Unter den Linden

Unter den Linden, avenue in Berlin, running in a straight line between two squares, the Marx-Engels Platz to the east and the Pariser Platz, where stands the Brandenburg Gate, to the west. The name (“under the limes”) derives from the lime trees planted along its route on the orders of Frederick William, the “Great Elector”, in 1647, when the Schloss (palace) of the Hohenzollern family, the rulers of Prussia, stood on what is now Marx-Engels Platz and the avenue connected the palace to Tiergarten Park, then a hunting ground.

The Zeughaus (arsenal), a Baroque building that now houses the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German historical museum), was constructed on the avenue between 1695 and 1706. In 1747, on the orders of Frederick the Great, the avenue was given its modern alignment by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, the architect of the Lindenoper, the opera house built on the avenue about the same time. Other public buildings went up later on Unter den Linden, including the Neue Wache, a Neo-Classical building by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and the palace of Prince Heinrich that, in 1810, became the headquarters of Friedrich Wilhelm University, renamed Wilhelm von Humboldt University in 1949.

Unter den Linden and most of the buildings on it were destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. After 1949, when the Soviet-controlled eastern sector of Berlin, containing the whole of the avenue, was claimed as the capital of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the opera house was rebuilt, reopening in 1955 as the Deutsches Staatsoper (German state opera), but the remains of the Hohenzollern palace were blown up in 1950 and replaced by Marx-Engels Platz, where statues of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and the Palast der Republik (palace of the republic) were erected.