Humboldt University & the Neue Wache
Berlin's oldest university, a Baroque palace turned cradle of modern learning that has counted Einstein, Hegel and the Brothers Grimm among its minds. Across the boulevard stands Schinkel's Neue Wache, where a single rain-washed sculpture mourns all the victims of war.
About this place
Here on Unter den Linden, the great lime-tree boulevard the Prussian kings laid out toward their palace, two buildings face each other across the traffic and tell the twin stories of this walk: glory and grief. On the north side rises the Humboldt University, founded in 1810 inside a graceful Baroque palace built for Prince Henry, the brother of Frederick the Great. Wilhelm von Humboldt's revolutionary idea, that teaching and research belong together, reshaped universities across the world, and the institution went on to gather 57 Nobel laureates, more than any other German university, among them Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Directly opposite stands the Neue Wache, a severe little Doric temple designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1816 as a royal guardhouse. Step inside its bare stone hall and you find Berlin at its most quietly devastating: Käthe Kollwitz's bronze pieta of a mother cradling her dead son, set alone beneath an open round skylight so that rain, snow and cold fall upon it, just as suffering once fell upon the city. Since 1993 it has served as Germany's central memorial to the victims of war and tyranny.
Key facts
- 1810 founded — The university opened its doors with 256 students and 52 lecturers
- 57 laureates — Nobel Prize winners linked to the university, the most of any in Germany
- 1816 year — Schinkel designed the Neue Wache, a landmark of Prussian Neoclassicism
📍 Unter den Linden 6, 10117, Berlin