Schönhausen Palace: A Baroque Royal Residence and GDR State Residence in Berlin
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- German, Holy Roman Empire, Kingdom of Prussia
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page17 sections
History
Schönhausen Palace is a Baroque palace in Berlin, Germany, whose late-seventeenth-century rebuilding established its role as a Brandenburg-Prussian royal residence. It became especially important as the summer home of Queen Elisabeth Christine under Frederick the Great and later, from 1949 to 1960, as the official residence of Wilhelm Pieck, the first and only president of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
From manor house to royal palace
The estate at Niederschönhausen entered the history of the palace in 1662, when Countess Sophie Theodore zu Dohna, the wife of Brandenburg general Christian Albrecht von Dohna, acquired the Niederschönhausen and Pankow estates. In 1664, she commissioned a Dutch-style manor house with a dairy. Joachim Ernst von Grumbkow bought the estate in 1680, demolished the earlier buildings, and ordered a new summer palace on a slightly different site. Johann Arnold Nering, a Prussian Baroque architect, designed and supervised the three-winged building, which had two upper floors.
Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg purchased Schönhausen in 1691 for 16,000 thalers. The surrounding estates were incorporated into the Amt Niederschönhausen, an administrative estate district, and Nering undertook further alterations. In August 1700, secret negotiations at Schönhausen helped prepare Frederick III’s elevation to the rank of King in Prussia in 1701. Beginning in 1704, Frederick I commissioned the court architect Johann Friedrich Eosander von Göthe to enlarge the palace and gardens. The additions increased the accommodation available to the royal couple and gave the complex a more formal character.
Frederick I died in 1713. His successor, Frederick William I, assigned the palace to court officials as housing and leased parts of the estate. During the following two decades, the palace and park increasingly deteriorated. In 1740, after becoming king, Frederick II gave Schönhausen to his wife, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern. She used it as a summer residence almost every year from 1740 to 1797. Frederick II preferred to live separately and apparently never visited Schönhausen.
Elisabeth Christine and the eighteenth-century transformation
The Seven Years’ War, a conflict between Prussia and an opposing European coalition from 1756 to 1763, interrupted Elisabeth Christine’s residence. She withdrew to the fortress of Magdeburg while Russian troops advancing toward Berlin devastated and heavily plundered Schönhausen. In 1764, Frederick II supplied funds for reconstruction. The work, directed by Johann Boumann, created much of the palace’s present principal form. The side wings were raised to the height of the main building, and the courtyard was covered by a broad staircase.
Elisabeth Christine also reshaped the grounds. She gradually turned the garden into a modern Rococo pleasure garden, and landscaped areas were laid out beside the Panke after the war. After her death in 1797, Schönhausen was occupied only intermittently. Pierre Barthelemy, the grandfather of the writer Theodor Fontane, served as castellan for several years after 1806. Princess Marianne spent the summers of 1816 to 1822 at the palace with the children of Queen Luise, including the future kings Frederick William IV and Wilhelm I. Friederike of Mecklenburg-Strelitz also used Schönhausen in summer and commissioned Peter Joseph Lenné to redesign the park as an English landscape garden in 1828 and 1829.
Decline, revolution, and museum use
From the second half of the nineteenth century, the palace and park declined. Schönhausen was used mainly to store furniture and paintings removed from other royal palaces, and the public was excluded. The German Revolution of 1918 ended the Prussian monarchy. The revolutionary government seized the palace, and it became property of the Free State of Prussia in 1920. Between 1931 and 1934, parts of the building were used for exhibitions organized by the Pankow-Schönhausen Artists’ Association.
Conservation and modernization began in the 1930s under Erich Schonert. From 1935, with strong support from Prussian Finance Minister Johannes Popitz, the palace underwent extensive renovation. It reopened in 1936 as an exhibition building of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, and exhibitions continued into the 1940s. Between 1938 and 1941, the building also stored works confiscated from German museums for the Nazi campaign against so-called “degenerate art.” The holdings included 780 paintings and sculptures and 3,500 works on paper, among them works by Ernst Barlach, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Vincent van Gogh, and Franz Marc.
Schönhausen suffered damage during the Battle of Berlin at the end of the Second World War. A Pankow artists’ initiative repaired part of the damage in 1945, enabling an art exhibition to open in September of that year. The Soviet Military Administration then requisitioned the palace as an officers’ club. It later used the building as a school and boarding school for Soviet pupils.
Presidential residence and government guest house
After the GDR was founded on 7 October 1949, the Soviet authorities transferred Schönhausen to the East German government. From 1949 to 1960, the palace served as the official presidential residence of Wilhelm Pieck and as a setting for GDR state representation. Receptions held there included those for Ho Chi Minh and Nikita Khrushchev.
Pieck’s death in 1960 coincided with the abolition of the GDR presidency. The palace temporarily housed the State Council, the collective institution that assumed the functions of head of state after the presidency was abolished. Its inaugural meeting took place in the ceremonial hall in 1960, before the council moved to the new State Council Building in Berlin-Mitte in 1964.
