The Humboldt Forum (Berlin Palace)
A reconstructed Baroque royal palace housing a museum of world cultures, standing where the Hohenzollern residence once ruled and the GDR later raised its Palace of the Republic. No single building tells Berlin's destroy-and-rebuild story more clearly than this one.
About this place
Facing the cathedral across the Lustgarten rises the Humboldt Forum, a palace that is both very old and very new. The original Berlin Palace served as the residence of the Prussian kings and German emperors for centuries, its grand Baroque facades shaped by the sculptor Andreas Schlueter from 1713. Burnt out in the bombing of 1945, it was deliberately blown up by the GDR in 1950 as a hated symbol of Prussian militarism, leaving a vast empty square. In the 1970s the East German state filled the void with the Palace of the Republic, its bronze-glass parliament and entertainment hall, which was itself demolished between 2006 and 2008. The site was rebuilt one final time: from 2013 to 2020, donors funded the painstaking recreation of three historic Baroque facades and the inner Schlueterhof, wrapped around a modern interior by Italian architect Franco Stella. Behind the quince-coloured stone, more than thirty thousand square metres now hold the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, a forum for the cultures of the world built inside the shell of a vanished empire.
Key facts
- 1950 year — The GDR demolished the war-damaged royal palace as a symbol of Prussian power
- 682 million euros — The budgeted cost of building the Humboldt Forum on the cleared site
- 2800 figures — Sculpted anew to recreate the Baroque facades, along with some 22,000 sandstone elements
📍 Schloßplatz, 10178, Berlin