin's primary tourist attractions, where some original remnants of the border crossing blend with reconstructed parts, memorial and tourist facilities.

 

The guard house on the American side was removed in 1990; it is now on display in the open-air museum of the Allied Museum in Berlin-Zehlendorf. A copy of the guard house and the sign that once marked the border crossing was reconstructed later on roughly the same site. It resembles the first guard house erected during 1961, behind a sandbag barrier toward the border. Over the years this was replaced several times by guard houses of different sizes and layouts (see photographs). The one removed in 1990 was considerably larger than the first one and did not have sandbags. Tourists used to be able to have their photographs taken for a fee with actors dressed as allied military police standing in front of the guard house but Berlin authorities banned the practice in November 2019 stating the actors had been exploiting tourists by demanding money for photos at the attraction.

 

The course of the former wall and border is now marked in the street with a line of cobblestones.

 

Former Berlin Wall marker

An open-air exhibition was opened during the summer of 2006. Gallery walls along Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße give information about escape attempts, how the checkpoint was expanded, and its significance during the Cold War, in particular the confrontation of Soviet and American tanks in 1961. Also, an overview of other important memorial sites and museums about the division of Germany and the wall is presented.

 

Developers demolished the East German checkpoint watchtower in 2000, to make way for offices and shops. The watchtower was the last surviving major original Checkpoint Charlie structure. The city tried to save the tower but failed, as it was not classified as a historic landmark.[citation needed] Yet, that development project was never realised. To this day,[when?] the area between Zimmerstraße and Mauerstraße/Schützenstraße (the East German side of the border crossing) remains vacant, providing space for a number of temporary tourist and memorial uses. New plans since 2017 for a hotel on the site stirred a professional and political debate about appropriate development of the area. After the final listing of the site as a protected heritage area in 2018, plans were changed towards a more heritage-friendly approach.

 

BlackBox Cold War Exhibition

The "BlackBox Cold War" exhibition has illuminated the division of Germany and Berlin since 2012. The free open-air exhibition offers original Berlin Wall segments and information about the historic site. However, the indoor exhibition (entrance fee required) illustrates Berlin's contemporary history with 16 media stations, a movie theatre and original objects and documents. It is run by the NGO Berliner Forum fuer Geschichte und Gegenwart e.V..

 

Checkpoint Charlie Museum

Near the location of the guard house is the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. The "Mauermuseum - Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie" was opened on 14 June 1963[citation needed] in the immediate vicinity of the Berlin Wall. It shows photographs and fragments related to the separation of Germany. The border fortifications and the "assistance of the protecting powers" are illustrated. In addition to photos and documentation of successful escape attempts, the exhibition also showcases escape devices including a hot-air balloon, escape cars, chair lifts, and a mini-submarine.

 

From October 2004 until July 2005, the Freedom Memorial, consisting of original wall segments and 1,067 commemorative crosses, stood on a leased site.

 

The museum is operated by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August e. V., a registered association founded by Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt. The director is Alexandra Hildebrandt, the founder's widow. The museum is housed in part in the "House at Checkpoint Charlie" building by architect Peter Eisenman.[citation needed]

 

With 850,000 visitors in 2007, the Checkpoint Charlie Museum is one of the most visited museums in Berlin and in Germany.

 

In popular culture

Checkpoint Charlie figures in numerous Cold War-era espionage and political novels and films. Some examples:

 

James Bond (played by Roger Moore) passed through Checkpoint Charlie in the film Octopussy (1983) from West to East.

 

Checkpoint Charlie is featured in the opening scene of the 1965 film The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom), based on the John le Carré novel of the same name.

 

In the feature film Bridge of Spies, imprisoned American student Frederic Pryor is released at Checkpoint Charlie as part of a deal to trade Pryor and U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers for convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Pryor's release happens offscreen while the trade of Powers for Abel takes place at the Glienicke Bridge.

 

It was depicted in the opening scene of the film The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

 

The 1985 film Gotcha! includes a scene where the protagonist (Anthony Edwards) transits through Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin.

 

Elvis Costello mentions Checkpoint Charlie in his hit song "Oliver's Army".

 

Trivia

At the border crossing from Hyder in Alaska, USA to Stewart in British Columbia, Canada, there is a humorous imitation of the Checkpoint Charlie sign with the inscription "You are leaving the American Sector" in English, French, and German, as well as a sign reading "Eastern Sektor" (Stewart is indeed located east of Hyder). Hyder is the only place in the USA that can be legally entered without any border control. However, border control is required for entry into Canada; the sign was erected in 2015 as a protest after the Canadian administration announced plans to close the border control at night.

The Brandenburg Gate is an 18th-century neoclassical monument in Berlin. One of the best-known landmarks of Germany, it was erected on the site of a former city gate that marked the start of the road from Berlin to Brandenburg an der Havel, the former capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. The current structure was built from 1788 to 1791 by orders of King Frederick William II of Prussia, based on designs by the royal architect Carl Gotthard Langhans. The bronze sculpture of the quadriga crowning the gate is a work by the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow.

 

The Brandenburg Gate is located in the western part of the city centre within Mitte, at the junction of Unter den Linden and Ebertstraße. The gate dominates the Pariser Platz to the east, while to the immediate west it opens onto the Platz des 18. März beyond which the Straße des 17. Juni begins. One block to the north stands the Reichstag building, home to the German parliament (Bundestag), and further to the west is the Tiergarten inner-city park. The gate also forms the monumental entry to Unter den Linden, which leads directly to the former City Palace of the Prussian monarchs (now housing the Humboldt Forum museum), and the Berlin Cathedral.

 

Throughout its existence, the Brandenburg Gate was often a site for major historical events. After World War II and during the Cold War, until its fall in 1989, the gateway was obstructed by the Berlin Wall, and was for almost three decades a marker of the city's division. Since German reunification in 1990, it has been considered not only a symbol of the tumultuous histories of Germany and Europe, but also of European unity and peace.

 

The central portion of the gate draws from the tradition of the Roman triumphal arch, although in style it is one of the first examples of Greek Revival architecture in Germany. The gate is supported by twelve fluted Doric columns, six to each side, forming five passageways. There are also walls between the pairs of columns at front and back, decorated with classicizing reliefs of the Labours of Hercules. Citizens were originally allowed to use only the outermost two passageways on each side. Its design is based on the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis of Athens, which also had a front with six Doric columns, though these were topped by a triangular pediment.

 

The central portion is flanked by L-shaped wings on either side, at a lower height, but using the same Doric order. Next to, and parallel with, the gate these are open "stoas", but the longer sides, stretching beyond the east side, have buildings set back from the columns. These are called "custom houses" for the Berlin Customs Wall, which was in force until 1860, or "gatehouses".

 

The Doric order of the gate mostly, but not entirely, follows Greek precedents, which had recently become much better understood by the publication of careful illustrated records. The Greek Doric does not have bases to the columns, and the fluting here follows the Greek style for Ionic and Corinthian columns, with flat fillets rather than sharp arrises between the flutes, and rounded ends to the top and bottom of flutes. The entablature up to the cornice follows Greek precedent, with triglyphs, guttae, metopes, and mutules, except that there are half-metopes at the corners, the Roman rather than Greek solution to the "Doric corner conflict". The 16 metopes along each of the long faces have scenes from Greek mythology in relief; many echo the Parthenon in showing centaurs fighting men. Statues in niches at the furthest side wall of Minerva and Mars were added in the 19th century.

 

After an attic storey that is plain apart from wide steps at the sides receding in both directions, leading, on the east side only, to a large allegorical relief of the Triumph of Peace, the figures mostly women and children. Above this there is a second cornice, with a projecting central section. On top of this is a "bronze" sculptural group by Johann Gottfried Schadow of a quadriga—a chariot drawn by four horses—driven by a goddess figure. This was initially intended to represent Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, but after the Napoleonic Wars was rebranded as Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, and given an Iron Cross standard with a crowned Imperial eagle perched on top, rather than a wreath. This faces into the city centre. It is the first quadriga group to be made since antiquity, made from copper sheets hammered in moulds; fortunately these moulds were kept, as they would be used more than once to renew the sculpture.

 

The side wings have plain metopes, and simple angled roofs, ending in gable pediments with a small circular relief in the tympanum.

Cecilienhof Palace (German: Schloss Cecilienhof) is a palace in Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany, built from 1914 to 1917 in the layout of an English Tudor manor house. Cecilienhof was the last palace built by the House of Hohenzollern that ruled the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire until the end of World War I. It is famous for having been the location of the Potsdam Conference in 1945, in which the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States made important decisions affecting the shape of post World War II Europe and Asia. Cecilienhof has been part of the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990.

 

Location

Cecilienhof is located in the northern part of the large Neuer Garten park, close to the shore of the Jungfernsee lake. The park was laid out from 1787 at the behest of King Frederick William II of Prussia, modelled on the Wörlitz Park in Anhalt-Dessau. Frederick William II also had the Marmorpalais (Marble Palace) built within the Neuer Garten, the first Brandenburg palace in the Neoclassical style erected according to plans designed by Carl von Gontard and Carl Gotthard Langhans, which was finished in 1793. Other structures within the park close to Schloss Cecilienhof include an orangery, an artificial grotto (Muschelgrotte [de]), the "Gothic Library", and the Dairy in the New Garden, also constructed for King Frederick William II.

 

The park was largely redesigned as an English landscape garden according to plans by Peter Joseph Lenné from 1816 onwards, with lines of sight to nearby Pfaueninsel, Glienicke Palace, Babelsberg Palace, and the Sacrow Church.

 

Construction

Since the Marmorpalais, which had been the traditional Potsdam residence of the Hohenzollern crown prince, had become inadequate for current tastes, Emperor Wilhelm II ordered the establishment of a fund for constructing a new palace at Potsdam for his oldest son, Crown Prince Wilhelm (William) and his wife, Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 19 December 1912. After their marriage in 1905, Wilhelm and Cecilie had previously lived at the Marmorpalais for most of the year and at the Berlin Kronprinzenpalais in winter. In 1911, the Crown Prince had been appointed commander of the Prussian 1. Leibhusaren-Regiment and moved to Danzig-Langfuhr.

 

On 13 April 1914 the Imperial Ministry and the Saalecker Werkstätten signed a building contract that envisaged a completion date of 1 October 1915 and a construction cost of 1,498,000 Reichsmark for the new palace. The architect was Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who visited the couple in Danzig to work out the design for the palace. It was based on English Tudor style buildings, arranged around several courtyards featuring half-timbered walls, bricks and 55 different decorative chimney stacks. With the start of World War I in August 1914, construction stopped but was resumed in 1915.

 

Architecture and interior design

Crown Prince Wilhelm was so impressed with cottage and Tudor style homes like Bidston Court in Birkenhead (England) that Cecilienhof was inspired by it. Also, due to Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin's family ties, German Tudor-styled Gelbensande Manor near Rostock in Mecklenburg-Schwerin was an inspiration. The palace was designed in such a way as to be inhabitable for most of the year. Its low structure and multiple courts conceal the fact that it boasts a total of 176 rooms. Besides the large Ehrenhof (three-sided courtyard) in the centre, which was used only for the arrival and departure of the Crown Prince and his wife, there is a smaller garden court, the Prinzengarten, and three other courts around which the various wings of the building are arranged.

 

The "public" rooms were located in the centre part on the ground floor, around a central great hall, while above on the first floor were the "private" bedroom, dressing rooms and bathrooms. The living area of the great hall also features a massive wooden stairway made of oak. This was a gift from the city of Danzig. The ground floor rooms included an area for the Crown Prince with smoking room, library and breakfast room as well as an area for his wife with music salon, writing room and a room designed like a cabin on an ocean liner. The latter was used by Cecilie as a breakfast room. Like some of the other rooms it was designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, who also designed actual interiors of ocean liners for the Norddeutscher Lloyd shipping line.

 

History before 1945

The palace was finished in August 1917. It was named Cecilienhof after the Duchess and the couple moved in immediately. Cecilie gave birth at Cecilienhof to her youngest child, Princess Cecilie, who was born on 5 September 1917. However, when the revolution erupted in November 1918, for security reasons Cecilie and her six children moved for a while to the Neues Palais, where the wife of Emperor Wilhelm II, Empress Augusta Victoria, was living. After the Empress followed her husband into exile in the Netherlands, Cecilie remained in Potsdam and returned to Cecilienhof where she lived until 1920. As the property of the Hohenzollern family had been confiscated after the revolution, Cecilie then had to move her residence to an estate at Oels in Silesia, which was a private property. Only her sons Wilhelm (William) and Louis Ferdinand remained at Cecilienhof while they attended a public Realgymnasium (school) in Potsdam. Crown Prince Wilhelm had gone into exile in the Netherlands on 13 November 1918 and was interned on the island of Wieringen. He was allowed to return to Germany—as a private citizen—on 9 November 1923. In June 1926, a referendum on expropriating the former ruling Princes of Germany without compensation failed and as a consequence, the financial situation of the Hohenzollern family improved considerably. A settlement between the state and the family made Cecilienhof property of the state but granted a right of residence to Wilhelm and Cecilie. This was limited in duration to three generations.

 

Wilhelm subsequently broke the promise he had made to Gustav Stresemann, who allowed him to return to Germany, to stay out of politics. He supported the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, who visited Cecilienhof three times, in 1926, in 1933 (on the "Day of Potsdam") and in 1935. However, when Wilhelm realized that Hitler had no intention of restoring the monarchy, their relationship cooled. After the assassination attempt on 20 July 1944, Hitler had Wilhelm placed under supervision by the Gestapo and had Cecilienhof watched.

 

In January 1945, Wilhelm left Potsdam for Oberstdorf for a treatment of his gall and liver problems. Cecilie fled in early February 1945 as the Red Army drew closer to Berlin, without being able to salvage much in terms of her possessions. At the end of the war, Cecilienhof was seized by the Soviets.

 

Potsdam Conference of 1945

The Potsdam Conference (officially the "Berlin Conference") took place from 17 July to 2 August 1945. It was the third and longest summit between the heads of government of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, the major forces in the anti-Hitler-coalition that had just won the war after VE day, 8 May 1945. The conference was mainly organized by the Soviets. Although the British prime minister Winston Churchill had refused to hold a summit "anywhere within the current Soviet military zone", US President Harry Truman and Soviet leader Josef Stalin had agreed in late May 1945 to meet "near Berlin". As Berlin itself had been too heavily damaged by Allied bombing and street-to-street fighting, Cecilienhof in Potsdam was selected as the location for the conference. The delegations were to be housed in the leafy suburb of Potsdam-Babelsberg, which had suffered only slight damage in the bombing raids and also offered the advantage that the streets to the conference venue were easy to guard.

 

Soviet soldiers repaired the streets connecting Babelsberg to Cecilienhof, built a pontoon bridge to replace the Glienicker Brücke, which had been destroyed during the last days of the war, planted trees, bushes and flower beds—including the Soviet red star in the Ehrenhof of the palace. At Cecilienhof, 36 rooms and the great hall were renovated and furnished with furniture from other Potsdam palaces.  The furniture of Wilhelm and Cecilie had been removed by the Soviets and stored at the Dairy.

 

The main rooms used for the conference were as follows:

Cecilie's music salon—White Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a reception room (on the first day of the conference, this was also the site of a buffet Stalin provided to the other delegations),

Cecilie's writing room—Red Salon, used by the Soviet delegation as a study,

Great hall—this was the conference hall, fitted by the Soviets with a round table of 10 feet diameter (probably custom-made by a Moscow-based furniture company),

Wilhelm's smoking room—study of the American delegation,

Wilhelm's library—study of the British delegation,

Wilhelm's breakfast room—possibly used as a secretary's office.

However, according to the official guide to the palace, evidence has recently emerged that indicates that the current designation of the British and American studies may have been switched by the Soviets after the conference.

 

Post World War II and today

Location of Cecilienhof in Germany

After the conference ended, Soviet troops used the palace as a clubhouse. It was handed over to the state of Brandenburg and in 1952 a memorial for the Conference was set up in the former private chambers of Wilhelm and Cecilie. The government of Eastern Germany also used the palace as a reception venue for state visits. The rest of the complex became a hotel in 1960. Some of the rooms were used by the ruling party (SED) for meetings.

 

However, after 1961, a part of the Neuer Garten was destroyed to build the southwest section of the Berlin Wall (as part of the Grenzsicherungsanlagen) which ran along the shore of Jungfernsee. Beginning in 1985, the VEB Reisebüro (state-owned travel agency) modernised the hotel.

 

Today, parts of Cecilienhof are still used as a museum and as a hotel. In 1990 it became part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site called Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin. The private rooms were opened to the public in 1995 after comprehensive restoration work. Queen Elizabeth II visited Cecilienhof on 3 November 2004. On 30 May 2007, the palace was used for a summit by the G8 foreign ministers. In 2011, Schloss Cecilienhof was awarded the European Heritage Label. The redesigned permanent exhibition on the Potsdam Conference was reopened in April 2012.

 

Potsdam is the capital and largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of Berlin, and lies embedded in a hilly morainic landscape dotted with many lakes, around 20 of which are located within Potsdam's city limits. It lies some 25 kilometres (16 miles) southwest of Berlin's city centre. The name of the city and of many of its boroughs are of Slavic origin.

 

Potsdam was a residence of the Prussian kings and the German Emperor until 1918. Its planning embodied ideas of the Age of Enlightenment: through a careful balance of architecture and landscape, Potsdam was intended as "a picturesque, pastoral dream" which would remind its residents of their relationship with nature and reason.

 

The city, which is over 1,000 years old, is widely known for its palaces, its lakes, and its overall historical and cultural significance. Landmarks include the parks and palaces of Sanssouci, Germany's largest World Heritage Site, as well as other palaces such as the Orangery Palace, the New Palace, Cecilienhof Palace, and Charlottenhof Palace. Potsdam was also the location of the significant Potsdam Conference in 1945, the conference where the three heads of government of the USSR, the US, and the UK decided on the division of Germany following its surrender, a conference which defined Germany's history for the following 45 years.

