Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The following sights are arranged roughly west to east, from the Reichstag down Unter den
Linden to Alexanderplatz. It's possible to link these sights as a convenient self-guided ori-
entation walk (I've included walking directions for this purpose)—allow about 1.5 hours
without stops for sightseeing. Adding tours of several sights can easily fill a whole day. Re-
member that reservations are required for the Reichstag dome, and you'll need timed-entry
tickets for the Pergamon and Neues Museums.
Also described here are sights to the south and north of Unter den Linden.
Theparliament building—the heart ofGerman democracy—has ashortbutcomplicated and
emotional history. When it was inaugurated in the 1890s, the last emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm
II, disdainfully called it the “chatting home for monkeys”
(Reichsaffenhaus).
It was placed
outside of the city's old walls—far from the center of real power, the imperial palace. But it
was from the Reichstag that the German Republic was proclaimed in 1918.
In1933,thissymbolofdemocracynearlyburneddown.TheNazis—whoseinfluenceon
the German political scene was on the rise—blamed a communist plot. A Dutch communist,
