Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin
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How it came to be
Frederick II of Prussia, Frederick the Great, had a summer palace built above a terraced vineyard in Potsdam. Its first stone was laid on 14 April 1745, and Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff designed it from the king's own sketches. He called it Sanssouci, French for without worries: a single-storey house of ten principal rooms where he could escape court ceremony, and where he spent every summer until his death in 1786.
His successors kept building. Frederick William II laid out the New Garden from 1787, and its Marble Palace was finished in 1793. In the 19th century Peter Joseph Lenné drew the gardens together into one landscape, with sightlines reaching to Peacock Island and Glienicke Palace on the Berlin side, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel was among the architects who worked there. The last palace, Cecilienhof, was built from 1914 to 1917, and from 17 July to 2 August 1945 it hosted the Potsdam Conference.
After the war the Berlin Wall ran between Potsdam and West Berlin, and its border fortifications destroyed several historic sites. The palaces and parks were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1990 and extended in 1992 and 1999, and they now cover 2,064 ha. After German reunification Frederick's remains were reburied at Sanssouci, in a tomb overlooking the gardens he created.
Travellers who came here
- 1873-03
On 27 March they toured the Neues Palais, Sanssouci with its picture gallery, the Belvedere on the Pfingstberg, the Marmorpalais and Babelsberg Palace.
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