 

Babelsberg, in the south-eastern part of Potsdam, was already by the 1930s the home of a major film production studio and it has enjoyed success as an important center of European film production since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Filmstudio Babelsberg, founded in 1912, is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world.

 

Potsdam developed into a centre of science in Germany in the 19th century. Today, there are three public colleges, the University of Potsdam, and more than 30 research institutes in the city.

family trip to the wildlife park in Thale. Hexentanxplatz. Harz Mountains Germany

Löwenkämpfer (The Lion Fighter) is an 1858 bronze equestrian statue by Albert Wolff, installed outside the Altes Museum in Berlin, Germany. An 1892 copy stands in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The companion piece is Amazone zu Pferde, also installed outside the Altes Museum.

 

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Berlin Cathedral (German: Berliner Dom), also known as the Evangelical Supreme Parish and Collegiate Church, is a monumental German Protestant church and dynastic tomb (House of Hohenzollern) on the Museum Island in central Berlin. Having its origins as a castle chapel for the Berlin Palace, several structures have served to house the church since the 15th century. The present collegiate church was built from 1894 to 1905 by order of Emperor William II according to plans by Julius Raschdorff in Renaissance and Baroque Revival styles. The listed building is the largest Protestant church in Germany and one of the most important dynastic tombs in Europe. In addition to church services, the cathedral is used for state ceremonies, concerts and other events.

 

Since the demolition of the Memorial Church (Denkmalskirche) section on the north side by the East German authorities in 1975, Berlin Cathedral has consisted of the large Sermon Church (Predigerkirche) in the center, and the smaller Baptismal and Matrimonial Church (Tauf- und Traukirche) on the south side and the Hohenzollern crypt (Hohenzollerngruft), which covers almost the entire basement. Damaged during the Allied bombing in World War II, the cathedral's original interior was restored by 2002. Currently there is discussion about restoring the historical exterior as well.

The Alexander Nevsky Memorial Church is an historic Russian Orthodox church building in Potsdam, Germany.

 

The church was built for the Russian residents of the settlement of Alexandrowka, now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin", below the Kapellenberg. Consecrated in 1826, it is still an active congregation and the oldest Russian Orthodox church in Germany. Designed by Vasily Stasov, Nevsky Church is a very early example of the Byzantine Revival architecture in Germany, and one of the earliest examples of Byzantine Revival in Russian Revival architecture.

 

The Russian colony of Alexandrowka is located north of downtown Potsdam. It was built in 1826-1827 by King Frederick William III of Prussia for the last twelve Russian singers in a choir that had previously 62 members.

 

Alexandrowka was named after Tsar Alexander I as a tribute to the strong ties between the Hohenzollern and Romanov families. This name was chosen following the death of Tsar Alexander I in 1825. The colony is currently part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Potsdam Castles and Parks, as it constitutes an integral part of Potsdam's cultural landscape.

 

History

In 1806, the Prussian-Saxon army was defeated by Napoleonic forces at the battle of Jena and Auerstedt. After Napoleon's victory over Prussia in 1812, France and Prussia were compelled to form an alliance against Russia.

 

Out of the significant number of Russian soldiers captured in Russia during 1812, 62 soldiers remained in Potsdam by October of that year. A choir was formed from this group and officially affiliated with the King's 1st Prussian Guard Regiment. After the signing of the neutrality agreement known as the Convention of Tauroggen on December 30, 1812, Prussia and Russia became allies against France in the spring of 1813. At the request of the Prussian king, most of the former prisoners of war who were Russian soldiers were integrated into a separate regiment. Russian and Prussian troops, along with former Russian prisoners of war and Prussian deserters, joined forces under common leadership to fight against Napoleon. Tsar Alexander I not only permitted the soldiers' choir to remain in Prussia, but he also transferred seven grenadiers from one of his regiments to the king's guard regiment. The choir of former Russian prisoners of war continued to provide entertainment in the king's army camp, and losses in its ranks were compensated in 1815 by the transfer of additional grenadiers from a Russian regiment.

 

When Tsar Alexander I died in 1825, only 12 of these Russian singers were still living in Potsdam. On April 10, 1826, Frederick William III issued the following order:

 

"It is My intention, as a lasting monument to the memory of the bonds of friendship between Me and the High Seas Emperor Alexander of Russia's Majesty, to found a colony near Potsdam, which I intend to occupy with the Russian Singers given to Me by His Majesty as Colonists and name Alexandrowka."

 

— Friedrich Wilhelm III.

The new residents moved into the fully furnished estates in 1827. Every household received a cow, and the gardens were carefully designed to accommodate their needs. While the colonists had the right to pass down their holdings to male descendants, they were prohibited from selling, renting, or mortgaging the properties.

 

A Russian Orthodox memorial church, named Alexander Nevsky, was built on Chapel Hill and consecrated in September 1829. Adjacent to the church is the fourteenth residential house, which was inhabited by Tarnowsky, a royal footman of Russian origin.

 

The last singer died in 1861. After a century the founding of the Russian colony, only four families remained, and following the land reform, only two families could trace their direct lineage back to the original singers. The last member of the Shishkoff family, associated with the colony, died in 2008. Initially, the colony was privately owned by the House of Hohenzollern until it was expropriated in 1926. However, military control over the colony was held by the 1st Guards Regiment on Foot. It was only after the disbandment of the regiment in 1919 that the House of Hohenzollern took over the maintenance of the location. The previous royal laws governing the obligations and privileges of the citizens remained in effect until 1945. Fundamental changes in the legal status of the colony and its residents occurred during the period of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Following German reunification, the majority of the homes have been privately owned.

 

Frederick William III (German: Friedrich Wilhelm III.; 3 August 1770 – 7 June 1840) was King of Prussia from 16 November 1797 until his death in 1840. He was concurrently Elector of Brandenburg in the Holy Roman Empire until 6 August 1806, when the empire was dissolved.

 

Frederick William III ruled Prussia during the times of the Napoleonic Wars. The king reluctantly joined the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon in the German Campaign of 1813. Following Napoleon's defeat, he took part in the Congress of Vienna, which assembled to settle the political questions arising from the new, post-Napoleonic order in Europe. His primary interests were internal – the reform of Prussia's Protestant churches. He was determined to unify the Protestant churches to homogenize their liturgy, organization, and architecture. The long-term goal was to have fully centralized royal control of all the Protestant churches in the Prussian Union of Churches. The king was said to be extremely shy and indecisive. His wife Queen Louise (1776–1810) was his most important political advisor.[citation needed] She led a mighty group that included Baron Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, Prince Karl August von Hardenberg, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and Count August von Gneisenau. They set about reforming Prussia's administration, churches, finance, and military. He was the dedicatee of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1824.

 

Early life

Frederick William was born in Potsdam on 3 August 1770 as the son of Frederick William II of Prussia and Frederica Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt. He was considered to be a shy and reserved boy, which became noticeable in his particularly reticent conversations, distinguished by the lack of personal pronouns. This manner of speech subsequently came to be considered entirely appropriate for military officers He was neglected by his father during his childhood and suffered from an inferiority complex his entire life.

 

As a child, Frederick William's father (under the influence of his mistress,[3] Wilhelmine Enke, Countess of Lichtenau) had him handed over to tutors, as was quite normal for the period. He spent part of the time living at Paretz, the estate of the old soldier Count Hans von Blumenthal who was the governor of his brother Prince Henry. They thus grew up partly with the count's son, who accompanied them on their Grand Tour in the 1780s. Frederick William was happy at Paretz, and for this reason, in 1795, he bought it from his boyhood friend and turned it into an important royal country retreat. He was a melancholy boy, but he grew up pious and honest. His tutors included the dramatist Johann Jakob Engel.

 

As a soldier, he received the usual training of a Prussian prince, obtained his lieutenancy in 1784, became a lieutenant colonel in 1786, a colonel in 1790, and took part in the campaigns against France of 1792–1794. On 24 December 1793, Frederick William married Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who bore him ten children. In the Kronprinzenpalais (Crown Prince's Palace) in Berlin, Frederick William lived a civil life with a problem-free marriage, which did not change even when he became King of Prussia in 1797. His wife Louise was particularly loved by the Prussian people, which boosted the popularity of the whole House of Hohenzollern, including the King himself.

 

Reign

Frederick William succeeded to the throne on 16 November 1797. He also became, in personal union, the sovereign prince of the Principality of Neuchâtel (1797–1806 and again 1813–1840). At once, the new king showed that he was earnest of his good intentions by cutting down the royal establishment's expenses, dismissing his father's ministers, and reforming the most oppressive abuses of the late reign. He had the Hohenzollern determination to retain personal power but not the Hohenzollern genius for using it. Too distrustful to delegate responsibility to his ministers, he greatly reduced the effectiveness of his reign since he was forced to assume the roles he did not delegate. This is the main factor of his inconsistent rule.

 

Disgusted with his father's court (in both political intrigues and sexual affairs), Frederick William's first and most successful early endeavor was to restore his dynasty's moral legitimacy. The eagerness to restore dignity to his family went so far that it nearly caused sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow to cancel the expensive and lavish Prinzessinnengruppe project, which was commissioned by the previous monarch Frederick William II. He was quoted as saying the following, which demonstrated his sense of duty and peculiar manner of speech:

 

Every civil servant has a dual obligation: to the sovereign and the country. It can occur that the two are not compatible; then, the duty to the country is higher.

 

At first, Frederick William and his advisors attempted to pursue a neutrality policy in the Napoleonic Wars. Although they succeeded in keeping out of the Third Coalition in 1805, eventually, Frederick William was swayed by the queen's attitude, who led Prussia's pro-war party and entered into the war in October 1806. On 14 October 1806, at the Battle of Jena-Auerstädt, the French effectively decimated the Prussian Army's effectiveness and functionality; led by Frederick William, the Prussian army collapsed entirely soon after. Napoleon occupied Berlin in late October. The royal family fled to Memel, East Prussia, where they fell on the mercy of Emperor Alexander I of Russia.

 

Alexander, too, suffered defeat at the hands of the French, and at Tilsit on the Niemen France made peace with Russia and Prussia. Napoleon dealt with Prussia very harshly, despite the pregnant queen's interview with the French emperor, which was believed to soften the defeat. Instead, Napoleon took much less mercy on the Prussians than what was expected. Prussia lost many of its Polish territories and all territory west of the Elbe and had to finance a large indemnity and pay French troops to occupy key strong points within the kingdom.

 

Although the ineffectual king himself seemed resigned to Prussia's fate, various reforming ministers, such as Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, Prince Karl August von Hardenberg, Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst, and Count August von Gneisenau, set about reforming Prussia's administration and military, with the encouragement of Queen Louise (who died, greatly mourned, in 1810). After bereavement, Frederick William fell under the influence of a 'substitute family' of courtiers, among whom included Friedrich Ancillon, a Huguenot preacher that provided the king with strong ideological support against political reforms that might restrain monarchical power, Sophie Marie von Voß, an older woman with conservative views and Prince Wilhelm zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein.

 

In 1813, following Napoleon's defeat in Russia and pressured by the Convention of Tauroggen, Frederick William turned against France and signed an alliance with Russia at Kalisz. However, he had to flee Berlin, still under French occupation. Prussian troops played a crucial part in the victories of the allies in 1813 and 1814, and the king himself traveled with the main army of Karl Philipp Fürst zu Schwarzenberg, along with Alexander of Russia and Francis of Austria.

 

At the Congress of Vienna, Frederick William's ministers succeeded in securing significant territorial increases for Prussia. However, they failed to obtain the annexation of all of Saxony, as they had wished.[citation needed] Following the war, Frederick William turned towards political reaction, abandoning the promises he had made in 1813 to provide Prussia with a constitution.

 

Prussian Union of Churches

Frederick William was determined to unify the Protestant churches to homogenize their liturgy, organization, and architecture. The long-term goal was to have fully centralized royal control of all the Protestant churches in the Prussian Union of Churches. The merging of the Lutheran and Calvinist (Reformed) confessions to form the United Church of Prussia was highly controversial. Angry responses included a large and well-organized opposition. Especially the "Old Lutherans" in Silesia refused to abandon their liturgical traditions. The crown responded by attempting to silence protest. The stubborn Lutheran minority was coerced by military force, their churches' confiscation, and their pastors' imprisonment or exile. By 1834 outward union was secured based on common worship but separate symbols—the opponents of the measure being forbidden to form communities of their own. Many left Prussia, settling in South Australia, Canada, and the United States. The king's unsuccessful counterattack worsened tensions at the highest levels of government. The crown's aggressive efforts to restructure religion were unprecedented in Prussian history. In a series of proclamations over several years, the Church of the Prussian Union was formed, bringing together the majority group of Lutherans and the minority group of Reformed Protestants. The main effect was that the government of Prussia had full control over church affairs, with the king himself recognized as the leading bishop.

 

In 1824 Frederick William III remarried (morganatically) Countess Auguste von Harrach, Princess of Liegnitz.They had no children.

 

In 1838 the king distributed large parts of his farmland at Erdmannsdorf Estate to 422 Protestant refugees from the Austrian Zillertal, who built Tyrolean style farmhouses in the Silesian village.

 

Death

Frederick William III died on 7 June 1840 in Berlin, from a fever, survived by his second wife. His eldest son, Frederick William IV, succeeded him. Frederick William III is buried at the Mausoleum in Schlosspark Charlottenburg, Berlin.

 

Potsdam is the capital and largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of Berlin, and lies embedded in a hilly morainic landscape dotted with many lakes, around 20 of which are located within Potsdam's city limits. It lies some 25 kilometres (16 miles) southwest of Berlin's city centre. The name of the city and of many of its boroughs are of Slavic origin.

 

Potsdam was a residence of the Prussian kings and the German Emperor until 1918. Its planning embodied ideas of the Age of Enlightenment: through a careful balance of architecture and landscape, Potsdam was intended as "a picturesque, pastoral dream" which would remind its residents of their relationship with nature and reason.

 

The city, which is over 1,000 years old, is widely known for its palaces, its lakes, and its overall historical and cultural significance. Landmarks include the parks and palaces of Sanssouci, Germany's largest World Heritage Site, as well as other palaces such as the Orangery Palace, the New Palace, Cecilienhof Palace, and Charlottenhof Palace. Potsdam was also the location of the significant Potsdam Conference in 1945, the conference where the three heads of government of the USSR, the US, and the UK decided on the division of Germany following its surrender, a conference which defined Germany's history for the following 45 years.

 

Babelsberg, in the south-eastern part of Potsdam, was already by the 1930s the home of a major film production studio and it has enjoyed success as an important center of European film production since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Filmstudio Babelsberg, founded in 1912, is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world.

 

Potsdam developed into a centre of science in Germany in the 19th century. Today, there are three public colleges, the University of Potsdam, and more than 30 research institutes in the city.

Trausnitz Castle is a medieval castle situated in Landshut, Bavaria in Germany.

 

It was the home of the Wittelsbach dynasty, and it served as their ducal residence for Lower Bavaria from 1255–1503, and later as the seat of the hereditary rulers of the whole of Bavaria. The castle was founded in 1204 by Duke Ludwig I.

 

Trausnitz Castle is situated atop a hill above Landshut. Before the 16th century, it had the same name as the town, Landshut, which translates into "protector of the land". Previously, the castle guarded over the city and the surrounding land. The size of the castle has remained almost the same since Louis I of Bavaria in 1204. The castle was completed by the time of Emperor Frederick II's visit in 1235.

 

During the first half of the 13th century, Trausnitz represented not only the centre of imperial politics but also of Staufer culture. Landshut was visited by famous minstrel singers, including Walter von der Vogelweide and Tannhäuser, during this period. The patronage of art by the Dukes of Bavaria was so high that they sent for a sculptor from Strasbourg who created jewellery for a sculpture that now stands in the Castle's "Burgkapelle".

  

Trausnitz Castle is a medieval castle situated in Landshut, Bavaria in Germany.

 

It was the home of the Wittelsbach dynasty, and it served as their ducal residence for Lower Bavaria from 1255–1503, and later as the seat of the hereditary rulers of the whole of Bavaria. The castle was founded in 1204 by Duke Ludwig I.

 

Trausnitz Castle is situated atop a hill above Landshut. Before the 16th century, it had the same name as the town, Landshut, which translates into "protector of the land". Previously, the castle guarded over the city and the surrounding land. The size of the castle has remained almost the same since Louis I of Bavaria in 1204. The castle was completed by the time of Emperor Frederick II's visit in 1235.

 

During the first half of the 13th century, Trausnitz represented not only the centre of imperial politics but also of Staufer culture. Landshut was visited by famous minstrel singers, including Walter von der Vogelweide and Tannhäuser, during this period. The patronage of art by the Dukes of Bavaria was so high that they sent for a sculptor from Strasbourg who created jewellery for a sculpture that now stands in the Castle's "Burgkapelle".

  

The Fernsehturm (English: Television Tower) in central Berlin was constructed between 1965 and 1969 by the government of the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, as both a functional broadcasting facility and a symbol of Communist power.

 

It remains a landmark today from its position next to Alexanderplatz in the city's Marien Quarter, part of the district of Mitte, visible across most suburban districts of Berlin. With its height to 368 metres (1,207 ft) (including antenna) it is the tallest structure in Germany, and the third-tallest structure in the European Union. When built it was the fourth-tallest freestanding structure in the world after the Empire State Building and 875 North Michigan Avenue, then known as The John Hancock Center.

 

Of the four tallest structures in the European Union, the Fernsehturm is 2 metres (6.6 ft) shorter than the Torreta de Guardamar, 0.5 metres (1.6 ft) shorter than the Riga Radio and TV Tower, and 8 metres (26 ft) taller than the Trbovlje Power Station. The structure is also more than 220 metres (720 ft) higher than the old Berlin Radio Tower in the western part of the city, which was built in the 1920s.

