Neue Wache

Step out of the traffic on Unter den Linden and walk between the stone columns. The noise drops almost at once. Inside, the air feels cooler. The floor is bare grey stone, and light falls from a single round opening in the ceiling. There is no glass in that opening. When it rains in Berlin, the rain comes straight down into this room. When it snows, the snow settles here too.

This is the Neue Wache, which means the New Guardhouse. Today it is the central memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the victims of war and tyranny. But the building did not begin as a memorial. It began as a working guardhouse for soldiers. Over two centuries it has changed its meaning several times, and each change follows a turn in German history. In a sense, this one small room carries the story of the modern German state.

The architect was Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the most important Prussian builder of the early nineteenth century. Prussia was the kingdom that later formed the core of a united Germany. The guardhouse was completed in the late 1810s, soon after the wars against Napoleon. It housed the guard for the royal palace across the boulevard. This was one of Schinkel's first major works in Berlin. Many of the grand buildings that followed in the city carry the same calm, ordered style.

Look at the front. Schinkel used a portico of Doric columns, the plainest and heaviest of the classical Greek orders. Behind them, the building is almost a cube, with solid corner blocks. Schinkel compared this design to a Roman military camp, with towers at each corner. So the form has a double message. It looks like a Greek temple, but it is built like a small fortress. Above the columns, look for the winged figures of Victory. Their designs came from Johann Gottfried Schadow, the leading Berlin sculptor of the period.

The guardhouse also sits in a carefully chosen place. To your right, as you face it, stands the old Prussian arsenal, the Zeughaus. Today it is part of the German Historical Museum. To your left is the main building of Humboldt University. Behind the guardhouse grows a small grove of chestnut trees. Schinkel placed his building inside this grove so the trees would frame it. In late spring, when the chestnuts flower, that frame is easy to see.

After the First World War, the role of the guardhouse changed. The monarchy was gone, and the royal guard was no longer needed. In the early 1930s, the architect Heinrich Tessenow redesigned the interior as a memorial to the German soldiers who died in that war. Tessenow removed the inner walls and created the single open hall you stand in now. He also cut the round opening in the roof. Here is a detail many visitors miss — the empty, sky-lit room was not a modern idea. It was already almost a century old when the current memorial was installed.

The Second World War badly damaged the building. Bombs and fighting in central Berlin left it a burnt shell. After the war, this part of the city lay in East Berlin, in the German Democratic Republic, often called East Germany. The East German state restored the guardhouse and reopened it in 1960 as a memorial to the victims of fascism and militarism. Later, an eternal flame burned inside, above a glass block. The remains of an unknown soldier and an unknown victim of the concentration camps were buried in the floor.

In those East German years, the guardhouse had a guard again. Soldiers of the National People's Army stood outside, perfectly still. The changing of the guard here was a well-known spectacle, with soldiers marching in the stiff, high-kicking goose step. Visitors from the West often came to watch it. It is a strange image to hold in your mind as you stand here now. The building that once held armed guards for a king held armed guards again, this time for a socialist state.

Then the Berlin Wall fell, and Germany reunited in 1990. The question came back once more: what should this room mean now? In 1993, under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the guardhouse became the national memorial for all victims of war and tyranny. The East German flame and glass block were removed. In their place, the government chose a single sculpture. The inscription set into the floor reads, in German, to the victims of war and tyranny.

Now look at the figure in the centre of the room. A mother sits on the ground, holding her dead son across her lap. She wraps him in her body, and her face is half hidden. The original small sculpture is by Käthe Kollwitz, one of the great German artists of the twentieth century. Her younger son, Peter, was killed as a soldier in the first months of the First World War. Kollwitz spent years in grief, and that loss shaped much of her later work.

The statue you see is an enlarged copy of her small work, made by the sculptor Harald Haacke. Here is a second fact that surprises many people. The choice was controversial in the 1990s. Some critics said the image looks too much like a Christian Pietà, the traditional scene of Mary holding the dead Jesus. Others asked whether one memorial should honour soldiers and the victims of persecution together. Those debates are part of the memorial too. They show how hard it is for a country to remember its own past honestly.

Notice how the room works on you. There are no long texts on the walls, and there are no screens. There is only the figure, the inscription, the grey stone, and the light from above. The sculpture sits directly under the open roof. So the mother and son are exposed to the weather of the city. Rain darkens the bronze. In winter, a thin line of snow can rest on the mother's shoulders. This exposure is deliberate. It links the memorial to everyday life outside.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment near the entrance. Look up at the round patch of sky, then back down at the two figures. Then turn and face the boulevard, where buses, bicycles and tourists move past as if nothing happened here. As you walk out between Schinkel's columns, listen to the sound of the city returning. That sudden return is part of the experience. The quiet room stays behind you, open to the sky, in the middle of an ordinary Berlin day.