In 1662 Countess Sophie Theodore, of the Holland-Brederode family and married to the Brandenburg general Christian Albert of Dohna, bought the lands of Niederschönhausen and Pankow, then well beyond the Berlin gates. Two years later she built a manor here in the Dutch style, with the little Panke river running through the grounds.

It changed hands twice before it mattered. Minister Joachim Ernst von Grumbkow acquired it in 1680, and in 1691 his widow sold it for 16,000 Thalers to the Hohenzollern elector Frederick III, who had wanted it for years. Frederick had Johann Arnold Nering remodel the manor into a palace between 1691 and 1693, and in August 1700 he sat here planning the coronation that would make him Frederick I in Prussia. His son had no such affection for the place. After 1713 civil servants moved into the rooms as offices, land was leased off, and palace and park quietly fell apart.

In 1760, during the Seven Years' War, Russian troops drove deep into Prussia, occupied Berlin and wrecked Niederschönhausen. The queen sat the war out in the fortress at Magdeburg. After 1763 Johann Boumann rebuilt the palace into essentially the shape it holds today, and the gardens were redone in Rococo à la française.

Elisabeth Christine died in 1797, and the palace went quiet again — mostly a furniture and picture store, occasionally lived in by Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, widow of Prince Louis Charles, who had Peter Joseph Lenné turn the grounds into an English landscape garden.

One rumour outlived all of them: that Frederick the Great buried his favourite horse Condé in these gardens, under a particular hillock. It cannot be true in the way people tell it. Condé outlived his owner and died in 1804 at the age of thirty-eight. The skeleton is at the Free University's veterinary department.

The Hohenzollerns held the palace until 1920, when the family was dispossessed after the revolution of 1918-19 and Schönhausen passed to the Free State of Prussia. It opened to the public and filled up with art exhibitions. Under the Nazis it housed the government's art department, and several paintings of the modern art the regime had banned as 'degenerate' were stored in these rooms.

The Battle of Berlin damaged the building but did not gut it. A Pankow artists' initiative repaired it fast enough to mount an exhibition in September 1945, four months after the surrender. The Soviet Military Administration then requisitioned it as an officers' mess, and later as a boarding school for Soviet children.

When the German Democratic Republic was founded on 7 October 1949, the Soviets handed Schönhausen to the new East German state, and until 1960 it served as the official residence of Wilhelm Pieck, the GDR's first and only president. Khrushchev was received here. So was Ho Chi Minh. Garages went up on the north side for the presidential fleet, a casino and chancellery on the south, with two gatehouses framing a formal court. Reinhold Lingner laid out the inner garden in the bright, open manner of the 1950s — and a wall went through the park, dividing it into a private half and a public one.

After Pieck died in 1960 the building briefly housed the new State Council, which moved to Mitte in 1964. It then became the government guest house, renamed Schloss Niederschönhausen. Indira Gandhi stayed here. So did Fidel Castro. So, in October 1989, did Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, on the eve of the revolution that ended the state that was hosting them.

In 1989 and 1990 the Round Table — the negotiating body that bridged the collapsing GDR government and the opposition — met in the palace outbuildings. Major portions of the Two Plus Four talks, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, were held here too. A plaque now marks it. The palace had gone from a queen's summer house to a president's residence to the room where the country signed itself out of existence.

What followed was bureaucratic. The federal property office took it over, Berlin became the owner in 1991 and put it up for sale in 1997. A 2003 proposal to lodge the President of Germany here while Bellevue was refurbished collapsed over an estimated twelve million euros of works. In June 2005 the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation took ownership with €8.6 million in federal funds, and on 19 December 2009 Schönhausen reopened — Elisabeth Christine's rooms and Wilhelm Pieck's office, in the same building, on the same ticket.