 

In addition to its main function as the location of several radio and television transmitters, the building – internally known as "Fernmeldeturm 32" – serves as a viewing tower with observation deck including a bar at a height of 203 metres (666 ft), as well as a rotating restaurant. Also, the Berlin TV Tower can be booked as a venue for events. The distinctive city landmark has undergone a radical, symbolic transformation: After German reunification, it changed from a politically charged, national symbol of the GDR into a citywide symbol of a reunited Berlin. Due to its universal and timeless design, it has increasingly been used as a trademark and is identified worldwide with Berlin and Germany. In 1979, the Berlin TV Tower received official monument status by the East German government, a status which was perpetuated after the German reunification.

 

The tower has become one of the most prominent symbols of the country and is often in the establishing shot of films set in Berlin, alongside monuments such as the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Victory Column and the Reichstag building. It is also one of the ten most popular attractions in Germany with more than 1,000,000 visitors every year.

Indischer Brunnen is a fountain at Luisenstädtischer Kanal in Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany.

 

The Luisenstädtische Kanal is a historic inner-city canal in Berlin's Luisenstadt , which connected the Spree with the Landwehrkanal . It was opened in 1852 and ran through the later districts of Kreuzberg and Mitte . In 1926, the canal was filled in except for the angel basin and converted into a garden. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the border between East and West Berlin ran along the northern part of the canal until 1990 . Since 1991, sections of the gardens, which have been destroyed since the Second World War, have been reconstructed.

 

In 1825, senior building officer Johann Carl Ludwig Schmid drew up a development plan for the Köpenicker Feld, the southern part of Luisenstadt. Even in these initial plans, which were never implemented, a north-south canal was planned for drainage and as a waterway. After Friedrich Wilhelm IV became King of Prussia in 1840, urban planning for Berlin was entrusted to the landscape architect and city planner Peter Joseph Lenné .

 

Based on Schmid's plans, Lenné designed a development plan that took better account of the space requirements of industrial and railway areas and was intended to be more socially balanced. He wanted to make the Landwehr Canal navigable and take over the connecting canal from the Landwehr Canal to the Spree that Schmid had already planned. For Lenné, the social tasks of urban planning were of great importance - he viewed green spaces for local recreation and streets and squares with high recreational value as necessary for a functioning urban district.

 

In this spirit, the Luisenstädtische Kanal should be more than just a waterway; rather, it should be a decorative street designed as a decorative center that forms the design center of the new city district. Lenné defined the course and design of the Luisenstadt Canal in his work Projected Jewelry and Borders of Berlin with the immediate surroundings, published in 1839/1840 .

 

Construction

Construction of the Luisenstädtischer Canal began in 1848, two years after the completion of the Landwehr Canal. The canal was intended to serve as a transport route for building materials, as urban drainage and to channel the floods of the Spree. Above all, however, the construction served as a job creation measure; around 5,000 workers were employed without any major technical aids. In October 1848 there were bloody riots among workers out of fear of losing their jobs to construction machinery.

 

The canal was 2.3 kilometers long, 22.5 meters wide and 1.5 meters deep at medium water. The clinker seawalls, which are atypical for Berlin, towered above the water level by around three meters. It had only a minimal gradient and was designed for ships with a load capacity of up to 175 tons . The waterfront promenade was planted with “Kaiser linden ” trees. At the point where the canal flowed through what was then the Berlin customs wall , a new gate, the Wassertor, was also built in 1848.

 

History

The canal began at what was then Urbanhafen and ran in a northeasterly direction parallel to the street grid. It was divided by the Wassertorplatz , where there was a smaller pool, the Oranienplatz, the cast-iron Waldemar Bridge along Waldemarstrasse and a larger water basin, the Angel Pool. At the Engel Becken the canal branched off at a right angle to the east and ran in an arc to the northeast to the Cöpenick lock and the Spree. The lock was north of the Cöpenick Bridge . [1] It served to overcome the different water levels between the Spree and the Luisenstädtischen Canal and the Landwehr Canal and thus fulfilled the same purpose as the upper lock in the Landwehr Canal.

 

The angel pool is named after the archangel St. Michael , a copy of whose statue can now be found on the ridge at the front of St. Michael's Church . The original statue of the archangel, created by August Kiß , standing in flight towards the canal, was oriented towards the political “West” and was probably dismantled during the GDR era for ideological reasons. Saint Michael's Church is in ruins as a result of Allied air raids during World War II .

 

The relatively distinctive lines with the right-angled bends at the Urbanhafen and the Angel Basin were due to the layout of the city. From a shipping perspective it made little sense. The canal was created together with the late classicist buildings built on its banks and with them also formed an urban ensemble. It is of urban planning importance in that it was an attempt to use water as an urban design element.

 

The street to the northwest between Oranienplatz and today's Heinrich-Heine-Platz was originally called Luisenufer and has been called Legiendamm after the union leader Carl Legien since July 31, 1947 . The street opposite, located southeast of the canal and Engel Becken, was called Elisabethufer since 1849 . Also on July 31, 1947, it was renamed Leuschnerdamm in honor of Wilhelm Leuschner . The houses on Legiendamm and Leuschnerdamm have consecutive, complementary house numbers. Houses on Legiendamm only have even numbers, those on Leuschnerdamm only have odd numbers.

 

As early as 1937, Luisenufer and Elisabethufer were each divided into two sections. The street names change at Oranienplatz. Since 1947, the continuation of the Legiendamm to the Landwehr Canal has been called Segitzdamm (after the SPD politician Martin Segitz ), that of the Leuschnerdamm Erkelenzdamm (after Anton Erkelenz , a Reichstag member of the German Democratic Party ).

 

Bridges

Over time, the two sides of the canal were connected by a total of twelve bridges, including some purely pedestrian bridges. These were viewed from the Spree towards the Landwehr Canal:

 

the twin bridge,

the Köpenick Bridge ,

the Melchior Bridge,

the Adalbert Bridge ,

the Elizabeth Bridge,

the queen's bridge,

the Waldemar Bridge ,

the Orange Bridge,

the Luisenbrücke,

the new water gate bridge,

the swing bridge of the connecting railway ,

the viaduct of the elevated railway ,

the old water gate bridge,

the Luisensteg ,

a covered overpass of gas pipes shortly before the canal flows into the Landwehrkanal at Urbanhafen, which was used as a footbridge.

Of these bridges, only the Waldemar Bridge , which was reconstructed in 1995, has been preserved in its old form.

 

Green area

Barth's trick

The canal was opened on May 15, 1852. It never achieved great importance for water traffic. Due to the hardly any traffic and the low gradient, the water stood in the canal, which led to strong odor nuisances for the population. For these reasons, the Berlin magistrate decided on January 16, 1926 to have the canal filled again - this measure was also a job creation program. To fill the canal, excavated material from the construction of the Gesundbrunnen-Neukölln subway ( GN-Bahn , later subway line 8 ) was used, whose construction work was carried out in the nearby Reichenberger Straße, at Moritzplatz and in Neanderstraße (since 1960: Heinrich -Heine-Straße ) were in progress.

 

In keeping with Lenné's idea of ​​greenery close to home for the densely populated district, the canal was transformed into a green space under the leadership of Erwin Barth , the newly appointed city garden director of Greater Berlin , and Leo Kloss. He solved the difficulty of a long green area that was only 22 meters wide with a trick: he did not have the canal filled up to street level, but only up to just above the original water line. The brick sea walls were preserved, and Barth had parapets built on them. In order to make the green area varied, he divided it into ten sections with their own character. He created sitting areas, verandas , children's playgrounds and fountains, even narrow water channels - the theme of water was decisive for Barth's plans. In between there were paved paths, lawns, flowerbeds, flowering bushes, trees and various ornamental gardens with dahlias , roses , forest and alpine plantings.

 

The angel pool remained as a water surface, and arcades were created all around it. In the pool itself there were 16 fountains that were illuminated in the evenings . The green area was completed in 1932 - but not to the extent originally planned for cost reasons. The southern section in particular did not fully correspond to the original plans.

 

Post-war period

After the Allied air raids in the last years of the war , a lot of building rubble had to be cleared away. Numerous mountains of rubble were piled up and the lower parts of the Luisenstadt Canal were filled with rubble.

 

In the post-war period , the border with East Berlin ran between the Spree and Waldemarstrasse; the part south of Waldemarstrasse belonged to West Berlin . After the wall was built in 1961, the canal and basin were completely filled and leveled. A section of the death strip of the Berlin Wall was created on the area.

 

For the 1984 International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Kreuzberg, the southern part of the garden was restored and given the shape it largely still has today.

 

After the fall of communism

Shortly after the political change and the reunification of Berlin in 1990, there were efforts to unify the two halves of the Luisenstädtischer Canal again and to restore the old pre-war design. As part of garden archaeological investigations, test drillings were carried out and it was unexpectedly found that the quay walls and gardens were only slightly damaged; Even remnants of vegetation could be found. Since 1991, the green area has been restored under the management of the Schumacher office and has since been opened to the public in sections. In April 1993 the Evergreen Garden between Engel Becken and Adalbertstrasse was reopened and in June 1995 the Rose Garden between Engel Becken and Waldemarbrücke.

 

The partial excavation of the Engel Becken began as a search excavation at the beginning of the 1990s. Due to financing problems, the reconstruction of the Angel Pool came to a standstill. The basin therefore remained for several years in a state that was only dredged along the edges, where the groundwater was already emerging. It was not until 1999 that the middle area was completely excavated. In spring 2006, the pool area was further deepened and the dilapidated, partially slipped pool surround was rebuilt as a concrete surround for stabilization.

 

The reconstruction measures in spring 2006 also included the restoration of the 500 meter long section of the canal between Adalbertstrasse and Melchiorstrasse that ran further east and, in 2008, the remaining 200 meter long section between Melchiorstrasse and Köpenicker Strasse as a green area. Since the 2010s, a walking path has led under a four-row avenue of lime trees on around 2.5 hectares of park space in the former bed of the canal towards the Spree. To the southeast, the new green area is complemented by the neglected area at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, which is to be renovated , and the redesigned Mariannenplatz .

 

The Luisenstädtische Kanal is included in Berlin's state monument list as a garden monument worthy of protection .

The Richard Wagner Monument (German: Richard-Wagner-Denkmal) is a memorial sculpture of Richard Wagner by Gustav Eberlein, located in Tiergarten in Berlin, Germany. It was created during 1901–1903 and is installed along Tiergartenstraße across from the Indian Embassy. It depicts Wagner in a seated pose and is covered by a roof.

 

Gustav Heinrich Eberlein (14 July 1847, Spiekershausen (near Staufenberg) - 5 February 1926, Berlin) was a German sculptor, painter and writer.

 

Life

He was the son of a border guard. At the age of eight, his family moved to Hannoversch Münden, which would be his home for the remainder of his life, despite many years spent elsewhere. His parents lacked the money to provide him with formal artistic training, so he obtained instruction wherever possible, especially from the local goldsmith. In 1866, thanks to the patronage of a pastor who had recognized his talents, he was able to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. In 1869, he went to Berlin on a scholarship. Three years later, another scholarship enabled him to study in Rome.

 

Upon his return to Berlin, he received significant support from Martin Gropius. Despite growing success, the next decade was difficult. His three-year-old son died in 1882, then his mother in 1888. This was followed by a divorce in 1891. A year later, he married the Countess Maria von Hertzberg, an aspiring young artist, and was appointed a Professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts the year after that.

 

In 1900, he came out in strong opposition to the "Lex Heinze" (which, among other things, banned the display of "immoral" art works). That same year, all but a few of his figures were removed from display at the Great Berlin Exhibition, not only because of the law but also, probably, because of his support for French and Belgian sculptors (such as Rodin and Meunier). In fact, as tensions between Germany and its western neighbors grew, Eberlein's outspoken advocacy of peace and disarmament caused him to lose his public commissions.

 

Later career

He was able to find work elsewhere, notably in South America, but his finances never recovered and he was divorced for a second time in 1912. The following year, he auctioned off most of his possessions in anticipation of emigrating, but those plans were put off because of World War I. He received some orders during the war and created a small museum at his studios in Berlin but, after the war, criticism was renewed; especially for his creating a statue of Karl Marx at the same time he was doing one of the former Kaiser. He was especially well known for his small figures and portrait sculpture and produced over 900 works. The majority of his larger bronze monuments were melted down during World War II. Most of his 300 original plaster models were disposed of by the city of Münden after his death. In 1962, work related to a construction project revealed approximately 80 figures and 11 paintings that were preserved and restored between 1983 and 1989. Many are now in the collection of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

 

He was able to avert destitution only by adopting his housemaid as his daughter, ensuring that he would be cared for by her family.[4] By the time of his death, he was nearly forgotten. He was buried at the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof in Berlin.

 

Selected major works

Altona, Germany - The Peace

Berlin Tiergarten - Richard Wagner and Albert Lortzing monuments.

Berlin Tiergarten - Figures for the Siegesallee (Victory Avenue) project of Wilhelm II. He did two groups:

Group 26; consisting of Frederick I of Prussia as the central figure, flanked by Andreas Schlüter and Eberhard von Danckelmann.

Group 30; with Frederick William III of Prussia as the central figure, flanked by Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher and Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein.

Buenos Aires - "Monument to General José de San Martín and the Armies of Independence"; side figures.

Hannoversch Münden - Germania Statue; with many signed copies forming a part of various war memorials throughout Germany. (The exact number is unknown because some were lost or destroyed). This was the result of an aggressive advertising campaign by the foundry, which included the statue in its catalog.

Montevideo - Figures in the Second Concourse of the "Monument to Artigas".

Rome - Goethe monument.

Santiago - "German Fountain", Plaza de Armas.[a]

Tilsit - Statue of Queen Louise

Various statues of Wilhelm I in Arnsberg, Duisburg, Gera, Hamburg, Krefeld, Mannheim, Mönchengladbach and Wuppertal.

 

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

 

His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas, or plot elements. His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.

 

Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many novel design features. The Ring and Parsifal were premiered here and his most important stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, which was galvanized by the efforts of his wife Cosima Wagner and the family's descendants. His thoughts on the relative contributions of music and drama in opera were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg).

 

Until his final years, Wagner's life was characterised by political exile, turbulent love affairs, poverty and repeated flight from his creditors. His controversial writings on music, drama and politics have attracted extensive comment – particularly since the late 20th century, as they express antisemitic sentiments. The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts throughout the 20th century; his influence spread beyond composition into conducting, philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre.

 

Early years

Richard Wagner was born on 22 May 1813 to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, then part of the Confederation of the Rhine. His family lived at No 3, the Brühl (The House of the Red and White Lions) in Leipzig's Jewish quarter. He was baptized at St. Thomas Church. He was the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife, Johanna Rosine (née Paetz), the daughter of a baker. Wagner's father Carl died of typhoid fever six months after Richard's birth. Afterwards, his mother Johanna lived with Carl's friend, the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer. In August 1814 Johanna and Geyer probably married—although no documentation of this has been found in the Leipzig church registers. She and her family moved to Geyer's residence in Dresden. Until he was fourteen, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. He almost certainly thought that Geyer was his biological father.

 

Geyer's love of the theatre came to be shared by his stepson, and Wagner took part in his performances. In his autobiography Mein Leben Wagner recalled once playing the part of an angel. In late 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzel's school at Possendorf, near Dresden, where he received some piano instruction from his Latin teacher. He struggled to play a proper scale at the keyboard and preferred playing theatre overtures by ear. Following Geyer's death in 1821, Richard was sent to the Kreuzschule, the boarding school of the Dresdner Kreuzchor, at the expense of Geyer's brother. At the age of nine he was hugely impressed by the Gothic elements of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz, which he saw Weber conduct. At this period Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright. His first creative effort, listed in the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis (the standard listing of Wagner's works) as WWV 1, was a tragedy called Leubald. Begun when he was in school in 1826, the play was strongly influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe. Wagner was determined to set it to music and persuaded his family to allow him music lessons.

 

By 1827, the family had returned to Leipzig. Wagner's first lessons in harmony were taken during 1828–1831 with Christian Gottlieb Müller. In January 1828 he first heard Beethoven's 7th Symphony and then, in March, the same composer's 9th Symphony (both at the Gewandhaus). Beethoven became a major inspiration, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the 9th Symphony. He was also greatly impressed by a performance of Mozart's Requiem. Wagner's early piano sonatas and his first attempts at orchestral overtures date from this period.

 

In 1829 he saw a performance by dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, and she became his ideal of the fusion of drama and music in opera. In Mein Leben, Wagner wrote, "When I look back across my entire life I find no event to place beside this in the impression it produced on me," and claimed that the "profoundly human and ecstatic performance of this incomparable artist" kindled in him an "almost demonic fire."

 

In 1831, Wagner enrolled at the Leipzig University, where he became a member of the Saxon student fraternity. He took composition lessons with the Thomaskantor Theodor Weinlig. Weinlig was so impressed with Wagner's musical ability that he refused any payment for his lessons. He arranged for his pupil's Piano Sonata in B-flat major (which was consequently dedicated to him) to be published as Wagner's Op. 1. A year later, Wagner composed his Symphony in C major, a Beethovenesque work performed in Prague in 1832 and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1833. He then began to work on an opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), which he never completed.

 

Early career and marriage (1833–1842)

Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer (1835), by Alexander von Otterstedt

In 1833, Wagner's brother Albert managed to obtain for him a position as choirmaster at the theatre in Würzburg. In the same year, at the age of 20, Wagner composed his first complete opera, Die Feen (The Fairies). This work, which imitated the style of Weber, went unproduced until half a century later, when it was premiered in Munich shortly after the composer's death in 1883.

