Gendarmenmarkt
Widely called Berlin's most beautiful square, a perfect study in symmetry where Schinkel's grand Konzerthaus is flanked by two near-identical domed towers, the German and French Cathedrals. Their twin silhouettes rising above the open paving make this one of the great architectural set pieces in Europe.
About this place
Laid out in 1688 as the heart of the new Friedrichstadt quarter, this square owes its harmony to a quirk of religious history. When the Huguenots, French Protestants fleeing persecution, were welcomed to Berlin in the 1680s, they built their own church here, the Französischer Dom, completed by 1705. A German congregation answered with the Deutscher Dom soon after. For decades these were modest churches, until King Frederick the Great commissioned the architect Carl von Gontard to crown each one with a soaring, identical domed tower in the 1780s, transforming two ordinary places of worship into mirror images. Those towers are not really cathedrals at all but ornamental campaniles. Between them, Karl Friedrich Schinkel raised his neoclassical Konzerthaus from the ruins of a theatre that had burned down, completing it in 1821. The name itself comes from a regiment of cuirassiers, the gens d'armes, whose stables once stood here. Flattened in the Second World War and patiently rebuilt, the square today is a serene, café-lined stage on which Berlin shows off its talent for resurrection.
Key facts
- 1688 year — The square was first laid out as the centrepiece of the new Friedrichstadt district
- 1821 year — Schinkel completed the Konzerthaus on the foundations of a burned-down theatre
- 2 domed towers — Carl von Gontard added near-identical towers to both cathedrals in the 1780s for symmetry
📍 Gendarmenmarkt 7, 10117, Berlin