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Reichstag, building in Berlin that is the meeting place of the Bundestag (“Federal Assembly”), the lower house of Germany’s national legislature. One of Berlin’s most famous landmarks, it is situated at the northern end of the Ebertstrasse and near the south bank of the Spree River .
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Reichstag. The Bundestag, the lower house of Germany ’s national parliament, meets in a building called the Reichstag. It is one of Berlin ’s most famous landmarks. Prior to the Nazi era, Reichstag was also the name of the lower house of parliament.
Apr 11, 2024 · Reichstag fire, burning of the Reichstag (parliament) building in Berlin on the night of February 27, 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship and widely believed to have been contrived by the newly formed Nazi government to turn public opinion against its opponents and to assume new powers.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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The original twin towns of Berlin and Kölln developed from the early 13th century onward, on an island of the Spree River (the site of Kölln) and a small portion of land on the north bank of the river facing the island (the site of Berlin). While still a small town, it became the capital of the electoral princes of Brandenburg from the end of the 15th century onward. From the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when the electors of Brandenburg (also kings of Prussia from 1701) developed into powerful figures on the European political stage, the city expanded and gained a Baroque appearance; new castles, such as Charlottenburg Palace, were built. The central quarter expanded and was embellished with broad avenues, handsome squares, and grandiose stone buildings. The central area acquired broad north-south avenues, such as Wilhelmstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, and also its characteristic east-west road axis. Supplementing this main axis are several exit roads that now serve as major traffic arteries. In the late 19th century suburbs developed around these arteries and their subsidiary streets. Where destruction during World War II was massive, there has been large-scale construction of modern apartment and office buildings, one of the most famous being the Hansa Quarter, built by renowned architects from many countries.
Although there is only one major park near the city centre—the Tiergarten, just west of the Brandenburg Gate—Berlin has always been a surprisingly green city, with luxuriant trees softening the effect of the stone apartment blocks in many streets. Water is even more prevalent, with the Spree River running through the city’s centre, a broad belt of lakes spreading out east and west, and canals running through much of the city.
Until the “peaceful revolution” of 1989, the most notorious feature of the city’s topography was the Berlin Wall, erected by the East German communist government in 1961 to stop free movement between East Berlin (and indeed East Germany) and West Berlin. The boundary between East and West Berlin and the boundary between West Berlin and East Germany, for a combined length of 103 miles (166 km), were closed until 1989 by a solid ring of barriers, consisting mostly of prefabricated concrete slabs. Of the several heavily guarded crossing points, Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse was the most famous. Here one can find remnants of the wall as well as a small museum dedicated to its history. In some places buildings had immediately adjoined the wall, and in the early days of division some people died attempting to jump to freedom from their upper floors. Today crosses mark some of the places where these and other would-be refugees, numbering at least 110, lost their lives.
The political and physical division of Berlin had a profound and pervasive influence on urban planning. Because the walled boundary created, in effect, an urban frontier immediately west of what had been the city’s central administrative, commercial, and cultural quarter—Berlin Mitte—which became part of East Berlin, West Berlin was forced to develop a new central area of its own, around the Kurfürstendamm and the nearby Zoo railway station in the former suburb of Charlottenburg. The area had been a distinctive commercial and entertainment district since the late 19th century, but rebuilding following extensive damage from World War II gave it a decidedly modern character.
Throughout the city an effort to blend the modern with the traditional is evident. A striking example is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche), which incorporates the bell tower of the original 19th-century structure (ruined in World War II) into a dramatic glass-and-concrete church built in 1961.
A landmark of more conventional historic preservation is the heavily restored Reichstag building. The decision to restore the former parliament house in the 1970s was a controversial one—the building had been torched in the early days of Hitler’s chancellorship (a key event in his assumption of dictatorial powers) and heavily bombarded during the final Soviet offensive in April 1945. In early 1990 the building’s plenary session chamber was made suitable again for parliamentary use. In 1999, after extensive renovation and a major redesign, the German legislature finally moved into the Reichstag building, and the area surrounding the Reichstag became a centre of national government.
Although the two parts of the city divided by the wall were approximately equal in area, the population of East Berlin numbered less than two-thirds that of West Berlin. Because the average age of West Berliners was higher than that of other West Germans, West Berlin encouraged the immigration of younger West German and foreign workers. With the en...
The Reichstag is the building where the Bundestag, or lower house of Germany's parliament, meets.
The restored Reichstag building in Berlin is the seat of Germany's lower house of parliament.
Other articles where Reichstag is discussed: German Empire: Establishment of the North German Confederation: …adopted by the North German Reichstag on April 17, 1867. Four years later it became, almost without change, the constitution of the German Empire. Two principles were balanced against each other—the sovereignty of the German states and the national unity of the German people. In ...
