100 Years

1848, the "March Revolution". After citizens of all classes took to the streets all over Europe, demonstrating for freedom of the press and constitutional government, a new epoch began in German political life. With the establishment of a constitutional monarchy there was also set up a two-chamber parliament, the Prussian Landtag. It consisted of an upper chamber – the Prussian Herrenhaus – and a lower one: the Prussian Chamber of Deputies.

The Prussian Herrenhaus, whose members were appointed by the king, found provisional accommodation in the Oberwallstraße. When this the Herrenhaus’s first seat was destroyed by fire, the Prussian state acquired, in 1851, a magnificent Baroque townhouse belonging to the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family: Leipziger Straße No. 3. The family of the banker Abraham Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had acquired this building in 1825 from Carl Friedrich von der Recke, who had received it in turn from the heirs of Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky.

The famous composer Felix Mendelssohn, one of Abraham’s sons, composed his first works in this house. His family, leading representatives of the city’s urbane and cosmopolitan spirit, organized in the property’s summer house private concerts for friends and acquaintances which soon became one of the centres of Berlin’s musical life.

But the Mendelssohn house too was only a makeshift, since, after the establishment of the constitutional monarchy, the Prussian monarchs were hardly inclined to place at the top of their agenda the erection, opposite that Berlin City Castle which incarnated the principle of aristocratic rule, an architectural counterpart symbolizing the political representation of the people. The Herrenhaus was obliged itself to erect an annexe for the actual conduct of parliamentary business; moreover, its plenary chamber had to be shared with the Reichstag of the North German Federation.

As complaints increased about lack of space, bad acoustics and inadequate ventilation, plans were made for expansion. The obvious choice was the neighbouring property at Leipziger Straße No. 4 which had been developed in 1761 by Gotzkowsky as a porcelain factory and had been home, after its sale to King Friedrich II., to the world-famous "Royal Porcelain Works". But there was a decisive problem: after the foundation of the German Reich in 1871, the Reichstag had chosen as its provisional seat just this former "Royal Porcelain Works".

It was only in 1894, when Wallot’s building on what is today the Platz der Republik had finally been completed and the Reichstag was able to move into its new home on the banks of the Spree, that the way was clear to join together the two properties at Leipziger Straße 3 and 4. Instead of the two palatial townhouses, there arose, to designs by Friedrich Schulze-Kolbitz, first a brand new building for the Prussian Chamber of Deputies (1892) and then (1899) the Herrenhaus building. This latter, which was completed in 1904, reprises, with its cour d’honneur, a dominant motif of the noble palaces of the Baroque era – a circumstance not to be wondered at, since the members of the Herrenhaus were appointed to the chamber by the king himself.

With the end of the monarchy in the revolution of 1918, the Herrenhaus also vanished as an institution. A little later, during the Weimar Republic period, the building was adopted as the seat of the Prussian State Council, whose function it was to represent the Prussian provinces at regional state level and whose president was Konrad Adenauer, later first president of the Federal Republic. In the course of the disempowerment of the organs of German constitutional government and their forcible bringing into line with Nazi policy which followed on Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, the former Herrenhaus building passed into the hands of the National Socialist "Preußenhaus Foundation". Hermann Göring, who became, in this year, Minister-President of Prussia and later held the post of Aviation Minister for the Reich, had his headquarters in the building while his new ministry was being built.

The former Herrenhaus building survived the Second World War only in a seriously damaged condition. The northern façade, indeed, was very largely still intact. The rear part of the building’s central section, however, had been burnt to the ground. The site on which it stood had once been the lively centre of Berlin, but it now found itself lying close to the demarcation line separating the Soviet and the Allied sectors of the city, which meant that it was later in large part enclosed by the Berlin Wall.

As late as the beginning of the 1950’s it was still planned to adapt the building so as to make of it the official seat of the Minister-President of the GDR – an idea, admittedly, which was soon abandoned. Instead, its west wing became home to the GDR’s Academy of Sciences. The east wing accommodated, for a time, the GDR’s State Planning Commission and its National Economic Council.

The necessary conversions and renovations, and the removal of war damage, were carried out mainly with a view to immediate functional requirements, which meant that the interior structure of the building was radically altered. Decorative elements were removed and rooms divided both vertically and horizontally by improvised walls and ceilings. The entrance hall and lobby in the central part of the building, with their lavish ornamentation still in a good state of repair, remained unused or served only as storage spaces.

After German reunification in 1990 and the moving of the federal German government to Berlin it was originally envisaged that the building be used to provide secondary headquarters in the new capital for those ministries which had remained behind in Bonn. When, however, in 1996, the Bundesrat decided that it too would move to Berlin, these plans were dropped.

It was the prestigious Hamburg architects Schweger & Partner s who were commissioned to redesign the former Prussian Herrenhaus as a building for the Bundesrat.

Their task was to create a building which would, on the one hand, meet the requirements of modern parliamentary business but, on the other hand, continue to evidence the special quality of the original building and its century-long history.

On the 27th March 1997, the President of the Bundesrat finally gave the go-ahead for the work of reconstruction. By August 2000, the building was ready to be occupied and a month later there took place the solemn inauguration of the plenary chamber.