 

Having returned to Leipzig in 1834, Wagner held a brief appointment as musical director at the opera house in Magdeburg during which he wrote Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. This was staged at Magdeburg in 1836 but closed before the second performance; this, together with the financial collapse of the theatre company employing him, left the composer in bankruptcy. Wagner had fallen for one of the leading ladies at Magdeburg, the actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer and after the disaster of Das Liebesverbot he followed her to Königsberg, where she helped him to get an engagement at the theatre. The two married in Tragheim Church on 24 November 1836. In May 1837, Minna left Wagner for another man, and this was but only the first débâcle of a tempestuous marriage. In June 1837, Wagner moved to Riga (then in the Russian Empire), where he became music director of the local opera; having in this capacity engaged Minna's sister Amalie (also a singer) for the theatre, he presently resumed relations with Minna during 1838.

 

By 1839, the couple had amassed such large debts that they fled Riga on the run from creditors. Debts would plague Wagner for most of his life. Initially they took a stormy sea passage to London, from which Wagner drew the inspiration for his opera Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), with a plot based on a sketch by Heinrich Heine. The Wagners settled in Paris in September 1839 and stayed there until 1842. Wagner made a scant living by writing articles and short novelettes such as A pilgrimage to Beethoven, which sketched his growing concept of "music drama", and An end in Paris, where he depicts his own miseries as a German musician in the French metropolis. He also provided arrangements of operas by other composers, largely on behalf of the Schlesinger publishing house. During this stay he completed his third and fourth operas Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer.

 

Dresden (1842–1849)

Wagner had completed Rienzi in 1840. With the strong support of Giacomo Meyerbeer, it was accepted for performance by the Dresden Court Theatre (Hofoper) in the Kingdom of Saxony and in 1842, Wagner moved to Dresden. His relief at returning to Germany was recorded in his "Autobiographic Sketch" of 1842, where he wrote that, en route from Paris, "For the first time I saw the Rhine—with hot tears in my eyes, I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my German fatherland." Rienzi was staged to considerable acclaim on 20 October.

 

Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years, eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. During this period, he staged there Der fliegende Holländer (2 January 1843) and Tannhäuser (19 October 1845), the first two of his three middle-period operas. Wagner also mixed with artistic circles in Dresden, including the composer Ferdinand Hiller and the architect Gottfried Semper.

 

Wagner's involvement in left-wing politics abruptly ended his welcome in Dresden. Wagner was active among socialist German nationalists there, regularly receiving such guests as the conductor and radical editor August Röckel and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. He was also influenced by the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Ludwig Feuerbach. Widespread discontent came to a head in 1849, when the unsuccessful May Uprising in Dresden broke out, in which Wagner played a minor supporting role. Warrants were issued for the revolutionaries' arrest. Wagner had to flee, first visiting Paris and then settling in Zürich where he at first took refuge with a friend, Alexander Müller.

 

In exile: Switzerland (1849–1858)

Wagner was to spend the next twelve years in exile from Germany. He had completed Lohengrin, the last of his middle-period operas, before the Dresden uprising, and now wrote desperately to his friend Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence. Liszt conducted the premiere in Weimar in August 1850.

 

Nevertheless, Wagner was in grim personal straits, isolated from the German musical world and without any regular income. In 1850, Julie, the wife of his friend Karl Ritter, began to pay him a small pension which she maintained until 1859. With help from her friend Jessie Laussot, this was to have been augmented to an annual sum of 3,000 thalers per year, but the plan was abandoned when Wagner began an affair with Mme. Laussot. Wagner even plotted an elopement with her in 1850, which her husband prevented. Meanwhile, Wagner's wife Minna, who had disliked the operas he had written after Rienzi, was falling into a deepening depression. Wagner fell victim to ill health, according to Ernest Newman "largely a matter of overwrought nerves", which made it difficult for him to continue writing.

 

Wagner's primary published output during his first years in Zürich was a set of essays. In "The Artwork of the Future" (1849), he described a vision of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), in which music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts and stagecraft were unified. "Judaism in Music" (1850) was the first of Wagner's writings to feature antisemitic views.[58] In this polemic Wagner argued, frequently using traditional antisemitic abuse, that Jews had no connection to the German spirit, and were thus capable of producing only shallow and artificial music. According to him, they composed music to achieve popularity and, thereby, financial success, as opposed to creating genuine works of art.

 

In "Opera and Drama" (1851), Wagner described the aesthetics of music drama that he was using to create the Ring cycle. Before leaving Dresden, Wagner had drafted a scenario that eventually became Der Ring des Nibelungen. He initially wrote the libretto for a single opera, Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried's Death), in 1848. After arriving in Zürich, he expanded the story with Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried), which explored the hero's background. He completed the text of the cycle by writing the libretti for Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) and Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold) and revising the other libretti to conform to his new concept, completing them in 1852. The concept of opera expressed in "Opera and Drama" and in other essays effectively renounced all the operas he had previously written through Lohengrin. Partly in an attempt to explain his change of views, Wagner published in 1851 the autobiographical "A Communication to My Friends". This included his first public announcement of what was to become the Ring cycle:

 

I shall never write an Opera more. As I have no wish to invent an arbitrary title for my works, I will call them Dramas ...

 

I propose to produce my myth in three complete dramas, preceded by a lengthy Prelude (Vorspiel)....

 

At a specially-appointed Festival, I propose, some future time, to produce those three Dramas with their Prelude, in the course of three days and a fore-evening [emphasis in original].

 

Wagner began composing the music for Das Rheingold between November 1853 and September 1854, following it immediately with Die Walküre (written between June 1854 and March 1856). He began work on the third Ring drama, which he now called simply Siegfried, probably in September 1856, but by June 1857 he had completed only the first two acts. He decided to put the work aside to concentrate on a new idea: Tristan und Isolde, based on the Arthurian love story Tristan and Iseult.

 

One source of inspiration for Tristan und Isolde was the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, notably his The World as Will and Representation, to which Wagner had been introduced in 1854 by his poet friend Georg Herwegh. Wagner later called this the most important event of his life. His personal circumstances certainly made him an easy convert to what he understood to be Schopenhauer's philosophy, sometimes categorized as "philosophical pessimism". He remained an adherent of Schopenhauer for the rest of his life.

 

One of Schopenhauer's doctrines was that music held a supreme role in the arts as a direct expression of the world's essence, namely, blind, impulsive will. This doctrine contradicted Wagner's view, expressed in "Opera and Drama", that the music in opera had to be subservient to the drama. Wagner scholars have argued that Schopenhauer's influence caused Wagner to assign a more commanding role to music in his later operas, including the latter half of the Ring cycle, which he had yet to compose. Aspects of Schopenhauerian doctrine found their way into Wagner's subsequent libretti.

 

A second source of inspiration was Wagner's infatuation with the poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the silk merchant Otto Wesendonck. Wagner met the Wesendoncks, who were both great admirers of his music, in Zürich in 1852. From May 1853 onwards Wesendonck made several loans to Wagner to finance his household expenses in Zürich, and in 1857 placed a cottage on his estate at Wagner's disposal, which became known as the Asyl ("asylum" or "place of rest"). During this period, Wagner's growing passion for his patron's wife inspired him to put aside work on the Ring cycle (which was not resumed for the next twelve years) and begin work on Tristan. While planning the opera, Wagner composed the Wesendonck Lieder, five songs for voice and piano, setting poems by Mathilde. Two of these settings are explicitly subtitled by Wagner as "studies for Tristan und Isolde".

 

Among the conducting engagements that Wagner undertook for revenue during this period, he gave several concerts in 1855 with the Philharmonic Society of London, including one before Queen Victoria. The Queen enjoyed his Tannhäuser overture and spoke with Wagner after the concert, writing in her diary that Wagner was "short, very quiet, wears spectacles & has a very finely-developed forehead, a hooked nose & projecting chin."

 

In exile: Venice and Paris (1858–1862)

Wagner's uneasy affair with Mathilde collapsed in 1858, when Minna intercepted a letter to Mathilde from him. After the resulting confrontation with Minna, Wagner left Zürich alone, bound for Venice, where he rented an apartment in the Palazzo Giustinian, while Minna returned to Germany. Wagner's attitude to Minna had changed; the editor of his correspondence with her, John Burk, has said that she was to him "an invalid, to be treated with kindness and consideration, but, except at a distance, [was] a menace to his peace of mind." Wagner continued his correspondence with Mathilde and his friendship with her husband Otto, who maintained his financial support of the composer. In an 1859 letter to Mathilde, Wagner wrote, half-satirically, of Tristan: "Child! This Tristan is turning into something terrible. This final act!!!—I fear the opera will be banned ... only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad."

 

In November 1859, Wagner once again moved to Paris to oversee production of a new revision of Tannhäuser, staged thanks to the efforts of Princess Pauline von Metternich, whose husband was the Austrian ambassador in Paris. The performances of the Paris Tannhäuser in 1861 were a notable fiasco. This was partly a consequence of the conservative tastes of the Jockey Club, which organised demonstrations in the theatre to protest at the presentation of the ballet feature in act 1 (instead of its traditional location in the second act); but the opportunity was also exploited by those who wanted to use the occasion as a veiled political protest against the pro-Austrian policies of Napoleon III. It was during this visit that Wagner met the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who wrote an appreciative brochure, "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris". The opera was withdrawn after the third performance and Wagner left Paris soon after. He had sought a reconciliation with Minna during this Paris visit, and although she joined him there, the reunion was not successful and they again parted from each other when Wagner left.

 

Return and resurgence (1862–1871)

The political ban that had been placed on Wagner in Germany after he had fled Dresden was fully lifted in 1862. The composer settled in Biebrich, on the Rhine near Wiesbaden in Hesse. Here Minna visited him for the last time: they parted irrevocably, though Wagner continued to give financial support to her while she lived in Dresden until her death in 1866.

 

A young man in a dark military jacket, jodhpurs, long boots, and a voluminous ermine robe. He wears a sword at his side, a sash, a chain and a large star. Mainly hidden by his robe is a throne and behind that is a curtain with a crest with Ludwig's name and title in Latin. To one side a cushion holding a crown sits on a table.

 

In Biebrich, Wagner, at last, began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only mature comedy. Wagner wrote a first draft of the libretto in 1845, and he had resolved to develop it during a visit he had made to Venice with the Wesendoncks in 1860, where he was inspired by Titian's painting The Assumption of the Virgin. Throughout this period (1861–1864) Wagner sought to have Tristan und Isolde produced in Vienna.[91] Despite many rehearsals, the opera remained unperformed, and gained a reputation as being "impossible" to sing, which added to Wagner's financial problems.

 

Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II succeeded to the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18. The young king, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas, had the composer brought to Munich. The King, who was homosexual, expressed in his correspondence a passionate personal adoration for the composer,[n 11] and Wagner in his responses had no scruples about feigning reciprocal feelings. Ludwig settled Wagner's considerable debts, and proposed to stage Tristan, Die Meistersinger, the Ring, and the other operas Wagner planned. Wagner also began to dictate his autobiography, Mein Leben, at the King's request. Wagner noted that his rescue by Ludwig coincided with news of the death of his earlier mentor (but later supposed enemy) Giacomo Meyerbeer, and regretted that "this operatic master, who had done me so much harm, should not have lived to see this day."

 

After grave difficulties in rehearsal, Tristan und Isolde premiered at the National Theatre Munich on 10 June 1865, the first Wagner opera premiere in almost 15 years. (The premiere had been scheduled for 15 May, but was delayed by bailiffs acting for Wagner's creditors, and also because the Isolde, Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was hoarse and needed time to recover.) The conductor of this premiere was Hans von Bülow, whose wife, Cosima, had given birth in April that year to a daughter, named Isolde, a child not of Bülow but of Wagner.

 

Cosima was 24 years younger than Wagner and was herself illegitimate, the daughter of the Countess Marie d'Agoult, who had left her husband for Franz Liszt. Liszt initially disapproved of his daughter's involvement with Wagner, though nevertheless, the two men were friends. The indiscreet affair scandalised Munich, and Wagner also fell into disfavour with many leading members of the court, who were suspicious of his influence on the King. In December 1865, Ludwig was finally forced to ask the composer to leave Munich. He apparently also toyed with the idea of abdicating to follow his hero into exile, but Wagner quickly dissuaded him.

 

A couple is shown: On the left is a tall woman of about 30. She wears a voluminous dress and is sitting sideways in an upright chair, facing and looking up into the eyes of the man who is on the right. He is about 60, quite short, and balding at the temples. He is dressed in a suit with a tailcoat and wears a cravat. He faces and looks down at the woman. His hand rests on the back of the chair.

 

Ludwig installed Wagner at the Villa Tribschen, beside Switzerland's Lake Lucerne. Die Meistersinger was completed at Tribschen in 1867, and premiered in Munich on 21 June the following year. At Ludwig's insistence, "special previews" of the first two works of the Ring, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were performed at Munich in 1869 and 1870, but Wagner retained his dream, first expressed in "A Communication to My Friends", to present the first complete cycle at a special festival with a new, dedicated, opera house.

 

Minna died of a heart attack on 25 January 1866 in Dresden. Wagner did not attend the funeral. Following Minna's death Cosima wrote to Hans von Bülow several times asking him to grant her a divorce, but Bülow refused to concede this. He consented only after she had two more children with Wagner; another daughter, named Eva, after the heroine of Meistersinger, and a son Siegfried, named after the hero of the Ring. The divorce was finally sanctioned, after delays in the legal process, by a Berlin court on 18 July 1870. Richard and Cosima's wedding took place on 25 August 1870. On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner arranged a surprise performance (its premiere) of the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end of Wagner's life.

 

Wagner, settled into his new-found domesticity, turned his energies towards completing the Ring cycle. He had not abandoned polemics: he republished his 1850 pamphlet "Judaism in Music", originally issued under a pseudonym, under his own name in 1869. He extended the introduction, and wrote a lengthy additional final section. The publication led to several public protests at early performances of Die Meistersinger in Vienna and Mannheim.

 

Bayreuth (1871–1876)

In 1871, Wagner decided to move to Bayreuth, which was to be the location of his new opera house. The town council donated a large plot of land—the "Green Hill"—as a site for the theatre. The Wagners moved to the town the following year, and the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival Theatre") was laid. Wagner initially announced the first Bayreuth Festival, at which for the first time the Ring cycle would be presented complete, for 1873, but since Ludwig had declined to finance the project, the start of building was delayed and the proposed date for the festival was deferred. To raise funds for the construction, "Wagner societies" were formed in several cities, and Wagner began touring Germany conducting concerts. By the spring of 1873, only a third of the required funds had been raised; further pleas to Ludwig were initially ignored, but early in 1874, with the project on the verge of collapse, the King relented and provided a loan. The full building programme included the family home, "Wahnfried", into which Wagner, with Cosima and the children, moved from their temporary accommodation on 18 April 1874. The theatre was completed in 1875, and the festival was scheduled for the following year. Commenting on the struggle to finish the building, Wagner remarked to Cosima: "Each stone is red with my blood and yours".

 

A building stands beyond a part-ploughed field and a row of trees. It has five sections. Farthest away, the tallest part with a v-shaped roof contains the stage. Adjoining it is the auditorium section built of patterned brick. Nearest is the royal entrance, made of stone and brick with arched windows and a portico. Two wings adjoin the auditorium.

The Bayreuth Festspielhaus: photochrom print of c. 1895

For the design of the Festspielhaus, Wagner appropriated some of the ideas of his former colleague, Gottfried Semper, which he had previously solicited for a proposed new opera house in Munich.[119] Wagner was responsible for several theatrical innovations at Bayreuth; these include darkening the auditorium during performances, and placing the orchestra in a pit out of view of the audience.

 

The Festspielhaus finally opened on 13 August 1876 with Das Rheingold, at last taking its place as the first evening of the complete Ring cycle; the 1876 Bayreuth Festival therefore saw the premiere of the complete cycle, performed as a sequence as the composer had intended. The 1876 Festival consisted of three full Ring cycles (under the baton of Hans Richter). At the end, critical reactions ranged between that of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who thought the work "divinely composed", and that of the French newspaper Le Figaro, which called the music "the dream of a lunatic". The disillusioned included Wagner's friend and disciple Friedrich Nietzsche, who, having published his eulogistic essay "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" before the festival as part of his Untimely Meditations, was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as Wagner's pandering to increasingly exclusivist German nationalism; his breach with Wagner began at this time. The festival firmly established Wagner as an artist of European, and indeed world, importance: attendees included Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, Anton Bruckner, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

 

Wagner was far from satisfied with the Festival; Cosima recorded that months later, his attitude towards the productions was "Never again, never again!" Moreover, the festival finished with a deficit of about 150,000 marks. The expenses of Bayreuth and of Wahnfried meant that Wagner still sought further sources of income by conducting or taking on commissions such as the Centennial March for America, for which he received $5000.

 

Last years (1876–1883)

Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final opera. The composition took four years, much of which Wagner spent in Italy for health reasons. From 1876 to 1878 Wagner also embarked on the last of his documented emotional liaisons, this time with Judith Gautier, whom he had met at the 1876 Festival. Wagner was also much troubled by problems of financing Parsifal, and by the prospect of the work being performed by other theatres than Bayreuth. He was once again assisted by the liberality of King Ludwig, but was still forced by his personal financial situation in 1877 to sell the rights of several of his unpublished works (including the Siegfried Idyll) to the publisher Schott.

 

Several floral tributes are laid on a flat gravestone that is in the middle of a large bed full of low leafy plants. A crazy-paved path passes either side of the bed.

The Wagner grave in the Wahnfried garden; in 1977 Cosima's ashes were placed alongside Wagner's body.

