In the winter of 1763, the Treaty of Hubertusburg brought the Seven Years’ War to a close. Prussia had survived, but only just. Friedrich II (1712–1786) had carried a poison capsule throughout the conflict, preparing for the worst as a coalition of Austria, France, and Russia set about what its architects openly described as la déstruction totale de la Prusse. His reprieve came not on the battlefield but through the death of the Russian Empress Elizabeth (1709–1762) in January 1762 and the accession of Peter III (1728–1762), an admirer of the Prussian king, who withdrew from the war. Within months of the peace Friedrich had ordered work to begin on a vast new palace at the western end of the park at Sanssouci. The building, which he called a Fanfaronade (a boast, a blast of trumpets), was conceived less as a home than as a piece of political theatre: proof, directed outward to every court in Europe, that Prussia was not merely solvent but ascendant.
The Neues Palais was built between 1763 and 1769 to designs by Johann Gottfried Büring (1723–after 1788), Heinrich Ludwig Manger (1728–1790), and Carl von Gontard (1731–1791), all working under the close personal direction of the king. Friedrich, who sketched his own architectural ideas and required his builders to execute them, involved himself in decisions from the layout of the principal rooms to the placement of individual sculptures. The palace stretches some 240 metres across the park’s west axis, with over two hundred rooms, and is crowned by a functionless dome fifty-five metres high, topped by the Three Graces. More than four hundred large-scale sandstone figures line the balustrades and pilasters, depicting mythological heroes and gods in a programme whose scale alone was intended to overwhelm. The entire sculptural campaign, involving several workshops and dozens of stonemasons, took six years. In the central pediment of the garden front, the myth of Perseus runs across the relief and the four attic sculptures above it: Perseus slaying the sea monster, Perseus with Medusa and Pegasus, Perseus fighting Phineus, and Perseus freeing Andromeda. The subject, in which a mortal achieves divine status through courage alone, is plainly addressed to Friedrich himself.
What makes the Neues Palais unusual, and what made contemporaries uneasy, is its deliberate anachronism. By the 1760s, the Baroque as a court style was giving way across much of Europe to the cooler, more archaeologically minded language of Neoclassicism. Robert Adam (1728–1792) was already reshaping English interiors along antique lines; Jacques-Ange Gabriel (1698–1782) had completed the Petit Trianon at Versailles in 1764 in a pared-back classical manner; and the publications of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), above all his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums [History of the Art of Antiquity] (1764), were establishing a new theoretical foundation for architecture rooted in the sobriety and proportion of the ancient world. Friedrich, however, looked backward. The palace’s massing, its colossal Corinthian pilasters, its domed silhouette, and the broad rhythm of its garden front recall English Baroque models of half a century earlier, particularly John Vanbrugh’s (1664–1726) Castle Howard in Yorkshire (1699–1712). The connection is direct enough to have been noted in the architectural literature: the end pavilions with their small cupolas, the insistent horizontality of the façade, and the outsized central dome all bear the imprint of Vanbrugh’s approach, as does the influence of Christopher Wren’s (1632–1723) south front at Hampton Court Palace (1689–1694), with its red brick and severe classical articulation. Friedrich had in fact expressed admiration for Castle Howard, and the resemblance is more than passing. Yet the Neues Palais does not simply copy its English models. Where Vanbrugh and Wren worked in a restrained English idiom, Friedrich pushed the Baroque toward excess. The contemporary architect Heinrich Ludwig Manger, writing in 1789, described the building as a sonderbarer Steinklumpen (a strange lump of stone), and the English traveller John Moore, visiting in 1775, found the interiors showy and gaudy. Friedrich knew this. The overstatement was the point.
And yet for all its spectacle, the Neues Palais was functionally peculiar. Friedrich did not live there. He occupied it for roughly three weeks each summer, receiving relatives and foreign dignitaries. The rest of the year the building stood empty. It was, in structural terms, a maison de plaisance, a summer house, inflated to the scale of a European royal residence. Friedrich’s real home was the modest, single-storey Schloss Sanssouci at the park’s eastern end, with its vineyard terraces and its library of two thousand volumes. There is something revealing about this arrangement: the greatest palace in Prussia built by a king who preferred a small hilltop retreat, as though the building existed to perform a role its creator felt no need to inhabit. Whether this says more about Friedrich’s political instincts or his personal temperament is a question the palace itself leaves open.
