Episode Details

After German unification in 1871, the new imperial parliament spent 23 years working out of a former porcelain factory in Berlin while the government fought to clear a Polish Prussian aristocrat's palace off the Koenigsplatz. Frankfurt architect Paul Wallot won the commission in 1882 with a heavy neo-Renaissance design inspired by Philadelphia's Memorial Hall, its four corner towers standing for Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Wuerttemberg. Wilhelm I laid the foundation stone in 1884, but by the 1894 opening his grandson Wilhelm II ruled and mocked the building as the Imperial Monkey House. He blocked the inscription Dem Deutschen Volke, To the German People, until it was finally mounted in 1916. In November 1918 Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the German Republic from its balcony.

In 1920, 42 protesters were shot outside in the Reichstag bloodbath. On February 27, 1933, fire gutted the chamber, Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe was blamed, and Hitler used the blaze to push Hindenburg into an emergency decree suspending civil liberties. The Nazis moved parliament to the Kroll Opera House and used the Reichstag for propaganda shows, a hospital, a maternity ward, and an AEG vacuum tube factory. Soviet soldiers carved their names into its walls in May 1945. Stranded in West Berlin, it was stripped by Paul Baumgarten in the 1960s, barred from hosting parliament by the 1971 Four Power Agreement, and used for concerts. After reunification, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped it in 1995 and Norman Foster rebuilt it with a public glass dome, reopening in 1999.

• Ernst Reuter pleading "you people of the world, look upon this city" before the burned facade during the 1948 Soviet blockade
• Barclay James Harvest playing its steps in 1980 and Tangerine Dream performing there the following year
• The Bethke brothers flying ultralights out of East Germany in 1989 and landing on the lawn in front of the building
• Foster's team preserving Soviet graffiti and bullet holes, after removing a few markings deemed offensive in talks with Russian diplomats
• The dome's mirrored cone and sun tracking shield, and public ramps that place visitors above the debating chamber