Wagner wrote several articles in his later years, often on political topics, and often reactionary in tone, repudiating some of his earlier, more liberal, views. These include "Religion and Art" (1880) and "Heroism and Christianity" (1881), which were printed in the journal Bayreuther Blätter, published by his supporter Hans von Wolzogen. Wagner's sudden interest in Christianity at this period, which infuses Parsifal, was contemporary with his increasing alignment with German nationalism, and required on his part, and the part of his associates, "the rewriting of some recent Wagnerian history", so as to represent, for example, the Ring as a work reflecting Christian ideals. Many of these later articles, including "What is German?" (1878, but based on a draft written in the 1860s), repeated Wagner's antisemitic preoccupations.

 

Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera, which premiered on 26 May. Wagner was by this time extremely ill, having suffered a series of increasingly severe angina attacks. During the sixteenth and final performance of Parsifal on 29 August, he entered the pit unseen during act 3, took the baton from conductor Hermann Levi, and led the performance to its conclusion.

 

After the festival, the Wagner family journeyed to Venice for the winter. Wagner died of a heart attack at the age of 69 on 13 February 1883 at Ca' Vendramin Calergi, a 16th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal. The legend that the attack was prompted by an argument with Cosima over Wagner's supposedly amorous interest in the singer Carrie Pringle, who had been a Flower-maiden in Parsifal at Bayreuth, is without credible evidence. After a funerary gondola bore Wagner's remains over the Grand Canal, his body was taken to Germany where it was buried in the garden of the Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth.

The T-34 is a Soviet medium tank from World War II. When introduced, its 76.2 mm (3 in) tank gun was more powerful than its contemporaries, and its 60-degree sloped armour provided good protection against anti-tank weapons. The T-34 had a profound effect on the conflict on the Eastern Front, and had a long-lasting impact on tank design. The tank was praised by multiple German generals when encountered during Operation Barbarossa, although its armour and armament were surpassed later in the war. Though, its main strength was its cost and production time, meaning that German panzer forces would often fight against Soviet tank forces several times their size. The T-34 is also a critical part of the mechanized divisions that form the backbone of the Deep Battle Strategy.

 

The T-34 was the mainstay of the Soviet Red Army armoured forces throughout the war. Its general specifications remained nearly unchanged until early 1944, when it received a firepower upgrade with the introduction of the greatly improved T-34-85 variant. Its production method was continuously refined and rationalized to meet the needs of the Eastern Front, making the T-34 quicker and cheaper to produce. The Soviets ultimately built over 80,000 T-34s of all variants, allowing steadily greater numbers to be fielded despite the loss of tens of thousands in combat against the German Wehrmacht.

 

Replacing many light and medium tanks in Red Army service, it was the most-produced tank of the war, as well as the second most-produced tank of all time (after its successor, the T-54/T-55 series). With 44,900 lost during the war, it also suffered the most tank losses ever. Its development led directly to the T-44, then the T-54 and T-55 series of tanks, which in turn evolved into the later T-62, that form the armoured core of many modern armies. T-34 variants were widely exported after World War II, and as recently as 2010 more than 130 were still in service.

 

Development and production

Origins

In 1939, the most numerous Soviet tank models were the T-26 infantry tank and the BT series of fast tanks. The T-26 was slow-moving, designed to keep pace with infantry on the ground. The BT tanks were cavalry tanks: fast-moving and light, designed for manoeuver warfare. Both were Soviet developments of foreign designs from the early 1930s: the T-26 was based on the British Vickers 6-Ton, and the BT tanks were based on a design from American engineer J. Walter Christie.

 

In 1937, the Red Army had assigned engineer Mikhail Koshkin to lead a new team to design a replacement for the BT tanks at the Kharkiv Komintern Locomotive Plant (KhPZ). The prototype tank, designated A-20, had a modified BA-20 engine and was specified with 20 mm (0.8 in) of armour, a 45 mm (1.77 in) gun, the production model used a Model V-2-34 engine, a less-flammable diesel fuel in a V12 configuration designed by Konstantin Chelpan. It also had an 8×6-wheel convertible drive similar to the BT tank's 8×2, which allowed it to run on wheels without caterpillar tracks. This feature had greatly saved on maintenance and repair of the unreliable tank tracks of the early 1930s, and allowed tanks to exceed 85 kilometres per hour (53 mph) on roads, but gave no advantage in combat and its complexity made it difficult to maintain. By 1937–38, track design had improved and the designers considered it a waste of space, weight, and maintenance resources, despite the road speed advantage. The A-20 also incorporated previous research (BT-IS and BT-SW-2 projects) into sloped armour: its all-round sloped armour plates were more likely to deflect rounds than perpendicular armour.

 

During the Battle of Lake Khasan in July 1938 and the Battles of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, an undeclared border war with Japan on the frontier with occupied Manchuria, the Soviets deployed numerous tanks against the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). Although the IJA Type 95 Ha-Go light tanks had diesel engines, the Red Army's T-26 and BT tanks used petrol engines which, while common in tank designs of the time, often burst into flames when hit by IJA tank-killer teams using Molotov cocktails. Poor-quality welds in the Soviet armour plates left small gaps between them, and flaming petrol from the Molotov cocktails easily seeped into the fighting and engine compartment; portions of the armour plating that had been assembled with rivets also proved to be vulnerable. The Soviet tanks were also easily destroyed by the Japanese Type 95 tank's 37 mm gunfire, despite the low velocity of that gun, or "at any other slightest provocation". The use of riveted armour led to a problem whereby the impact of enemy shells, even if they failed to disable the tank or kill the crew on their own, would cause the rivets to break off and become projectiles inside the tank.

 

After these battles, Koshkin convinced Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to let him develop a second prototype, a more heavily armed and armoured "universal tank" that reflected the lessons learned and could replace both the T-26 and the BT tanks. Koshkin named the second prototype A-32, after its 32 mm (1.3 in) of frontal armour. It had an L-10 76.2 mm (3 in) gun, and the same Model V-2-34 diesel. Both were tested in field trials at Kubinka in 1939, with the heavier A-32 proving to be as mobile as the A-20. A still heavier version of the A-32, with 45 mm (1.77 in) of front armour, wider tracks, and a newer L-11 76.2 mm gun, was approved for production as the T-34. Koshkin chose the name after the year 1934, when he began to formulate his ideas about the new tank, and to commemorate that year's decree expanding the armoured force and appointing Sergo Ordzhonikidze to head tank production.

 

Valuable lessons from Lake Khasan and Khalkhin Gol regarding armour protection, mobility, quality welding, and main guns were incorporated into the new T-34 tank, which represented a substantial improvement over the BT and T-26 tanks in all four areas. Koshkin's team completed two prototype T-34s in January 1940. In April and May, they underwent a grueling 2,000-kilometre (1,200 mi) drive from Kharkiv to Moscow for a demonstration for the Kremlin leaders, to the Mannerheim Line in Finland, and back to Kharkiv via Minsk and Kiev. Some drivetrain shortcomings were identified and corrected.

 

Initial production

Resistance from the military command and concerns about high production cost were finally overcome by anxieties about the poor performance of Soviet tanks in the Winter War in Finland, and the effectiveness of German tanks during the Battle of France. The first production T-34s were completed in September 1940, completely replacing the production of the T-26, the BT series and the multi-turreted T-28 medium tank at the KhPZ plant. Koshkin died of pneumonia (exacerbated by the drive from Kharkiv to Moscow) at the end of that month, and the T-34's drivetrain developer, Alexander Morozov, was appointed Chief Designer.

 

The T-34 posed new challenges for the Soviet industry. It had heavier armour than any medium tank produced to date, and there were problems with defective armour plates. Only company commanders' tanks could be fitted with radios (originally the 71-TK-3 radio set), due to their expense and short supply – the rest of the tank crews in each company signalled with flags. The L-11 gun did not live up to expectations, so the Grabin Design Bureau at Gorky Factory N.92 designed the superior 76.2 mm F-34 gun. No bureaucrat would approve production of the new gun, but Gorky and KhPZ started producing it anyway; official permission came from the State Defense Committee only after troops praised the weapon's performance in combat against the Germans.

 

Production of this first T-34 series – the Model 1940 – totalled only about 400, before production was switched to the Model 1941, with the F-34 gun, 9-RS radio set (also installed on the SU-100), and even thicker armour.

 

Mass production

Subassemblies for the T-34 originated at several plants: Kharkiv Diesel Factory N.75 supplied the model V-2-34 engine, Leningrad Kirovsky Factory (formerly the Putilov works) made the original L-11 gun, and the Dinamo Factory in Moscow produced electrical components. Tanks were initially built at Plant N.183, in early 1941 at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory (STZ), and starting in July at Krasnoye Sormovo Factory N.112 in Gorky.

 

Total Soviet tank production

TypeNumber

Light tanks14,508

T-3435,119

T-34-8529,430

KV and KV-854,581

IS-3,854

SU-7612,671

SU-852,050

SU-1001,675

SU-1221,148

SU-1524,779

 

After Germany's surprise invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), the Wehrmacht's rapid advances forced the evacuation and relocation of Soviet tank factories eastwards to the Ural Mountains, an undertaking of immense scale and haste that presented enormous logistic difficulties and was extremely punishing to the workers involved. Alexander Morozov personally supervised the evacuation of all skilled engineers and laborers, machinery and stock from KhPZ to re-establish the factory at the site of the Dzerzhinsky Ural Railcar Factory in Nizhny Tagil, renamed Stalin Ural Tank Factory N.183. The Kirovsky Factory, evacuated just weeks before the Germans surrounded Leningrad, moved with the Kharkiv Diesel Factory to the Stalin Tractor Factory in Chelyabinsk, soon to be nicknamed Tankograd ("Tank City"). The workers and machinery from Leningrad's Voroshilov Tank Factory N.174 were incorporated into the Ural Factory and the new Omsk Factory N.174. The Ordzhonikidze Ural Heavy Machine Tool Works (UZTM) in Sverdlovsk absorbed workers and machines from several small machine shops in the path of German forces.

 

While these factories were being rapidly moved, the industrial complex surrounding the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory in Stalingrad continued to work double shifts throughout the period of withdrawal (September 1941 to September 1942) to make up for production lost, and produced 40% of all T-34s during the period. As the factory became surrounded by heavy fighting in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, the situation there grew desperate: manufacturing innovations were necessitated by material shortages, and stories persist of unpainted T-34 tanks driven out of the factory directly to the battlefields around it. Stalingrad kept up production until September 1942.

 

Soviet designers were aware of design deficiencies in the tank, but most of the desired remedies would have slowed tank production and so were not implemented: the only changes allowed on the production lines through to 1944 were those to make production simpler and cheaper. New methods were developed for automated welding and hardening the armour plate, including innovations by Prof. Evgeny Paton. The design of the 76.2 mm F-34 gun Model 1941 was reduced from an initial 861 parts to 614. The initial narrow, cramped turrets, both the cast one and the one welded of rolled armour plates bent to shape, were since 1942 gradually replaced with the somewhat less cramped hexagonal one; as it was mostly cast with only a few, simple flat armour plates welded in (roof etc.), this turret was actually faster to produce. Limited rubber supplies led to the adoption of all-steel, internally sprung road wheels, and a new clutch was added to an improved five-speed transmission and engine, improving reliability.

 

Over two years, the unit production cost of the T-34 was reduced from 269,500 Rbls in 1941, to 193,000 Rbls, and then to 135,000 Rbls.

 

In 1943, T-34 production had reached an average of 1,300 per month; this was the equivalent of three full-strength tank divisions. By the end of 1945, over 57,300 T-34s had been built: 34,780 T-34 tanks in multiple variants with 76.2 mm guns in 1940–44, and another 22,609 of the revised T-34-85 model in 1944–45. The single largest producer was Factory N.183 (UTZ), building 28,952 T-34s and T-34-85s from 1941 to 1945. The second-largest was Krasnoye Sormovo Factory N.112 in Gorky, with 12,604 in the same period.

 

At the start of the German-Soviet war, T-34s comprised about four percent of the Soviet tank arsenal, but by the end it made up at least 55% of tank production (based on figures from; Zheltov lists even larger numbers.

 

Following the end of the war, a further 2,701 T-34s were built prior to the end of Soviet production. Under licence, production was restarted in Poland (1951–55) and Czechoslovakia (1951–58), where 1,380 and 3,185 T-34-85s were made, respectively, by 1956. Altogether, as many as 84,070 T-34s are thought to have been built, plus 13,170 self-propelled guns built on T-34 chassis. It was the most-produced tank of the Second World War, and the second most-produced tank of all time, after its successor, the T-54/55 series.

 

Design

The T-34 had well-sloped armour, a relatively powerful engine and wide tracks. The initial T-34 version had a powerful 76.2 mm gun, and is often called the T-34/76 (originally a World War II German designation, never used by the Red Army). In 1944, a second major version began production, the T-34-85, with a larger 85 mm gun intended to deal with newer German tanks.

 

Comparisons can be drawn between the T-34 and the U.S. M4 Sherman tank. Both tanks were the backbone of the armoured units in their respective armies, both nations distributed these tanks to their allies, who also used them as the mainstay of their own armoured formations, and both were upgraded extensively and fitted with more powerful guns. Both were designed for mobility and ease of manufacture and maintenance, sacrificing some performance for these goals. Both chassis were used as the foundation for a variety of support vehicles, such as armour recovery vehicles, tank destroyers, and self-propelled artillery. Both were an approximately even match for the standard German medium tank, the Panzer IV, though each of these three tanks had particular advantages and weaknesses compared with the other two. Neither the T-34 nor the M4 was a match for Germany's heavier tanks, the Panther (technically a medium tank) or the Tiger I; the Soviets used the IS-2 heavy tank and the U.S. used the M26 Pershing as the heavy tanks of their forces instead.

 

Armour

The heavily sloped armour design made the tank better protected than the armour thickness alone would indicate. The shape also saved weight by reducing the thickness required to achieve equal protection. A few tanks also had appliqué armour of varying thickness welded onto the hull and turret. Tanks thus modified were called s ekranami (Russian: с экранами, "with screens").

 

The USSR donated two combat-used Model 1941 T-34s to the United States for testing purposes in late 1942. The examinations, performed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, revealed problems with overall armour build quality, especially of the plate joins and welds, as well as the use of soft steel combined with shallow surface tempering. Leak issues were noted: "In a heavy rain lots of water flows through chinks/cracks, which leads to the disabling of the electrical equipment and even the ammunition". Earlier models of the T-34, until the Model 1942, had cast turrets whose armour was softer than that of the other parts of the tank, and offered poor resistance even to 37 mm anti-aircraft shells. Early T-34s also suffered from poor quality welds, leading to instances of shells which would not have penetrated the tank under normal circumstances to penetrate anyway. They also suffered from rushed manufacturing, leading to inconsistent protection.

 

In addition, close examination of the T-34 at the Aberdeen Testing Ground showed that a variety of alloys were used in different portions of the armour on the T-34. "Mn-Si-Mo steels were employed for the thinner rolled armour sections, Cr-Mo steels for the thicker rolled armour sections, Mn-Si-Ni-Cr-Mo steels were employed for both rolled and cast steel components from 2" to 5" in thickness, and Ni-Cr-Mo steels were employed for some of the moderately thick cast armour sections". The armour was heat-treated in order to prevent penetration by armour-piercing shells, but this also caused it to be structurally weak, as the armor was very hard and thus brittle, resulting in strikes by high explosive shells causing spalling.

 

Despite these deficiencies, the T-34's armour proved problematic for the Germans in the initial stages of the war on the Eastern Front. In one wartime account, a single T-34 came under heavy fire upon encountering one of the most common German anti-tank guns at that stage of the war: "Remarkably enough, one determined 37 mm gun crew reported firing 23 times against a single T-34 tank, only managing to jam the tank’s turret ring." Similarly, a German report of May 1942 noted the ineffectiveness of their 50 mm gun as well, noting that "Combating the T-34 with the 5 cm KwK tank gun is possible only at short ranges from the flank or rear, where it is important to achieve a hit as perpendicular to the surface as possible." However, a Military Commissariat Report of the 10th Tank Division, dated 2 August 1941 reported that within 300–400 m the 37 mm Pak 36's armour-piercing shot could defeat the frontal armour. According to an examination of damaged T-34 tanks in several repair workshops in August to September 1942, collected by the People's Commissariat for Tank Industry in January 1943, 54.3% of all T-34 losses were caused by the German long-barreled 5 cm KwK 39 gun.

 

As the war went on, the T-34 gradually lost some of its initial advantages. The Germans responded to the T-34 by fielding large numbers of improved anti-tank weapons such as the towed 7.5 cm Pak 40 anti-tank gun, while hits from 88 mm-armed Tigers, anti-aircraft guns and 8.8 cm Pak 43 anti-tank guns usually proved lethal. In 1942 the German Panzer IVs were refitted with the 7.5 cm KwK 40 due to the inadequate anti-tank performance of previous German tank designs against the T-34. The upgunned Panzer IV posed a serious threat to the T-34-76, being able to penetrate the frontal turret of a T-34-76 at a range of 1,200 m (3,900 ft) at any angle.

 

A Wa Pruef 1 report estimated that, with the target angled 30° sideward, a Panther tank could penetrate the turret of a T-34-85 from the front at ranges up to 2000 m, the mantlet at 1200 m, and the frontal hull armour at 300 m. According to the Pantherfibel (the Panther tank manual for its crew), the T-34's glacis could be penetrated from 800 m and the mantlet from 1500 m at 30° sideward angle.

 

A Waffenamt-Prüfwesen 1 report estimated that with the T-34 angled 30 degrees sidewards and APCBC round, the Tiger I's 8.8 cm KwK 36 L/56 would have to close in to 100 m (110 yd) to achieve a penetration in the T-34's glacis, and could penetrate the frontal turret of a T-34-85 at 1,400 m, the mantlet at 400 m, and the nose at 300 m Ground trials by employees of NIBT Polygon in May 1943 reported that the 88 mm KwK 36 gun could pierce the T-34 frontal hull from 1,500 meters at 90 degrees and cause a disastrous burst effect inside the tank. The examined hull showed cracks, spalling, and delamination due to the poor quality of the armour. It was recommended to increase and improve the quality of welds and armour.