After Friedrich’s death in 1786, the Neues Palais fell largely out of use. It became, intermittently, a summer residence for later members of the Hohenzollern dynasty, notably Friedrich Wilhelm (1831–1888), later Emperor Friedrich III, who was born and died in the palace during his brief ninety-nine-day reign in 1888. The building entered its most sustained period of domestic occupation under the last German Emperor, Wilhelm II (1859–1941), who had spent part of his childhood there and who made it his principal summer residence from 1889 onward. Wilhelm’s attachment to the palace was personal as well as dynastic. He oversaw extensive modernisation: steam heating, electric lighting, bathrooms in the state apartments, a telephone line, and, for the Empress Auguste Viktoria (1858–1921), a private elevator and a small enclosed bathing cabinet attached to the bedroom, closable like a wardrobe to retain heat. The fireplace settings, beautiful as they were, had always been largely decorative and provided limited heating. Under Wilhelm, the palace became, for the first time, a working domestic household as well as a setting for state occasions.
The November Revolution of 1918 ended all of that with abrupt finality. Wilhelm abdicated and fled to the Netherlands, initially to Amerongen Castle and then, from May 1920, to Huis Doorn, a fourteenth-century moated castle near Utrecht that had been rebuilt as an elegant country house in the eighteenth century. Wilhelm had purchased the property in 1919 with funds approved by the Weimar Finance Minister Albert Südekum (1871–1944) for the furnishing of his household in exile. In 1920, fifty-nine railway wagons carried approximately thirty thousand objects from the imperial palaces in Berlin and Potsdam to the Netherlands: paintings, furniture, silver, porcelain, carpets, photograph albums, and domestic effects spanning centuries of Hohenzollern history. Huis Doorn became a miniature court in exile, the inventory of a great royal household compressed into forty rooms. Among the objects was a specially designed fork (the Kaisergabel), which enabled Wilhelm, whose left arm was withered from birth, to eat without difficulty. He lived there, chopping wood, receiving visitors, and nursing his grievances against the Weimar Republic, until his death in June 1941, during the German occupation of the Netherlands.
The subsequent history of these objects is one of the quieter curiosities of twentieth-century cultural displacement. After the war, the Dutch government requisitioned Huis Doorn as enemy property and opened it as a museum. A significant portion of the material shipped from Potsdam in 1920 was never unpacked. In the 1970s, the Dutch government returned these crated objects to Potsdam, where they were reintegrated into the Neues Palais. The furnishings that visitors encounter in the upper rooms today are, in many cases, not the originals from those spaces but replacements drawn from this returned stock, since Wilhelm’s own furniture had long since gone to the Netherlands and what came back was largely material that had never been used at Doorn. The result is a palace whose interiors preserve the appearance of 1918 while concealing a history of wholesale removal and partial return.
It is in the rooms damaged during the Soviet occupation, however, that the Neues Palais confronts visitors most directly with the violence of the twentieth century. The palace survived the Second World War without significant structural damage from bombing. What it did not survive intact was the Red Army’s arrival in the spring of 1945 and the months that followed.
The plunder of cultural property in the Soviet occupation zone operated on two distinct levels. At the institutional level, the process was directed by the Soviet Committee on Arts, which deployed specialised units known as Trophy Brigades (trofeinye brigady). These were composed of art historians, restorers, museum officials, and other specialists, dressed in military uniforms, tasked with the systematic identification and removal of works from state collections, private holdings, and wartime storage depots. The operation had its origins in Stalin’s decrees of February 1945, issued shortly after the Yalta Conference, which established the framework for what was officially described as compensation for the vast cultural losses inflicted on the Soviet Union by the German invasion: the destruction of some 427 museums, roughly four thousand libraries, and an estimated 110 million books across Soviet territory. In practice, the principle of restitution in kind (the seizure of equivalent objects to replace those destroyed) rapidly gave way to indiscriminate confiscation. As Konstantin Akinsha, who with Grigorii Kozlov first revealed the full scope of the Trophy Brigades’ activities in a shocking 1991 article for ARTnews, later wrote, the initial premise of equivalent compensation was abandoned and replaced by a programme of total removal (ARTnews 90, no.4, April 1991). By 1946, the brigades operating under the Committee on Arts alone had claimed an estimated 2.5 million works of art and 10 million books and manuscripts from the Soviet zone.
At the Neues Palais and the surrounding Sanssouci complex, works that had been evacuated to storage depots during the war were entered and taken. Paintings disappeared. Old Master pictures that had hung in the palace since Friedrich’s time were removed and shipped east. In the rooms from which they were taken, the palace today displays black-and-white photographic reproductions in the positions once occupied by the originals, a quiet, unflinching acknowledgement of absence. The tattered silk wall coverings, still bearing the damage inflicted in those months, have been left unrestored. On the walls, Cyrillic graffiti scratched or written by Soviet soldiers remains visible, a form of inscription that is at once individual (a soldier writing his name, his unit, a date) and collective (the mark of an occupying army moving through the possessions of a defeated enemy). These inscriptions have not been cleaned or removed. The Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg (Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation), which administers the site, has preserved them as part of the historical fabric.
