Potsdam, once a garrison town, became the preferred residence of Prussian rulers and now has more palaces and pavilions than any other city in Germany. A humble town was transformed into a landscape of grandeur and vision.

In Potsdam, in spite of their martial reputation, the Brandenburg electors and Prussian kings created worlds for their own pleasure.

Potsdam is virtually an island in a chain of lakes strung out along the course of the river Havel in the flat Brandenburg landscape. Between 1730 and 1917 the Hohenzollern rulers developed more than 500 hectares of parks where 16 palaces and about 150 other buildings stand.

The work of their architects and garden designers displays the evolution of styles over centuries.

The UNESCO world-heritage site known as Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin includes Park Sanssouci, the connected Neuer Garten and Pfingstberg, Park Babelsberg, Schlosspark Sacrow, and the nearby Berlin parks Klein-Glienicke and Pfaueninsel, areas covering more than 2,000 hectares. The site, declared in 1990, was extended in 1992 and 1999.

The Dutch soldier and royal official Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, then working for the Brandenburg ‘Great Elector’ Friedrich Wilhelm, was the first to see the potential of the Havel landscape. In 1664 he wrote to the elector: ‘The whole island must become a paradise.’

Friedrich Wilhelm, who was rebuilding Brandenburg after the Thirty Years War, was forced to focus on fortifying his city and building an army, city palace and stables. His two successors intensified the military activity. But his great-grandson Frederick the Great began exploiting the potential of Park Sanssouci, beginning with the summer palace Schloss Sanssouci, a development that continued.

Unsatisfied with one park, successor princes commissioned further expanses. The landscape architect Johann August Eyserbeck laid out the first Neuer Garten of about 100 hectares in English style around Friedrich Wilhelm II’s summer palace Marmorpalais on the lakes north of the city. Peter Joseph Lenné remodelled Neuer Garten early in the 19th century and made over and extended Park Sanssouci. 

Later, on the south-east shore of the lake Tiefer See, Park Babelsberg was laid out over more than 100 hectares, masterminded by Lenné, and dotted with follies such as the Neogothic Flatowturm and the rebuilt Gerichtslaube, a small courthouse that was once part of Berlin’s medieval town hall. The citizens of Berlin gifted the red-brick building to Wilhelm I, a medievalist who admired Gothic architecture.

At the high point almost 50m above the landscape, the Siegessäule marks Prussia’s military successes.

Marmorpalais: Classicist elegance

In one of his first acts on succeeding to the Prussian throne, Friedrich Wilhelm II commissioned Carl von Gontard and Carl Gotthard Langhans to design this early Classicist private summer residence on the west shore of the Heiliger See.

Tastes had moved on during the later years of Frederick the Great, with whom Friedrich Wilhelm, as crown prince, was not on good terms. The restrained red-brick exterior of the palace, completed in 1791, reveals a main wing topped by a tower and single-storey side wings connected in an almost horseshoe plan.

The luxury is within. The palace was equipped with a concert hall and oriental room and marble and stucco interiors and supplied with Wedgwood ceramics.

The palace outbuildings were detached and presented in what to us is an eccentric variety of styles, though not outlandish in the fashion of the period. The kitchen was a separate building, presented like a Roman ruin. An orangerie stood to the south of the main garden area, which featured an obelisk.

The Weisses Haus nearby was an earlier garden house that the king bought and used as accommodation for courtiers. It has been under restoration since 2020.

The cool room cellar about 200m to the north of the palace was designed as a pyramid.
A small village of Dutch-style buildings housed servants and a Dutch-style villa, known as the Damenhaus, was for the king’s chief mistress Wilhelmine Enke. But other ladies widely known to enjoy the king’s favour also used it to preen themselves for their ruler. Later, the building was known as the Kavaliershaus and became a residence for court ladies. In recent years it has been fully restored.

Belvedere auf dem Pfingstberg: Built for the view

This ambitious Italian Renaissance-style sandstone palace, designed to have outlooks throughout Potsdam, was never fully realised. Friedrich Wilhelm IV envisaged hanging gardens and when the project started in 1847.

As with the Neue Orangerie, Rome’s Villa Medici was an inspiration, with elements of Tivoli’s Villa D’Este. Grand stairs flanking a cascade were to lead up from a lower fountain, encircling a smaller fountain. Vines were planned for the lower terrace. The building concept was for a beautiful lookout point. It was, in short, another of the king’s Italian visions.

