Schönhausen Palace

Schönhausen Palace was built between 1685 and 1691 for the Countess Dohna in the village of Niederschönhausen, which is now part of the Pankow district of northern Berlin. The palace is a compact Baroque structure with a symmetrical garden front, a central corps de logis, and two lower lateral wings, originally surrounded by a formal Baroque park. The palace's first royal resident was Queen Elisabeth Christine of Prussia, wife of Frederick the Great, who lived here from 1740 to the 1790s after the king decided to keep separate households. Frederick visited only rarely, and the queen spent nearly five decades at Schönhausen, embellishing the interiors with Rococo stuccowork and building up the palace's porcelain collection. After the monarchy ended in 1918, the palace was used as exhibition space and a museum until the Second World War. Following the war, it served as the official residence of the first president of the German Democratic Republic, Wilhelm Pieck, from 1949 to 1960, and later as the state guest house of the GDR, hosting Jawaharlal Nehru, Fidel Castro, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Following German reunification, the palace was comprehensively restored and reopened as a public museum in 2009. The interior tour covers the Rococo state rooms with their original stucco ceilings and inlaid parquet floors, the Queen's apartments including her bedchamber and writing room, and an exhibition on the palace's layered history as a royal residence and as the centre of GDR diplomacy. The palace park was reconstructed to its Baroque layout with a central avenue, a carp pond, and a small orangery.