Finished in 1894 for the German Empire’s parliament. The inscription “Dem Deutschen Volke” — “To the German People” — was only added in 1916, cast from two French cannons captured in the Napoleonic Wars. In February 1933 the building burned in a mysterious fire; the Nazis used it within 24 hours as the excuse to suspend civil rights and arrest the opposition. The Reichstag never housed a free parliament under Hitler.
For the Red Army the Reichstag was the symbolic target in the Battle of Berlin. The photo of a Soviet soldier raising the red flag on its roof in May 1945 became one of the most famous pictures of the 20th century. Inside, Soviet soldiers wrote their names and messages on the walls in Cyrillic — and here’s the thing: the graffiti is still there. The architects preserved whole walls of it. Look for it as you go up.
After decades on the edge of West Berlin — the Wall ran metres behind it — the building got the strangest rebirth imaginable: in summer 1995 the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the entire Reichstag in silver fabric for two weeks. Five million people came. Then Sir Norman Foster gutted it and crowned it with the glass dome. Since 1999 it’s the seat of the Bundestag, the German parliament.
The dome isn’t decoration — it’s an argument. Citizens walk on a spiral ramp above the plenary chamber, literally over the heads of their representatives: the people above the parliament. The mirrored cone in the middle funnels daylight down into the chamber. At sunset the whole city glows at your feet — free of charge, by design.