What the builders realised were the twin towers with arcades and Classically rendered parapets with open stairs looking out over the Jungfernsee and Heiliger See. There were only two rooms, with interior wall paintings in the Etruscan-Roman villa style and Moorish style, but these are fragmentary today after long neglect as part of the Soviet border zone. Vines remain at the foot of the hill.

Ludwig Persius, Friedrich August Stüler and Ludwig Ferdinand Hesse worked on the designs.
Much of the land the Hohenzollerns needed for their park fantasies had to be bought up. Already on the hill was a Jewish cemetery, which remains.

The political troubles of 1848-49 were challenges, but when work paused it was to focus resources on a still grander concept, the Neue Orangerie at Park Sanssouci. Work finally ceased on the Pfingstberg in 1863, two years after Friedrich Wilhelm’s death, when Wilhelm I, the first Prussian emperor, called a halt. The court thereafter used the palace as a place to take tea.

The Pomonatempel on the slope below the Belvedere was in place before the palace. The Pfingstberg landowner, cartographer and privy councillor Karl Ludwig von Oesfeld had created a vineyard on the lower slope and commissioned Karl Friedrich Schinkel to design a new pavilion doing homage to the Roman goddess of fruit, but in honour of Oesfeld’s new wife. This precious first work by Schinkel, who became the greatest of the Prussian architects, remains a highlight today.

Schloss Glienicke: Antique villa

One of the junior Prussian princes, Carl, commissioned Schinkel in the 1820s to redesign an 18th century residence and estate as a lakeside two-storey Italian Classicist villa with tower on the Berlin bank of the Havel lakes.

Four small wings and a coach house were arranged around a courtyard, creating an antique feel by mounting fragments of sculpture, reliefs, pergolas and Byzantine touches. Lenné had already relaid the gardens. Schinkel created the pavilion Grosse Neugierde to greet arrivals from the bridge Glienicker Brücke.

Ludwig Persius later carried out building extensions and redesigned some details.

The elegant Roter Saal and the Klosterhof are highlights.

Carl and his son lived at Schloss Glienicke for 60 years before the small palace went out of use. It accommodated a World War II military hospital and later a sports hotel and a school. Its rich interiors have been restored for visitors and one wing houses a museum of court garden design.

Jagdschloss Glienicke: Potsdam hunting lodge

The hunting lodge near Schloss Glienicke has origins older than the surrounding palaces.
It was a secondary residence of the elector Friedrich Wilhelm, completed in 1682 but extended and remodelled in Baroque style early in the 18th century.

The palace was used by a succession of princes and other owners for various purposes through successive redesigns. It is now an educational institution, restored with a ground-floor glass bay.

Schloss Babelsberg: Revivalist castle

The summer palace, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, dominates the scene and provides a superb lake outlook. It was commissioned by the crown prince Wilhelm, later the emperor Wilhelm I, and the eastern stage was completed in 1835.

It was one of Schinkel’s Neogothic designs, influenced by his study of Tudor Revivalist English architecture and Windsor Castle is a likely model. The crown princess Augusta wanted an English-style Neogothic palace and garden and was later in charge of the interior decoration.

His proteges Ludwig Persius and Johann Heinrich Strack were in charge of the western-stage expansion, including a ballroom and apartments and completed in 1849. The Weimar prince and garden designer Hermann von Pückler-Muskau took over direction of the gardens and extended the terraces.

Queen Victoria and her consort Albert visited the palace in 1858, when their daughter, later the empress Victoria, was living there. It was likely politics were discussed as Albert, the prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, would have been concerned about his patrimony in the face of Prussian expansion. It was the place Wilhelm agreed to appoint Otto von Bismarck Prussian chancellor in 1862.

The palace was closed during ongoing restoration late in 2024.

Schloss Cecilienhof: Reshaping the post-war world

In the mid-20th century, Potsdam’s role in history was unfinished. Berlin lay in ruins after six years of war. The Potsdam Conference of 1945 was held in Cecilienhof, an early 20th century hunting lodge designed on a Tudor inspiration and built near the north end of Neuer Garten.

In drawing up a new world order, Harry Truman, Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill (succeeded by Clement Atlee after losing the concurrent UK election) and their delegations revealed the East-West mistrust that was to develop into the Cold War. Here, Truman issued the authority to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

However, the Allied powers succeeded confirming many of the conditions and boundaries for post-World War II Germany. The conference room is maintained as it was for the post-war leaders.

Cecilienhof was built between 1914 and 1917 for the German crown prince Wilhelm and named for his princess Cecilie. The style and atmosphere are intimate but there are, however, more than 170 rooms. This, and its ability to remain secure for the meeting of great leaders, made it an ideal conference venue.

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