From 1964, Schönhausen became the GDR government’s official guest house and was formally called Schloss Niederschönhausen. Its state guests included Indira Gandhi, Fidel Castro, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with his wife Raisa. The Gorbachevs stayed there in October 1989, shortly before the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany, the civic movement that brought down the GDR’s political system.
Political transition and preservation
During the transition of 1989 and 1990, the Central Round Table met in the palace complex’s casino from 27 December 1989 until its final meeting on 12 March 1990. The Central Round Table brought together representatives of the GDR’s former ruling party and newly organized opposition groups to discuss the country’s political future. One of the four rounds of the Two Plus Four negotiations took place at Schönhausen in June 1990. These diplomatic talks involved the two German states and the four victorious Second World War powers and prepared the international settlement for German reunification. A memorial plaque in the forecourt recalls this political history.
After reunification, Schönhausen first belonged to the federal authorities responsible for government property. Berlin assumed ownership of the palace and garden in 1991, and the property was transferred to the Berlin Land Property Fund in 1997 with the intention of selling it. In 1994, the palace hosted the founding congress of the International Delphic Council, which established the modern Delphic Games. Plans discussed in 2003 to use the palace temporarily as the German federal president’s residence during renovation of Bellevue Palace were abandoned because of projected costs. Toxic wood-preservative chemicals in the roof structure then limited use of the building for several years.
Berlin transferred Schönhausen Palace to the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg on 24 June 2005. Restoration culminated in its reopening for museum use on 19 December 2009. The restored presentation covers Elisabeth Christine’s life, the palace’s Baroque and Rococo development, its GDR presidential and guest-house functions, and its place in the political transition of 1989 and 1990. Since 2003, the former presidential chancellery and casino have housed the Federal Academy for Security Policy, while a museum exhibition opened in the gatehouses in June 2009 on the palace’s history under the SED dictatorship and during the transition.
Remains
Palace building and water landscape
Main palace
Schönhausen is a Baroque complex surrounded by a park through which the Panke River flows. The palace developed from Nering’s three-winged summer residence of 1680, with two upper floors, and from Eosander von Göthe’s enlargement beginning in 1704. The reconstruction of 1764 raised the north and south wings to the level of the central building and covered the courtyard with a broad staircase designed by Johann Boumann. This eighteenth-century rebuilding accounts for much of the form that survives today.
Gardens and canal
The grounds retain the history of several garden designs. Frederick I’s enlargement included more extensive and elaborate gardens, while Elisabeth Christine transformed them into a Rococo pleasure garden. Landscaped areas were later created beside the Panke, and Lenné redesigned the park as an English landscape garden in 1828 and 1829. A canal called the Schönhauser Graben was constructed to connect the palace through the Panke with the Spree and Berlin. Small boats known as treckschuten were intended to reach the palace by this water route.
Historic interiors and collections
Elisabeth Christine’s rooms
The ground floor contains reconstructed rooms associated with Elisabeth Christine. Original fireplaces, mirror frames, and wall paneling survive alongside rediscovered furniture and wallpapers from the queen’s period. A permanent exhibition in these rooms presents her life and the palace’s role as her summer residence.
Rococo and GDR interiors
The ceremonial hall is described as Berlin’s only completely preserved Rococo interior. It continues to serve for concerts, readings, and formal receptions. Part of the upper floor preserves GDR representational interiors, including the government guest apartment and the surviving furnishings of Wilhelm Pieck’s study. Together, these rooms preserve the building’s contrasting royal and socialist state functions.
Schlobitten collection
Other rooms on the first upper floor and part of the second display paintings, furniture, and decorative arts from Schloss Schlobitten in East Prussia. The material was assembled over centuries by the Dohna family and conveys an impression of three centuries of East Prussian aristocratic culture. The second floor also presents exhibitions on the construction history and reconstruction of Schönhausen Palace. From 2009 to 2019, the palace displayed the Dohna-Schlobitten collection.
Presidential grounds and later alterations
Auxiliary buildings
The palace grounds include former garages, two gatehouses, and the casino and chancellery buildings added for the GDR presidential complex. The casino and chancellery were arranged around a formal forecourt, while the gatehouses marked the entrance to the complex. The historic garages are protected structures. Since 2003, the former chancellery and casino have been used by the Federal Academy for Security Policy.
Park and presidential enclosure
A wall once divided the garden into an inner section closed to the public and an outer public section. Reinhold Lingner redesigned the inner garden as an open, cheerful landscape characteristic of the 1950s. An apartment house for accompanying ministers, staff, and security personnel was built in the western part of the park between 1966 and 1968. Repeated alterations through the 1980s caused further losses of historic fabric, and the eighteenth-century castellan’s house was demolished around 1980.
The palace park is crossed by the Berlin–Usedom long-distance cycle route, which follows the Panke Cycle Route along the Panke. Its trees have suffered extensive recent damage from drought and heat, particularly during the extreme weather of 2018 to 2020.