 

Analysis of destroyed T-34 tanks in the Korean War found that the 76 and 90 mm armour-piercing rounds of the M41 Walker Bulldog and M46 Patton could penetrate the T-34 at most angles from 800 yd (730 m). The maximum range at which the tanks could penetrate the T-34 could not be determined due to a lack of data at higher combat ranges.

 

In late 1950 a T-34-85 tank was captured by the UN security force in the Korean War. An evaluation of the tank was conducted by the USA which found that the sloped armour of the T-34 was desirable for deflecting shells. They also concluded that the armour was deemed as satisfactory as armour strength was comparable to US armour of similar hardness and that the quality of the material used was "high-grade". Similarly, casting was seen as high quality although casting defects were found in the side armour of the tank that negatively affected armour strength. The abundance of gaps in the joints of the armour was seen as an undesirable feature of the tank due to the risk of injury from "entry of bullet splash and shell fragments".

 

Firepower

The 76.2 mm (3.00 in) F-34 gun, fitted on the vast majority of T-34s produced through to the beginning of 1944, was able to penetrate any early German tank's armour at normal combat ranges. When firing APCR shells, it could pierce 92 mm (3.6 in) at 500 m (1,600 ft) and 60 mm (2.4 in) of armour at 1,000 m (3,300 ft) The best German tanks of 1941, the Panzer III and Panzer IV, had no more than 50 or 60 mm (2.0 or 2.4 in) of flat frontal armour. However by 1942 the Germans had increased the hull armour on the Panzer IV to 80 mm (3.1 in) which provided good protection at normal combat distances. The F-34 also fired an adequate high explosive round.

 

The gun sights and range finding for the F-34 main gun (either the TMFD-7 or the PT4-7) were rather crude, especially compared to those of their German adversaries, affecting accuracy and the ability to engage at long ranges.[68] As a result of the T-34's two-man turret, weak optics and poor vision devices, the Germans noted:

 

T-34s operated in a disorganized fashion with little coordination or else tended to clump together like a hen with its chicks. Individual tank commanders lacked situational awareness due to the poor provision of vision devices and preoccupation with gunnery duties. A tank platoon would seldom be capable of engaging three separate targets but would tend to focus on a single target selected by the platoon leader. As a result, T-34 platoons lost the greater firepower of three independently operating tanks.

 

The Germans also noted that the T-34 was very slow to find and engage targets, while their own tanks could typically get off three rounds for every one fired by the T-34. As the war progressed the Germans created heavier tank designs like the Tiger I or Panther which were both immune to the 76mm gun of the T-34 when fired upon from the front. This meant that they could only be penetrated from the sides at ranges of a few hundred metres. Due to low anti-tank performance, the T-34 was upgraded to the T-34-85 model. This model, with its 85 mm (3.35 in) ZiS gun, provided greatly increased firepower compared to the previous T-34's 76.2mm gun. The 85 mm gun could penetrate the turret front of a Tiger I tank from 500 m (550 yd) and the driver's front plate from 300 m (330 yd) at the side angle of 30 degrees, and the larger turret enabled the addition of another crew member, allowing the roles of commander and gunner to be separated and increasing the rate of fire and overall effectiveness. The D-5T was capable of penetrating the Tiger I's upper hull armour at 1,000 metres. When firing on the frontal armour of the Panther at an angle of 30 degrees sidewards, the T-34-85 could not penetrate its turret at 500 m (550 yd). This meant that the T-34 would have to resort to using tungsten rounds or firing on the weaker sides of the Panther to destroy it.

 

The greater length of the 85 mm gun barrel – 4.645 m (15 ft 2.9 in) – made it necessary for crews to be careful not to plough it into the ground on bumpy roads or in combat. Tank commander A.K. Rodkin commented: "the tank could have dug the ground with it in the smallest ditch [filling the barrel with dirt]. If you fired it after that, the barrel would open up at the end like the petals of a flower", destroying the barrel. Standard practice when moving the T-34-85 cross-country in non-combat situations was to fully elevate the gun, or reverse the turret.

 

During the Korean War, the USA captured a T-34-85. US engineering analysis and testing concluded that the T-34-85 could penetrate 4.1 in (100 mm) at 1,000 yd (910 m), performing similarly to the HVAP rounds of the M41. The Americans also concluded the maximum range of the gun was 2–3 km (1.2–1.9 mi), but the effective range was only up to 1,900 m (1.2 mi).

 

Mobility

The T-34 was powered by a Model V-2-34 38.8 L V12 Diesel engine of 500 hp (370 kW),[d] giving a top speed of 53 km/h (33 mph). It used the coil-spring Christie suspension of the earlier BT-series tanks, using a "slack track" tread system with a rear-mounted drive sprocket and no system of return rollers for the upper run of track, but dispensed with the heavy and ineffective convertible drive. T-34 tanks equipped with the 4-speed gearbox could only use 4th gear on road, being limited to 3rd on terrain. In the first batch of T-34s, shifting from 2nd to 3rd required a force of 46-112 kg. In September 1941, however, changes were made which lowered the effort to under 31 kg by changing the 3rd gear ratio, which lowered top speed in 3rd gear from 29 km/h to 25 km/h, but made shifting easier. Using the 5-speed gearbox allowed the T-34 to use 4th gear on terrain, with which it could reach 30 km/h.

 

The T-34-76's ground pressure was around 0.72 kg/cm². Its wide tracks allowed for superior performance on dirt roads and off-road when compared to contemporary tanks. There were, however, still examples of T-34s getting stuck in mud. For example, in 1944 February 4, the 21st Guards Tank Brigade with 32 T-34, was ordered to proceed by road to Tolstoye Rogi, a journey of approximately 80 kilometers. Of the 32 tanks, no less than 19 got stuck in the mud or suffered mechanical breakdowns.

 

Ergonomics

The original 76mm armed T-34 suffered from the unsatisfactory ergonomic layout of its crew compartment compared to the later 85mm variant. The two-man turret crew arrangement required the commander to aim and fire the gun, an arrangement common to most Soviet tanks of the day. The two-man turret was "cramped and inefficient" and was inferior to the three-man (commander, gunner, and loader) turret crews of German Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks. The Germans noted the T-34 was very slow to find and engage targets while the Panzers could typically get off three rounds for every one fired by the T-34.

 

Early in the war, the commander fought at a further disadvantage; the forward-opening hatch and the lack of a turret cupola forced him to observe the battlefield through a single vision slit and traversable periscope.[81] German commanders liked to fight "heads-up", with their seat raised and having a full field of view – in the T-34 this was impossible. Soviet veterans condemned the turret hatches of the early models. Nicknamed pirozhok ("stuffed bun") because of its characteristic shape, it was heavy and hard to open. The complaints of the crews urged the design group led by Alexander Morozov to switch in August 1942 to using two hatches in the turret.

 

The loader also had a difficult job due to the lack of a turret basket (a rotating floor that moves as the turret turns); the same fault was present on all German tanks prior to the Panzer IV. The floor under the T-34's turret was made up of ammunition stored in small metal boxes, covered by a rubber mat. There were nine ready rounds of ammunition stowed in racks on the sides of the fighting compartment. Once these rounds had been used, the crew had to pull additional ammunition out of the floor boxes, leaving the floor littered with open bins and matting and reducing their performance.

 

The main weakness [of the two-man turret of a T-34 Model 1941] is that it is very tight. The Americans couldn't understand how our tankers could fit inside during a winter when they wear sheepskin jackets. The electrical mechanism for rotating the turret is very bad. The motor is weak, very overloaded and sparks horribly, as a result of which the device regulating the speed of the rotation burns out, and the teeth of the cogwheels break into pieces. They recommend replacing it with a hydraulic or simply manual system. Due to not having a turret basket the crew was [sic] could be injured by getting caught in the drive mechanism, this could leave them out of combat for a while, the lack of a turret basket also caused general discomfort to the crew, having to manually turn.

 

Most of the problems created by the cramped T-34/76 turret, known before the war, were corrected with the provision of a bigger cast three-man turret[86] on the T-34-85 in 1944.

 

General reliability

The T-34's wide track and good suspension gave it excellent cross-country performance. Early in the tank's life, however, this advantage was greatly reduced by the numerous teething troubles the design displayed: a long road trip could be a lethal exercise for a T-34 tank at the start of the war. When in June 1941, the 8th Mechanised Corps under Dmitry Ryabyshev marched 500 km towards Dubno, the corps lost half of its vehicles. A.V. Bodnar, who was in combat in 1941–42, recalled:

 

From the point of view of operating them, the German armoured machines were almost perfect, they broke down less often. For the Germans, covering 200 km was nothing, but with T-34s something would have been lost, something would have broken down. The technological equipment of their machines was better, the combat gear was worse.

 

The T-34 gearbox had four forward and one reverse gear, replaced by a five-speed box on the last of the 1943 model of the T-34.

 

The tracks of early models were the most frequently repaired part. A.V. Maryevski later remembered:

 

The caterpillars used to break apart even without a bullet or shell hits. When earth got stuck between the road wheels, the caterpillar, especially during a turn – strained to such an extent that the pins and tracks themselves couldn't hold out.

 

The USSR donated two combat-used Model 1941 T-34s to the United States for testing purposes in late 1942. The examinations, performed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, highlighted these early faults, which were in turn acknowledged in a 1942 Soviet report on the results of the testing:

 

The Christie's suspension was tested a long time ago by the Americans and unconditionally rejected. On our tanks, as a result of the poor steel on the springs, it very quickly fatigues and as a result clearance is noticeably reduced. The deficiencies in our tracks from their viewpoint result from the lightness of their construction. They can easily be damaged by small-caliber and mortar rounds. The pins are extremely poorly tempered and made of poor steel. As a result, they quickly wear and the track often breaks.

 

Testing at Aberdeen also revealed that engines could grind to a halt from dust and sand ingestion, as the original "Pomon" air filter was almost totally ineffective and had an insufficient air-inflow capacity, starving the combustion chambers of oxygen, lowering compression, and thereby restricting the engine from operating at full capacity. The air filter issue was later remedied by the addition of "Cyclone" filters on the Model 1943, and even more efficient "Multi-Cyclone" filters on the T-34-85.

 

The testing at Aberdeen revealed other problems as well. The turret drive also suffered from poor reliability. The use of poorly machined, low quality steel side friction clutches and the T-34's outdated and poorly manufactured transmission meant frequent mechanical failure occurred and that they "create an inhuman harshness for the driver". A lack of properly installed and shielded radios – if they existed at all – restricted their operational range to under 16 km (9.9 mi).

 

Judging by samples, Russians when producing tanks pay little attention to careful machining or the finishing and technology of small parts and components, which leads to the loss of the advantage what would otherwise accrue from what on the whole are well-designed tanks. Despite the advantages of the use of diesel, the good contours of the tanks, thick armor, good and reliable armaments, the successful design of the tracks etc., Russian tanks are significantly inferior to American tanks in their simplicity of driving, manoeuvrability, the strength of firing (reference to muzzle velocity), speed, the reliability of mechanical construction and the ease of keeping them running.

 

Soviet tests on newly built T-34’s showed that in April 1943 only 10.1% could complete a 330 km trial and in June ’43 this went down to 7.7%. The percentage stayed below 50% till October 1943 when it rose to 78%, in the next month it dropped to 57% and in the period December ’43 – January ’44 the average was 82%. During February 1944 tests, 79% of tanks reached 300 kilometers, and of the test batches 33% reached 1,000 kilometers. This became immediately apparent to the tank troops. The deputy commander of the 1st Guards Tank Army, P. G. Dyner, commented that tanks in 1943 would reach only 75 percent of their guaranteed life span in engine hours and mileage, but in 1944 they reached 150 percent.

 

In 1944 June, a report written by the 2. Panzerjäger-Abteilung Company 128 (23. PzDiv.) described experiences acquired during operations with its Beutepanzer SU-85 and T-34:

 

Despite not having much experience yet, it can be said that the Russian battle tank is not suitable for carrying out long marches as well as high-speed marches. A maximum driving speed of 10–12 km / h has become convenient. During the marches and in order to allow the engines to cool down, it is absolutely necessary to make a stop every half hour for a minimum duration of between fifteen and twenty minutes.

 

Steering gears have caused problems and breakdowns on all new battle tanks. In difficult terrain, during the gears or also during the course of attacks where many changes of direction are made, the steering clutch heats up and covers with oil quickly: consequently the clutch does not engage and it is impossible to maneuver the vehicle. Once it has cooled down, the clutch should be cleaned with copious amounts of fuel.

 

In relation to the armament and based on the experiences acquired so far, it can be affirmed that the power of the 7.62 cm cannon is good. If the barrel is adjusted correctly it has good precision even at great distances. The same can be said of the rest of the automatic weapons of the battle tank. The weapons have good precision and reliability, although a slow rate of fire.

 

The Company has had the same positive experiences with the 8.5 cm assault gun. Regarding the true power of fire compared to the 7.62 cm gun, the Company is not yet able to give details. The effect of explosive projectiles ( Sprenggranaten ) at great distances and its precision is much higher than that of the 7.62 cm cannon.

 

The optical systems of the Russian battle tank are, in comparison with the Germans, much inferior. The German gunner has to get used to the Russian telescopic sight. Observing the impact or the trajectory of the projectile through the telescopic sight is only partially possible. The gunner of the Russian T-43 [sic] battle tank has only a panoramic optic, located in the upper left area, in front of the telescopic sight. In order for the loader to be able to observe the trajectory of the projectile in any case, the Company has additionally incorporated a second panoramic optics for this member of the crew.

 

In the Russian tank it is very difficult to steer the vehicle or a unit and shoot simultaneously. Coordinating fire within a company is only partially possible.

 

On January 29, 1945, the State Defense Committee approved a decree that extended the service life guarantee of the T-34's V-2-34 engine from 200 hours to 250 hours. A report by the 2nd Guards Tank Army in February 1945 revealed that the average engine service life of a T-34 was lower than the official warranty at 185–190 hours. For comparison, the US M4 Sherman had an average engine service life of 195–205 hours.

 

Operational history

Operation Barbarossa (1941)

Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its invasion of the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941. At the start of hostilities, the Red Army had 967 T-34 tanks and 508 KV tanks concentrated in five of their twenty-nine mechanized corps. The existence of the T-34 and KV heavy tanks proved a psychological shock to German soldiers, who had expected to face an inferior enemy. The T-34 was superior to any tank the Germans then had in service. The diary of Alfred Jodl seems to express surprise at the appearance of the T-34 in Riga, noting "the surprise at this new and thus unknown wunder-armament being unleashed against the German assault divisions". Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, called it "the finest tank in the world" and Heinz Guderian affirmed the T-34's "vast superiority" over German tanks.

 

Initially, the Wehrmacht had great difficulty destroying T-34s in combat, as standard German anti-tank weaponry proved ineffective against its heavy, sloped armour. In one of the first known encounters, a T-34 crushed a 3.7 cm PaK 36, destroyed two Panzer IIs, and left a 14-kilometre (8.7 mi) long swathe of destruction in its wake before a howitzer destroyed it at close range. In another incident, a single Soviet T-34 was hit more than 30 times by a battalion-sized contingent of German 37mm and 50mm anti-tank guns, yet survived intact and drove back to its own lines a few hours later. The inability to penetrate the T-34's armour led to the Germans' standard anti-tank gun, the 37 mm PaK 36, being dubbed the Panzeranklopfgerät ("tank door knocker") because the PaK 36 crew simply revealed their presence and wasted their shells without damaging the T-34's armour. Anti-tank gunners began aiming at tank tracks, or vulnerable margins on the turret ring and gun mantlet, rather than the bow and turret armour. The Germans were forced to deploy 105 mm field guns and 88 mm anti-aircraft guns in a direct fire role to stop them.

 

Despite this, the Soviet corps equipped with these new tanks lost most of them within weeks. The combat statistics for 1941 show that the Soviets lost an average of over seven tanks for every German tank lost. The Soviets lost a total of 20,500 tanks in 1941 (approximately 2,300 of them T-34s, as well as over 900 heavy tanks, mostly KVs). The destruction of the Soviet tank force was accomplished not only by the glaring disparity in the tactical and operational skills of the opponents, but also by mechanical defects that afflicted Soviet armour. Besides the poor state of older tanks, the new T-34s and KVs suffered from initial mechanical and design problems, particularly with regard to clutches and transmissions. Mechanical breakdowns accounted for at least 50 percent of the tank losses in the summer fighting, and recovery or repair equipment was not to be found. The shortage of repair equipment and recovery vehicles led the early T-34 crews to enter combat carrying a spare transmission on the engine deck.

 

Other key factors diminishing the initial impact of T-34s on the battlefield were the poor state of leadership, tank tactics, initial lack of radios in tanks, and crew training; these factors were partially consequences of Stalin's purge of the Soviet officer corps in 1937, reducing the army's efficiency and morale. This was aggravated as the campaign progressed by the loss of many of the properly trained personnel during the Red Army's disastrous defeats early in the invasion. Typical crews went into combat with only basic military training plus 72 hours of classroom instruction; according to historian Steven Zaloga:

 

The weakness of mechanized corps lay not in the design of their equipment, but rather in its poor mechanical state, the inadequate training of their crews, and the abysmal quality of Soviet military leadership in the first month of the war.

 

Further action (1942–1943)

As the invasion progressed, German infantry began receiving increasing numbers of the 7.5 cm Pak 40 anti-tank guns, which were capable of penetrating the T-34's armour at long range. Larger numbers of the 88 mm Flak guns also arrived, which could easily defeat a T-34 at very long ranges, though their size and general unwieldiness meant that they were often difficult to move into position in the rough Soviet terrain.

