Neue Wache (New Guardhouse)

The Neue Wache stands on Unter den Linden in central Berlin, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and completed in 1818 as a royal guardhouse for the Prussian royal family, built in a severe neoclassical style with a Doric portico. It was converted into a war memorial after the First World War and again, in altered form, under different East German and West German governments during the divided postwar period, each regime adapting the space to its own commemorative narrative. Since German reunification, the building has served since 1993 as the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny. The interior is deliberately stark: a single oculus in the roof exposes the empty stone chamber to rain, snow, and sunlight year-round, and at its center stands an enlarged bronze cast of Käthe Kollwitz's 1937/38 sculpture "Mother with Her Dead Son," a pieta-like figure the artist created in memory of her own son killed in the First World War. Inscriptions on the walls dedicate the memorial to all victims of war and tyranny, including soldiers, civilians, victims of the Holocaust and racial persecution, resistance fighters, and those who died in exile, without further embellishment or additional exhibition. The unadorned single room and the elements' direct exposure to the sculpture are intended to evoke vulnerability and loss without national triumphalism, distinguishing it from earlier militaristic memorial traditions at the same site.