New Guard House

The Neue Wache stands on Unter den Linden between the Armoury and Humboldt University and is one of Berlin's earliest Neoclassical masterpieces. Karl Friedrich Schinkel built it from 1816 to 1818 as a guardhouse for the Royal Palace opposite, with a Doric portico that quotes a Roman castrum. In 1931 Heinrich Tessenow converted it into a memorial to the fallen of the First World War, centred on a black granite block under an open ceiling. After wartime destruction the GDR reopened it in 1960 as a memorial to the victims of fascism and militarism. Since 1993 it has served as the Federal Republic's central memorial to the victims of war and tyranny, with an enlarged copy of Kaethe Kollwitz's Pieta at its centre.