 

At the same time, the Soviets incrementally upgraded the T-34. The Model 1942 featured increased armour on the turret and many simplified components. The Model 1943 (confusingly also introduced in 1942) had yet more armour, as well as increased fuel capacity and more ammunition storage. Also added were an improved engine air filter and a new clutch mated to an improved and more reliable five-speed transmission. Finally, the Model 1943 also had a new, slightly roomier (but still two-man) turret of a distinctive hexagonal shape that was easier to manufacture, derived from the abandoned T-34M project.

 

The T-34 was essential in resisting the German summer offensive in 1942, and executing the double encirclement manoeuvre that cut off the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in December 1942. The Sixth Army was surrounded, and eventually surrendered in February 1943, a campaign widely regarded as the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front.

 

In 1943, the Soviets formed Polish and Czechoslovak armies-in-exile, and these started to receive the T-34 Model 1943 with a hexagonal turret. Like the Soviet forces themselves, the Polish and Czechoslovak tank crews were sent into action quickly with little training, and suffered high casualties.

 

In July 1943, the Germans launched Operation Citadel, in the region around Kursk, their last major offensive on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. It was the debut of the German Panther tank, although the numbers employed at the resulting Battle of Kursk were small and the brunt of the burden was carried by the Panzer III, StuG III, and Panzer IV. The campaign featured the largest tank battles in history. The high-water mark of the battle was the massive armour engagement at Prokhorovka, which began on 12 July, though the vast majority of armour losses on both sides were caused by artillery and mines, rather than tanks. Over 6,000 fully tracked armoured vehicles, 4,000 combat aircraft, and 2 million men are believed to have participated in these battles.

 

The Soviet high command's decision to focus on one cost-effective design, cutting costs and simplifying production wherever possible while only allowing relatively minor improvements, had proven to be an astute choice for the first two years of the war. However, the battles in the summer of 1943 demonstrated that the 76.2 mm gun of the T-34 was no longer as effective as it was in 1941. Soviet tank crews struggled at longer ranges with the additional frontal armour applied to the later variants of the Panzer III and Panzer IV, and were unable to penetrate the frontal armour of the new German Panther or Tiger I tank at standard combat ranges without tungsten rounds, and had to rely on tactical skill through flanking manoeuvres and combined arms.

 

T-34-85

After improved German Panzer IVs with the high-velocity 7.5cm (2.95 in) KwK 40 gun were encountered in combat in 1942, a project to design an entirely new Soviet tank was begun, with the goals of increasing armour adding modern features like a torsion-bar suspension and a three-man turret. The new tank, the T-43, was intended to be a universal model to replace both the T-34 and the KV-1 heavy tank. However, the T-43 prototype's armour, though heavier, was not capable against German 88 mm guns, while its mobility was found to be inferior to the T-34. Finally, although the T-43 shared over 70% of its components with the T-34, manufacturing it would still have required a significant slow-down in production. Consequently, the T-43 was cancelled.

 

Not only were the weapons of German tanks improving, so was their armour. Soviet firing tests against a captured Tiger I heavy tank in April 1943 showed that the T-34's 76 mm gun could not penetrate the front of the Tiger I at all, and the side only at very close range. A Soviet 85 mm anti-aircraft gun, the M1939 (52-K), was found capable of doing the job, and so derivatives of it were developed for tanks. One of the resulting guns used on the original T-34 85 model (the D-5T) was capable of penetrating the Tiger I's upper hull armour at 1,000 metres. It was still not enough to match the Tiger, which could destroy the T-34 from a distance of 1,500 to 2,000 m (4,900 to 6,600 ft), but it was a noticeable improvement.

 

With the T-43 canceled, the Soviet command made the decision to retool the factories to produce an improved version of the T-34. Its turret ring was enlarged from 1,425 mm (56 in) to 1,600 mm (63 in), allowing a larger turret to be fitted supporting the larger 85 mm gun. The prototype T-43's turret design was hurriedly adopted by Vyacheslav Kerichev at the Krasnoye Sormovo Factory to fit the T-34. This was a larger three-man turret, with radio (previously in the hull) and observation cupola in the roof. Now the tank commander needed only to command (aided by cupola and radio systems), leaving the operation of the gun to the gunner and the loader. The turret was bigger and less sloped than the original T-34 turret, making it a bigger target (due to the three-man crew and bigger gun), but with thicker 90 mm armour, making it more resistant to enemy fire. The shells were 50% heavier (9 kg) and were much better in the anti-armour role, and reasonable in a general purpose role, though only 55–60 could be carried, instead of 90–100 of the earlier shells. The resulting new tank, the T-34-85, was seen as a compromise between advocates for the T-43 and others who wanted to continue to build as many 76 mm-armed T-34s as possible without interruption.

 

Production of the T-34-85 began in January 1944 at Factory No. 112, first using the D-5T 85 mm gun. Parallel to the production of the T-34-85 with the D-5T gun, production of the T-34-85 using the S-53 gun (later to be modified and redesignated as the ZIS-S-53 gun) began in February 1944 at Factory No. 112. The improved T-34-85 became the standard Soviet medium tank, with an uninterrupted production run until the end of the war. A T-34-85 initially cost about 30 percent more to produce than a Model 1943, at 164,000 Rbls; by 1945 this had been reduced to 142,000 Rbls during the course of World War II the cost of a T-34 tank had almost halved, from 270,000 Rbls in 1941, while its top speed remained about the same, and its main gun's armour penetration and turret frontal armour thickness both nearly doubled.

 

The T-34-85 gave the Red Army a tank with better armour and mobility than the German Panzer IV tank and StuG III assault gun. While it could not match the armour or weapons of the heavier Panther and Tiger tanks, its improved firepower made it much more effective than earlier models, and overall it was more cost-effective than the heaviest German tanks. In comparison with the T-34-85 program, the Germans instead chose an upgrade path based on the introduction of completely new, expensive, heavier, and more complex tanks, greatly slowing the growth of their tank production and helping the Soviets to maintain a substantial numerical superiority in tanks. By May 1944, T-34-85 production had reached 1,200 tanks per month. In the entire war, production figures for all Panther types reached no more than 6,557, and for all Tiger types (including the Tiger I and Tiger II) 2,027. Production figures for the T-34-85 alone reached 22,559.

 

On 12 January 1945, a column of Tiger IIs and other tanks from 424th Heavy Panzer Battalion were involved in a short-range engagement with T-34-85 tanks near the village of Lisow. Forty T-34-85 tanks commanded by Colonel N. Zhukov were attacked by the 424th Heavy Panzer battalion, which had been reinforced by 13 Panthers. The Germans permanently lost five Tiger IIs, seven Tiger Is and five Panthers for the loss of four T-34-85 tanks burnt out.

 

German use of T-34s

The German army often employed as much captured materiel as possible and T-34s were not an exception. Large numbers of T-34s were captured in fighting on the Eastern Front though few were T-34-85s. These were designated by the Germans as Panzerkampfwagen T-34 747. From late 1941, captured T-34s were transported to a German workshop for repairs and modification to German requirements. In 1943 a local tank factory in Kharkiv was used for this purpose. These were sometimes modified to German standards by the installation of a German commander's cupola and radio equipment.

 

The first captured T-34s entered German service during the summer of 1941. In order to prevent recognition mistakes, large-dimension crosses or even swastikas were painted on the tanks, including on top of the turret, in order to prevent attack by Axis aircraft. Badly damaged tanks were either dug in as pillboxes or were used for testing and training purposes.

 

After the end of World War II, East Germany continued to utilize the T-34.

 

Manchurian campaign (August 1945)

Just after midnight on 9 August 1945, though the terrain was believed by the Japanese to be impassable by armoured formations, the Soviet Union invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Red Army combined-arms forces achieved complete surprise and used a powerful, deep-penetrating attack in a classic double encirclement pattern, spearheaded by the T-34-85. The opposing Japanese forces had been reduced as elite units had been drawn off to other fronts and the remaining forces were in the middle of a redeployment. The Japanese tanks remaining to face them were all held in the rear and not used in combat; the Japanese had weak support from IJAAF forces, engineering, and communications. Japanese forces were overwhelmed, though some put up resistance. The Japanese emperor transmitted a surrender order on 14 August, but the Kwantung Army was not given a formal cease-fire until 17 August.

 

Korean War (1950–1953)

A full North Korean People's Army (KPA) brigade equipped with about 120 Soviet-supplied T-34-85s spearheaded the invasion of South Korea in June 1950. The WWII-era 2.36-inch bazookas initially used by the US troops in South Korea were useless against the KPA's T-34 tanks, as were the 75 mm main guns of the M24 Chaffee light tank. However, following the introduction of heavier and more capable armour into the war by US and UN forces, such as the American M4 Sherman, M26 Pershing and M46 Patton tanks, as well as the British Comet and Centurion tanks, the KPA began to suffer more T-34 tank losses in combat from enemy armour, aside from further losses due to numerous US/UN airstrikes and increasingly-effective anti-tank firepower for US/UN infantry on the ground, such as the then-new 3.5-inch M20 "Super Bazooka" (replacing the earlier 2.36-inch model). By the time the NKPA were forced to withdraw from the south, about 239 T-34s and 74 SU-76 assault guns had been lost or abandoned. After October 1950, NKPA armour was rarely encountered. Despite China's entry into the conflict in the following month, no major armour deployments were carried out by them, as the Chinese focus was on massed infantry attacks rather than large-scale armour assaults. Several T-34-85s and a few IS-2 tanks were fielded, primarily dispersed amongst their infantry, thus making armoured engagements with US and UN forces rare from then on.

 

A Chinese T-34 tank No. 215 from 4th Tank Regiment, 2nd Tank Division, allegedly destroyed four enemy tanks and damaged another M46 Patton tank during its fight from 6 to 8 July 1953. It also destroyed 26 bunkers,9 artillery pieces, and a truck. That tank is now preserved in the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution.

 

In summary, a 1954 US military survey concluded that there were, in all, 119 tanks vs. tank actions involving US Army and US Marine units against North Korean and Chinese forces during the Korean War, with 97 T-34-85 tanks knocked out and another 18 considered probable. American losses were somewhat greater.

 

Angolan Civil War (1975–1988)

One of the last modern conflicts which saw the extensive combat deployment of the T-34-85 was the Angolan Civil War. In 1975, the Soviet Union shipped eighty T-34-85s to Angola as part of its support for the ongoing Cuban military intervention there. Cuban crewmen instructed FAPLA personnel in their operation; other FAPLA drivers and gunners accompanied Cuban crews in an apprentice role.

 

FAPLA began deploying T-34-85s against the UNITA and FNLA forces on June 9, 1975. The appearance of FAPLA and Cuban tanks prompted South Africa to reinforce UNITA with a single squadron of Eland-90 armoured cars.

 

Other regions and countries

In early 1991, the Yugoslav People's Army possessed 250 T-34-85s, none of which were in active service. During the breakup of Yugoslavia, the T-34-85s were inherited by the national armies of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia and Montenegro and continued to see action during the Yugoslav Wars. Some were also acquired from Yugoslav reserve stocks by Serbian separatist armies, namely the Army of the Republic of Serb Krajina (SVK) and the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS). Most of these tanks were in poor condition at the beginning of the conflict and some were soon rendered unserviceable, likely through inadequate maintenance and lack of spares.

 

On 3 May 1995, a VRS T-34-85 attacked an UNPROFOR outpost manned by the 21st Regiment of the Royal Engineers in Maglaj, Bosnia, injuring six British peacekeepers, with at least one of them sustaining a permanent disability. A number of T-34s being stored by the VRS at a base in Zvornik were temporarily confiscated by UNPROFOR as part of a local disarmament programme the following year.

 

Middle East

Czechoslovak-produced T-34-85s were used by Egypt in the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1956 and 1967 (Six-Day War) in the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt went on to build the T-34-100, a local and unique conversion that was made up of a Soviet BS-3 100 mm heavy field-artillery gun mounted within a heavily modified turret, as well as the T-34-122 mounting the D-30 gun. In 1956, they were used as regular tanks to support Egyptian infantry, the tank was still in use by the Yom Kippur War in October 1973.

 

The Syrian Army also received T-34-85s from the Soviet Union and they took part in the many artillery duels with Israeli tanks in November 1964 and in the Six-Day War of 1967.

 

Warsaw Pact

T-34-85s equipped many of the armies of Eastern European countries (later forming the Warsaw Pact) and the armies of other Soviet client-states elsewhere. East German, Hungarian and Soviet T-34-85s served in the suppression of the East German uprising of 17 June 1953 as well as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

 

Afghanistan

T-34-85s were sporadically available in Afghanistan. During the Soviet–Afghan War, most of the T-34s were fielded by the Sarandoy internal security forces. Some were also kept in service with the Army of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

 

China

After the formation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Soviet Union sent many T-34-85s to the PRC's People's Liberation Army (PLA). Factory 617 had the ability to produce every part of the T-34-85, and during decades of service many modifications were made that visibly distinguish the PRC T-34-85 from the original specification, but no T-34-85 was actually made in China. The production plan of the T-34-85 in China was ended soon after the PRC received T-54A main battle tanks from the Soviet Union and began to build the Type 59 tank, a licensed production version of the T-54A.

 

Cuba

Cuba received 150 T-34-85 tanks as military aid from the Soviet Union in 1960. The T-34-85 was the first Soviet tank to enter service with the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), along with the IS-2. Many T-34-85 tanks first saw action in April 1961 during the Bay of Pigs Invasion with an unknown number destroyed or knocked out during the battle. In 1975, many T-34-85s were also donated by the USSR to the FAR to support its lengthy intervention in the Angolan Civil War.

 

A platoon of five Cuban T-34-85s saw combat in Angola against South African troops during the Battle of Cassinga. The tanks were based along with a company of Cuban mechanized infantry equipped with BTR-152 armoured personnel carriers. In May 1978, South Africa launched a major airborne raid on Cassinga with the objective of destroying a SWAPO (South West African People's Organisation) base there. The Cuban forces were mobilised to stop them. As they approached Cassinga they were strafed by South African aircraft, which destroyed most of the BTR-152s and three of the T-34-85s; a fourth T-34-85 was disabled by an anti-tank mine buried in the road. The remaining tank continued to engage the withdrawing South African paratroops from a hull down position until the battle was over.

 

Over a hundred Cuban T-34-85s and their respective crews remained in Angola as of the mid 1980s. In September 1986, Cuban president Fidel Castro complained to General Konstantin Kurochkin, head of the Soviet military delegation to Angola, that his men could no longer be expected to fight South African armour with T-34s of "World War II vintage"; Castro insisted that the Soviets furbish the Cuban forces with a larger quantity of T-55s. By 1987 Castro's request appeared to have been granted, as Cuban tank battalions were able to deploy substantial numbers of T-54Bs, T-55s, and T-62s; the T-34-85 was no longer in service.

 

Cyprus

Cypriot National Guard forces equipped with some 35 T-34-85 tanks helped to support a coup by the Greek junta against President Archbishop Makarios on 15 July 1974. They also saw extensive action against Turkish forces during the Turkish invasion in July and August 1974, with two major actions at Kioneli and at Kyrenia on 20 July 1974.

 

Namibia

In 1984, the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) made a concerted attempt to establish its own conventional armoured battalion through its armed wing, the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN). As part of this effort, SWAPO diplomatic representatives in Europe approached the German Democratic Republic with a request for ten T-34 tanks, which were delivered. PLAN T-34s were never deployed during offensive operations against the South African military, being confined to the role of protecting strategic bases inside northern Angola.

 

By 1988 the PLAN T-34-85s had been stationed near Luanda, where their crews received training from Cuban instructors. In March 1989, the PLAN tanks were mobilised and moved south towards the Namibian border. South Africa accused PLAN of planning a major offensive to influence Namibia's pending general elections, but the tank crews did not cross the border and refrained from intervening in a series of renewed clashes later that year. Between 1990 and 1991, SWAPO ordered the PLAN tanks in Angola repatriated to Namibia at its own expense. Four later entered service with the new Namibian Army.

 

Finland

The Soviet and Finnish armies used T-34s until the 1960s; the former included the 76.2 mm-armed versions until at least 1968, when they were used in filming the sequel to the movie The Alive and the Dead. The Finnish tanks were captured directly from the Soviets or purchased from Germany's captured stocks. Many of the Т-34-85s were enhanced with Finnish or Western equipment, such as improved optics.

 

Vietnam

During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese Army was equipped with many Soviet T-34-85 and these were used in the Operation Lam Son 719, the 1972 Easter Offensive and the 1975 Spring Offensive. They were later used during the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea and the Sino-Vietnamese War. A small number are currently being used as trainers. The rest are in storage and no longer serve as active duty battle tanks.

 

Yemen

In 2015, both T-34-85 Model 1969 tanks and SU-100 self-propelled guns were photographed being used in Houthi takeover in Yemen. Some were even being fitted with anti-tank guided missiles.

 

Current active service

In 2018, there were nine countries that maintained T-34s in the inventories of their national armed forces: Cuba, Yemen, the Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. Of these operators, Vietnam possessed the largest known surviving fleet of T-34 series tanks, with 45. Yemen possessed 30, Guinea 30, Guinea-Bissau 10, Mali 21, and Laos 30. It was unclear how many Cuban and North Korean T-34s remained in service. All the Congolese, Namibian and Malian tanks were believed to be in reserve storage or inoperable. The Laotian Army retired its T-34s in early 2019 and sold them to Russia, to be used for public displays and museum exhibits.

 

Successors

In 1944, pre-war development of a more advanced T-34 tank was resumed, leading to the T-44. The new tank had a turret design based on the T-34-85's, but featured a new hull with torsion-bar suspension and transversely mounted engine; it had a lower profile than the T-34-85 and was simpler to manufacture. Between 150 and 200 of these tanks were built before the end of the war. With substantial drivetrain changes, a new turret, and 100 mm gun, it became the T-54, starting production in 1947

The Historic Mill of Sanssouci is a mill in Potsdam, Germany. Thanks to the legend of The Miller of Sanssouci (German: Der Müller von Sanssouci), the Mill (Historische Mühle) became famous, particularly due to its association with Frederick the Great and his summer palace of Sanssouci.

