Palais Hardenberg

The Palais Hardenberg stood on the Dönhoffplatz at what is now Leipziger Straße 55 in Berlin’s Mitte district. Designed by Georg Christian Unger between 1774 and 1776 as a royal commission for Count Schwerin, it later became the home and office of Prussian chancellor Prince von Hardenberg. The building passed through several owners before Hardenberg bought it in 1804 and had it enlarged and modernised. Its most important role came in the mid-19th century when it housed the Prussian Landtag. Georg Heinrich Bürde remodelled the site in 1848–49, creating a rectangular chamber with the speaker’s desk in the centre and benches facing each other. The Second Chamber held its first session here on 26 February 1849, and after a fire elsewhere the First Chamber met here four times. In 1867 Hermann Blankenstein extended the building so that the Zollparliament could sit here from April 1868 to May 1870. After 1871 the palace served briefly as the meeting place of the new German Reichstag. Later it became home to the Prussian Herrenhaus until 1904. When the site was sold in 1905 a commercial building replaced it, and that too was destroyed in the Second World War.