Reichstag Building

Stand on the wide lawn in front of the building and look up. Grey stone rises above you, solid and serious. Four square towers mark the corners of the roof. A row of tall stone columns frames the main entrance. Above those columns, carved deep into the stone, four words catch the daylight. Dem Deutschen Volke. The words mean: To the German People. Hold that phrase in mind. It explains much of what happened here.

This is the Reichstag. Today it holds the Bundestag, the German parliament. Elected members meet inside to debate the laws of the country and to vote. People come from across Germany and around the world to see it. But the building has carried many roles, and many wounds, across more than a hundred years.

Construction began in 1884. The architect was Paul Wallot. He chose a heavy and grand style, with thick stone walls, carved figures, and a dome of iron and glass at the center. The work took ten years. The building was finished in 1894. It was made to house the parliament of the German empire, which had formed only a few years before.

The famous inscription came later. The four words above the door were not part of the first design. They were added in 1916, during the First World War. At that time, real power still sat with the emperor, not with the elected house. The words were a quiet claim. This building, they said, belongs to the people.

Then came fire. On the night of 27 February 1933, flames broke out and swept through the main chamber. The roof and the great hall were gutted. The cause of the fire is still debated today. But the result is clear. The new Nazi government blamed its enemies and used the fire as an excuse to seize total power and arrest its opponents.

War brought deeper ruin. In the spring of 1945, as Soviet soldiers fought their way into Berlin, the Reichstag became a prize. Heavy fighting raged around it and inside it. A photograph of a Soviet soldier raising a flag over the shattered roof traveled around the world. When the guns fell silent, the building was a burned and broken shell.

For decades afterward, the Reichstag stood at the edge of a divided city. The Berlin Wall ran only steps away. West Berlin and East Berlin faced each other across concrete, wire, and guards. The parliament of West Germany met far away, in the city of Bonn. The old house was patched up but mostly silent. It waited.

Everything changed in 1990. The Wall had fallen the year before, and Germany was reunited. The country decided that its parliament would return to Berlin and to this building. It would be rebuilt, not as a copy of the past, but for a new and open era. The British architect Norman Foster won the task.

Foster kept the old outer walls. Step inside and you can still see bare stone marked with messages written by Soviet soldiers in 1945. These were not erased. They are protected behind glass and left in place. Old and new stand side by side. The hard history of the building is not hidden. It is part of the room you walk through.

The boldest new feature sits on top. Foster crowned the building with a large dome of glass and steel. Inside it, two walkways spiral upward along the curved wall, one rising and one coming down. Visitors climb slowly to the top, and the whole city opens around them, roofs and parks and distant towers in every direction.

At the heart of the dome hangs a tall cone covered in mirrors. It catches daylight and sends it down into the parliament chamber below, so the room can be lit by the sky. The shape carries a message too. Citizens walk in a circle above the place where their representatives sit. The government works beneath the people, in full view.

Before you go, look once more at the four words across the front. They were carved in the middle of a war. They survived fire, bombing, and the long division of the city. The house beneath them has been an emperor's parliament, a burned ruin, and a symbol of a split nation. Now it is a working place of argument and decision, open to anyone willing to climb up into the light.