 

History of the Mill

In 1736 the soldier king, Frederick William I of Prussia, gave permission for the construction of a windmill, which was started in 1737. This first windmill, completed in 1738, was a post mill, whose entire superstructure, supported on a wooden post, was turned "into the wind" depending on the wind direction. The first mill and actual Historic Mill was thus older than the nearby summer palace, built in the years 1745 to 1747 for Frederick the Great.

 

A half-century later the, by now dilapidated, post mill had to be demolished. The construction of a new mill, between 1787 and 1791, was financed by Frederick William II, because the mill had become famous far beyond the city of Potsdam as the result of a legend. The task was given to the master builder, Cornelius Wilhelm van der Bosch, who erected a bigger smock mill based on the Dutch prototype in place of the post mill.

 

Following the accession of Frederick William IV in 1840, the landscape architect, Peter Joseph Lenné, smartened up the area around the mill. In connexion with this, a triumphal way was planned by the king, in honour of Frederick the Great, but it was only partially realised. It was intended to incorporate the Historic Mill into this project as the road was to run from the Gate of Triumph, east of Sanssouci Park, and run past the newly built Orangery Palace to the Belvedere on the Klausberg. The March Revolution of 1848 and a lack of finance, however, meant that this grand project came to nothing.

 

In 1858 the last miller finished his tenancy. Because the king refused to allow other applicants to run the mill, the building became open to visitors in 1861.

 

At the end of the Second World War, on 27 April 1945, a Soviet tank was hit by a panzerfaust between the mill and the drive up to Sanssouci Palace. In the battle that followed the mill and the Swiss house at its foot were set ablaze. Both buildings were destroyed, but the Swiss house (Schweizerhaus) was not rebuilt.

 

Reconstruction of the Historic Mill

In 1983 the Potsdam Chamber of Commerce began the restoration of the stone base. This work had to be stopped in 1990 due to financial difficulties. At the end of 1991, the rebuilding work was able to start again thanks to donations from the state of Brandenburg, the North Rhine-Westphalia Foundation and the then Potsdam-Sanssouci Foundation of Prussian Palaces and Gardens.

 

The present smock mill is a replica of the one built from 1787 to 1791 and the third so-called Historic Mill. It had to be planned from photographs and measurements of the mill foundations, because the construction drawings by Cornelius Wilhelm van der Bosch were no longer available.

 

The mill is owned by the Berlin-Brandenburg Foundation for Prussian Palaces and Gardens (Stiftung Preußische Schlösser and Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg). It has been operated since 1995 by the Berlin-Brandenburg Mill Association, founded in 1990.

 

Since 1984 a replica of the Historic Mill of Sanssouci in Potsdam has stood in the open land of the Gifhorn Mill Museum.

 

Technical data

The design reflects construction methods around the year 1800, its technical equipment in part that of the turn of the 19th century.

 

Mill design: Octagonal post, mill cap, mill technical features like the 5.5 metre long sail axle.

 

The mill has a height of 25.78 metres and, up to the upper edge of the sail, 35.45 metres. Breakdown:

 

Stone pedestal: 13.41 metres.

Wooden smock: 12.37 metres.

Length of the rods (Segelgatterflügel): each 12 metres.

Legend

As recorded by historian Franz Theodor Kugler in 1856,[1] the legend goes that Frederick the Great was being disturbed by the clatter of the mill sails and offered to buy the mill from its miller, Johann William Grävenitz. When he refused, the king is supposed to have threatened:

 

"Does he not know that I can take the mill away from him by virtue of my royal power without paying one groschen for it?"

Whereupon the miller is supposed to have replied:

 

"Of course, your majesty, your majesty could easily do that, if – begging your pardon – it were not for the Supreme Court in Berlin."

 

This is only a legend. According to Frederick the Great the mill underscored the rural character of his summer palace and said "that, ... the mill is an ornament for the palace." The miller was reportedly a difficult man, who cheated the local farmers over their flour and constantly pestered the king with petitions. At least one of these petitions was heard by Frederick II. Grävenitz pointed to the fact that, as a result of the construction of the palace, the post mill no longer stood in the open, but was partly shielded from the wind. So he demanded that the king let him build the mill in another site and to pay him for it. Frederick II acceded to this, with the result that, shortly thereafter, the wily Grävenitz was the proud possessor of two mills thanks to the king's grace, until he eventually resold the old mill.

 

In 1768 there was a legal dispute at another location over water rights and the remaining lease between Christian Arnold, the tenant of a mill in Pommerzig in the Neumark, and his landlord, the Count of Schmettau. After the miller was found guilty on two accounts, he appealed to Frederick the Great, who intervened in the ongoing proceedings in favour of the miller. Wrongly, as it turned out later. The king referred the case to the Berlin Court of Appeal, who once again ruled against the miller. Frederick the Great, then demanded a condemnation of the judges and their imprisonment in Spandau Citadel for their unjust judgments and thus precipitated an abuse of his name.

 

This legal battle and the story of the Sanssouci miller were woven together in the legend and were intended to emphasize the king's justice towards all his subjects. After the death of Frederick the Great, the case was reopened. His nephew and successor, Frederick William II decided in a compromise that:

 

"... the Miller Arnold case ... should be viewed as the consequence of a mistake, whereby the praiseworthy judicial zeal of our royal uncle, who rests in God, was misled by incomplete, inadequate reporting of the true situation by badly informed and preoccupied [biased] people."

In the years that followed there continued to be disputes between the reigning kings and the millers for different reasons.

 

After the death of Frederick II, the legend was first mentioned in the publication Vie de Frederic II, Roi de Prusse (The Life of Frederick II, King of Prussia) by Jean-Charles Laveaux (1749-1827), published in France in 1787. In it he formulates the miller's threat with the words: "Oui, [...] n'était la chambre de justice de Berlin" ("Yes, [...] if we didn't have the Supreme Court in Berlin"). This was followed by different versions of this legend in both France and Germany. Among others, a shortened version appeared in 1788 in the work About Friedrich the Great and my discussions with him shortly before his death by the doctor Johann Georg Zimmermann and in 1797 the story Le Meunier de Sans-Souci written in verse by the lawyer and playwright François Andrieux. The answer given by the miller: "Oui! si nous n'avions pas des juges à Berlin" ("Yes! If we do not have judges in Berlin"), became the saying: "Il ya des juges à Berlin" ("There are [still] judges in Berlin"). In 1798 the comedy Le moulin de Sans-Souci by the French playwright Michel Dieulafoy (1762-1823) followed. In Germany, Johann Peter [de] took further the legend in 1811 in his Treasure Chest of the Rhenish House Friend and reproduced it in a modified form under the title King Friedrich and his neighbor. The Miller of Sanssouci can be found in several publications to this day, was filmed and performed as a play, such as the comic opera by Karl Goepfart [de] (1907) and the comedy by Peter Hacks (1958).

 

Potsdam is the capital and largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of Berlin, and lies embedded in a hilly morainic landscape dotted with many lakes, around 20 of which are located within Potsdam's city limits. It lies some 25 kilometres (16 miles) southwest of Berlin's city centre. The name of the city and of many of its boroughs are of Slavic origin.

 

Potsdam was a residence of the Prussian kings and the German Emperor until 1918. Its planning embodied ideas of the Age of Enlightenment: through a careful balance of architecture and landscape, Potsdam was intended as "a picturesque, pastoral dream" which would remind its residents of their relationship with nature and reason.

 

The city, which is over 1,000 years old, is widely known for its palaces, its lakes, and its overall historical and cultural significance. Landmarks include the parks and palaces of Sanssouci, Germany's largest World Heritage Site, as well as other palaces such as the Orangery Palace, the New Palace, Cecilienhof Palace, and Charlottenhof Palace. Potsdam was also the location of the significant Potsdam Conference in 1945, the conference where the three heads of government of the USSR, the US, and the UK decided on the division of Germany following its surrender, a conference which defined Germany's history for the following 45 years.

 

Babelsberg, in the south-eastern part of Potsdam, was already by the 1930s the home of a major film production studio and it has enjoyed success as an important center of European film production since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Filmstudio Babelsberg, founded in 1912, is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world.

 

Potsdam developed into a centre of science in Germany in the 19th century. Today, there are three public colleges, the University of Potsdam, and more than 30 research institutes in the city.

Shot on the Sony A6000 with Sigma ART 18-35 f1.8

Am 26. Juli 2025 zeigte sich Stuttgart von seiner stilleren Seite – Regen, spiegelnde Straßen und ein fast leerer Schlossplatz.

 

Zwischen Tropfen, Reflexionen und gedämpftem Licht bot die Stadt eine ganz eigene Stimmung: ruhig, klar und überraschend farbig.

 

Mit der Fujifilm X-H2 entstanden diese Aufnahmen – konzentriert auf Licht, Struktur und Atmosphäre eines Sommertags, der anders war als geplant, aber genau deshalb besonders.

 

Mehr Fotos und Serien findest du auf 👉 www.fujicolours.com

 

— Stuttgart, Schlossplatz, 26. Juli 2025 ☔

Indischer Brunnen is a fountain at Luisenstädtischer Kanal in Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany.

 

The Luisenstädtische Kanal is a historic inner-city canal in Berlin's Luisenstadt , which connected the Spree with the Landwehrkanal . It was opened in 1852 and ran through the later districts of Kreuzberg and Mitte . In 1926, the canal was filled in except for the angel basin and converted into a garden. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the border between East and West Berlin ran along the northern part of the canal until 1990 . Since 1991, sections of the gardens, which have been destroyed since the Second World War, have been reconstructed.

 

In 1825, senior building officer Johann Carl Ludwig Schmid drew up a development plan for the Köpenicker Feld, the southern part of Luisenstadt. Even in these initial plans, which were never implemented, a north-south canal was planned for drainage and as a waterway. After Friedrich Wilhelm IV became King of Prussia in 1840, urban planning for Berlin was entrusted to the landscape architect and city planner Peter Joseph Lenné .

 

Based on Schmid's plans, Lenné designed a development plan that took better account of the space requirements of industrial and railway areas and was intended to be more socially balanced. He wanted to make the Landwehr Canal navigable and take over the connecting canal from the Landwehr Canal to the Spree that Schmid had already planned. For Lenné, the social tasks of urban planning were of great importance - he viewed green spaces for local recreation and streets and squares with high recreational value as necessary for a functioning urban district.

 

In this spirit, the Luisenstädtische Kanal should be more than just a waterway; rather, it should be a decorative street designed as a decorative center that forms the design center of the new city district. Lenné defined the course and design of the Luisenstadt Canal in his work Projected Jewelry and Borders of Berlin with the immediate surroundings, published in 1839/1840 .

 

Construction of the Luisenstädtischer Canal began in 1848, two years after the completion of the Landwehr Canal. The canal was intended to serve as a transport route for building materials, as urban drainage and to channel the floods of the Spree. Above all, however, the construction served as a job creation measure; around 5,000 workers were employed without any major technical aids. In October 1848 there were bloody riots among workers out of fear of losing their jobs to construction machinery.

 

The canal was 2.3 kilometers long, 22.5 meters wide and 1.5 meters deep at medium water. The clinker seawalls, which are atypical for Berlin, towered above the water level by around three meters. It had only a minimal gradient and was designed for ships with a load capacity of up to 175 tons . The waterfront promenade was planted with “Kaiser linden ” trees. At the point where the canal flowed through what was then the Berlin customs wall , a new gate, the Wassertor, was also built in 1848.

 

The canal began at what was then Urbanhafen and ran in a northeasterly direction parallel to the street grid. It was divided by the Wassertorplatz , where there was a smaller pool, the Oranienplatz, the cast-iron Waldemar Bridge along Waldemarstrasse and a larger water basin, the Angel Pool. At the Engel Becken the canal branched off at a right angle to the east and ran in an arc to the northeast to the Cöpenick lock and the Spree. The lock was north of the Cöpenick Bridge . [1] It served to overcome the different water levels between the Spree and the Luisenstädtischen Canal and the Landwehr Canal and thus fulfilled the same purpose as the upper lock in the Landwehr Canal.

 

The angel pool is named after the archangel St. Michael , a copy of whose statue can now be found on the ridge at the front of St. Michael's Church . The original statue of the archangel, created by August Kiß , standing in flight towards the canal, was oriented towards the political “West” and was probably dismantled during the GDR era for ideological reasons. Saint Michael's Church is in ruins as a result of Allied air raids during World War II .

 

The relatively distinctive lines with the right-angled bends at the Urbanhafen and the Angel Basin were due to the layout of the city. From a shipping perspective it made little sense. The canal was created together with the late classicist buildings built on its banks and with them also formed an urban ensemble. It is of urban planning importance in that it was an attempt to use water as an urban design element.

Trabant is a series of small cars produced from 1957 until 1991 by former East German car manufacturer VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau. Four models were made: the Trabant 500, Trabant 600, Trabant 601, and the Trabant 1.1. The first model, the 500, was a relatively modern car when it was introduced.

 

It featured detachable duroplast body panels on a galvanised steel unibody chassis, front-wheel drive, a transverse two-stroke engine, and independent suspension. Because this 1950s design remained largely unchanged until the introduction of the last model, the Trabant 1.1 in 1990, the Trabant became symbolic of the former East Germany's stagnant economy and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in general. Called "a spark plug with a roof", 3,096,999 Trabants were produced. Older models have been sought by collectors in the United States due to their low cost and fewer restrictions on the importation of antique cars. The Trabant also gained a following among car tuning and rallying enthusiasts.

 

VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau had its origins in the former Auto Union/DKW business which had operated out of the site prior to the war, and the company's first products were essentially copies of pre-war DKW designs. Following the partition of Germany, Auto Union re-established itself in West Germany (ultimately evolving into Audi), leaving VEB Sachsenring with the two stroke engine inherited from DKW.

 

The Trabant was the result of a planning process which had been intended to design a three-wheeled motorcycle. In German, Trabant is an astronomical term for a moon (or other natural satellite) of a celestial body.

 

Automobilwerke Zwickau factory in Saxony on 7 November 1957. It was a relatively advanced car when it was formally introduced the following year, with front wheel drive, unitary construction and independent suspension. The Trabant's greatest shortcoming was its engine. By the late 1950s, many small West European cars (such as the Renault) had cleaner, more-efficient four-stroke engines, but budgetary constraints and raw-materials shortages mandated an outdated (but inexpensive) two-stroke engine in the Trabant. It was technically equivalent to the West German Lloyd automobile, a similarly sized car with an air-cooled, two-cylinder four-stroke engine. The Trabant had a front, transversely mounted engine and front-wheel drive in an era when many European cars were using rear-mounted engines or front-mounted engines with rear-wheel drive. Its greatest drawback was its largely unchanged production; the car's two-stroke engine made it obsolete by the 1970s, limiting exports to Western Europe.

 

The Trabant's air-cooled, 500 cc (31 cu in) engine—upgraded to 600 cc (37 cu in) in 1962–63—was derived from a pre-war DKW design with minor alterations during its production run. The first Saab car had a larger (764 cc), water-cooled, two-cylinder two-stroke engine. Wartburg, an East German manufacturer of larger sedans, also used a water-cooled, three-cylinder, 1,000 cc (61 cu in), two-stroke DKW engine.

 

The original Trabant, introduced in 1958, was the P 50. Trabant's base model, it shared a large number of interchangeable parts with the latest 1.1s. The 500 cc, 17 PS (13 kW) P50 evolved into a 20 PS (15 kW) version with a fully synchronized gearbox in 1960, and received a 23 PS (17 kW), 600 cc (37 cu in) engine in 1962 as the P 60.

 

The updated P601 was introduced in 1964. It was essentially a facelift of the P 60, with a different front fascia, bonnet, roof and rear and the original P50 underpinnings. The model remained nearly unchanged until the end of its production except for the addition of 12V electricity, rear coil springs and an updated dashboard for later models.

 

The Trabant's designers expected production to extend until 1967 at the latest, and East German designers and engineers created a series of more-sophisticated prototypes intended to replace the P601; several are displayed at the Dresden Transport Museum. Each proposal for a new model was rejected by the East German government due to shortages of the raw materials required in larger quantities for the more-advanced designs. As a result, the Trabant remained largely unchanged for more than a quarter-century. Also unchanged was its production method, which was extremely labour-intensive.

 

Production started from 34,000 p.a. in 1964, reached 100,000 p.a. in 1973, to a high of 150,000 in 1989.

 

The Trabant 1.1 was a 601 with a better-performing 1.05-liter (64 cu in), 45 PS (33 kW) VW Polo engine. With a slightly modified look (including a floor-mounted gearshift), it was quieter and cleaner than its predecessor. The 1.1 had front disc brakes, and its wheel assembly was borrowed from Volkswagen. It was produced from 1989 to 1991, in parallel with the two-stroke P601. Except for the engine and transmission, many parts from older P50s, P60s and 601s were compatible with the 1.1.

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Landshut is a town in Bavaria, Germany, on the banks of the River Isar. Landshut is the capital of Lower Bavaria, one of the seven administrative regions of the Free State of Bavaria, and the seat of the surrounding district. With a population of more than 75,000, Landshut is the largest city in Lower Bavaria, followed by Passau and Straubing.

 

The town, called City of the Three Helmets (German: Dreihelmestadt), is known for its picturesque Gothic old town and the Landshut Wedding, a full-tilt medieval festival. The cityscape is dominated by the St. Martin's Basilica and Trausnitz Castle high above the old town.

 

Close to Munich and Franz Josef Strauss International Airport, Landshut is industrialized (BMW, ebm-papst, Schott), has a low unemployment rate and is among the richest towns in Bavaria.