Deutsche Oper Berlin

The Deutsche Oper Berlin in Charlottenburg is the largest of Berlin's three opera houses, seating roughly 1,865. The present building on Bismarckstrasse opened in 1961 to designs by Fritz Bornemann in a clean post-war modernist idiom - a deliberately austere facade replying to the neoclassical predecessor of 1912 destroyed in the war. On 2 June 1967, in front of the building, student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead during the Shah of Iran demonstration, a key event of the West German student movement. Today the house plays a broad repertoire from Verdi and Wagner to contemporary premieres.