Alongside the institutional seizure of art, individual soldiers took objects on their own initiative. This dual process of state-directed confiscation and personal appropriation has made the recovery and restitution of displaced works exceptionally difficult. Some objects entered Soviet museum reserves and were hidden for decades, their existence denied until the early 1990s. Others passed into private hands, were traded on the black market, or were distributed to military personnel under regulations that permitted officers to receive goods according to rank. The fate of many works removed from Potsdam remains unknown.
The plunder of cultural property, however, was only one dimension of the catastrophe that overtook the civilian population of Berlin and Brandenburg in 1945. The Soviet advance into eastern Germany was accompanied by mass sexual violence against women and girls on a scale that historians have only recently begun to address with the seriousness it demands. Norman Naimark, drawing on Soviet, East German, and Western archives, concluded that the number of German women raped by Soviet soldiers during and after the invasion likely ran into the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million across the occupation zone. Berlin was the most severely affected, but the violence was endemic throughout Brandenburg, including in Potsdam itself. Atina Grossmann, in her 1995 study published in the journal October, situated the rapes within a broader context of wartime sexual violence and the postwar reconstruction of German gender relations, noting that the subject was subsequently repressed in both East and West Germany, in the East because it contradicted the official narrative of Soviet liberation, in the West because it sat uncomfortably alongside the process of national rehabilitation and the rebuilding of male civic authority. Helke Sander and Barbara Johr, in their 1992 study BeFreier und Befreite [Liberators and Liberated], provided some of the first systematic demographic research, estimating that a substantial proportion of the assaults involved gang rape and that many victims were attacked repeatedly. The anonymous author of Eine Frau in Berlin [A Woman in Berlin], first published in 1959 and reissued in 2003, recorded the daily reality of the occupation from the perspective of a woman who was herself assaulted multiple times, describing how complaints to Soviet officers were dismissed and how the violence continued long after Stalin’s order of 20 April 1945 instructing troops to improve their treatment of the civilian population. Women who became pregnant as a result of rape faced further difficulties: access to abortion was restricted, and the children born of these assaults became the subject of a lasting social silence.
These events are not incidental to the history of the Neues Palais. They are part of the same historical moment that produced the graffiti on its walls, the empty picture frames, the damaged textiles. The palace, by virtue of having survived largely intact while the world around it was broken, became a site where the consequences of military defeat were inscribed directly onto the fabric of a building designed, two centuries earlier, to proclaim invincibility. The Cyrillic names on the walls were written by men who were, simultaneously, the agents of cultural appropriation and, in many cases, participants in or witnesses to the mass violence against the civilian population. To walk through these rooms is to encounter both histories at once, and neither can be understood without the other.
The Neues Palais today is among the most completely preserved Baroque palace interiors in northern Europe, and precisely because of that preservation it is also among the most honestly disturbing. The building holds together, within a single set of rooms, the ambitions of Frederician absolutism, the domesticity of Wilhelmine imperial life, the displacement of cultural property under two regimes (the Weimar transfer to Huis Doorn and the Soviet seizures of 1945), and the physical traces of military occupation. There is no comfortable narrative that accommodates all of these layers. The palace does not attempt one. It simply presents its walls, damaged and inscribed, its reproductions where originals once hung, its returned furnishings from Dutch crates, and leaves the visitor to reckon with what happened there.
References
Anonymous (1959) Eine Frau in Berlin: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen vom 20. April bis 22. Juni 1945. Geneva: Helmut Kossodo. Translated into English by Philip Boehm (2005) as A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary. London: Virago
Akinsha, K. and Kozlov, G. (1991) ‘Tracking the Trophy Brigade’, ARTnews, 90(4), pp. 130–137
Akinsha, K. and Kozlov, G. (1995) Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe’s Art Treasures. New York: Random House
Akinsha, K. (2010) ‘Stalin’s Decrees and Soviet Trophy Brigades: Compensation, Restitution in Kind, or “Trophies” of War?’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 17(2), pp. 195–216
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Giersberg, H.-J. (1986) Das Potsdamer Stadtschloss [The Potsdam City Palace]. Potsdam: Generaldirektion der Staatlichen Schlösser und Gärten Potsdam-Sanssouci
Grossmann, A. (1995) ‘A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers’, October, 72, pp. 43–63 Available at , https://www.scribd.com/doc/288197869/a-question-of-silence-pdf (Accessed 2-0 October 2023)
Naimark, N.M. (1995) The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Nicholas, L.H. (1994) The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Röhl, J.C.G. (2014) Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Sander, H. and Johr, B. (eds) (1992) BeFreier und Befreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder [Liberators and Liberated: War, Rapes, Children]. Munich: Verlag Antje Kunstmann.
Simpson, E. (ed.) (1997) The Spoils of War: World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg (n.d.) Neues Palais. Available at: https://www.spsg.de/en/group-offers/group-offers-at-a-glance/single-view-objects/new-palace (Accessed: 20 October 2023)