Tours · Potsdam · Palace & University
Neues Palais & University of Potsdam
Frederick the Great's colossal New Palace faces two matching baroque palaces built for his kitchens and servants, the Communs. Since 1991 they have housed the University of Potsdam, so students now take lectures in a king's service wing.
About this place
The Neues Palais, the New Palace, was Frederick the Great's triumphant statement after the Seven Years' War, built between 1763 and 1769 at the western end of Sanssouci Park. Its red brick and sandstone facade runs for more than two hundred metres beneath a green dome and over four hundred rooftop statues, and inside lie some two hundred rooms, a court theatre and the celebrated Grotto Hall, encrusted with around twenty four thousand shells, minerals and fossils. Facing the palace across a wide gravel square stand the Communs, two domed palaces joined by a colonnade and triumphal arch, which Carl von Gontard and Jean Laurent Legeay raised in 1766 to 1769 to house the kitchens, servants and guards and to hide the swampy ground beyond. Kaiser Wilhelm II made the New Palace his principal residence until his flight into exile in 1918. After reunification the Communs became the founding campus of the University of Potsdam in 1991, and today students of the humanities faculty study beneath Frederick's colonnades.
Key facts
- 1769 year — New Palace and Communs completed as Frederick's statement of strength after the Seven Years' War
- 24000 shells & minerals — Cover the walls of the palace's Grotto Hall
- 1991 year — University of Potsdam founded in the former royal service buildings
📍 Am Neuen Palais, 14469, Potsdam