Qualla: Schönhausen Palace

Schönhausen Palace: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frédéric Reclam / Joachim Martin Falbe, Public domain. For fifty summers, from 1740 to 1790, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern came out to Schönhausen. Her husband never came with her. Frederick the Great spent his summers at Sanssouci, thirty kilometres southwest in Potsdam, and in half a century of a marriage the records describe only as strained, he did not visit his wife's palace once. She had the stucco done anyway, most probably by the artist Johann Michael Graff, and the plasterwork in the upstairs rooms remains the loveliest thing in the building. Two hundred years later the same rooms would hold Wilhelm Pieck, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and the negotiators who dissolved a divided Germany.

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Image: Frédéric Reclam / Joachim Martin Falbe | Public domain

Schönhausen Palace: A Dutch House North of the Gates

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kvikk, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

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Image: Kvikk | CC BY-SA 3.0

Schönhausen Palace: Russians in the Park, a Horse in the Garden

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit file: James Steakley; artwork: Gottfried Hempel, Public domain. 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 gar...

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Image: file: James Steakley; artwork: Gottfried Hempel | Public domain

Schönhausen Palace: What the Regime Called Degenerate

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leonhard Lenz, CC0. 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 departmen...

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Image: Leonhard Lenz | CC0

Schönhausen Palace: The President's Palace

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebastian Wallroth, Public domain. 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 Min...

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Image: Sebastian Wallroth | Public domain

Schönhausen Palace: The Table Where It Ended

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 pla...

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Image: OTFW, Berlin | CC BY-SA 3.0