Bebelplatz & the State Opera
An elegant Enlightenment square laid out by Frederick the Great, ringed by the State Opera, the curved old Royal Library, and St. Hedwig's Cathedral. A glass plate set into the cobbles reveals empty white shelves below, the haunting memorial to the Nazi book burning of May 1933.
About this place
Step off the boulevard into Frederick the Great's grand cultural dream. When the young king took the Prussian throne in 1740 he wanted Berlin to rival the great capitals of Europe, so he commissioned an open civic forum modeled on imperial Rome, the Forum Fridericianum. His architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff framed the square with a trio of stately buildings: the Berlin State Opera of 1742, the first freestanding opera house in Germany, dedicated to Apollo and the Muses; the sweeping Baroque Royal Library, whose curved facade earned it the affectionate nickname the Kommode, or chest of drawers; and the green-domed St. Hedwig's Cathedral, the first Catholic church built in Prussia after the Reformation, modeled on the Pantheon as a deliberate gesture of religious tolerance. For two centuries this was a stage for opera, music, and learning. Then, on the night of May 10, 1933, it became something darker, when Nazi students hurled some twenty thousand books into the flames here. Today a pane of glass in the pavement looks down into a small white room of empty shelves, and a nearby plaque carries Heinrich Heine's chilling prophecy.
Key facts
- 1742 year — The State Opera opened, the first freestanding opera house ever built in Germany
- 20000 books — Roughly this many were burned on the square on the night of May 10, 1933
- 1947 year — The square was renamed Bebelplatz after Social Democrat leader August Bebel
📍 Bebelplatz 1, 10117, Berlin