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Age and death Permanent exhibition

New guard

Central Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny of the Federal Republic of Germany

The Neue Wache is one of the most visited memorials in Germany. The Neue Wache was designed and built by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the years 1816-1818, which renewed the old main guard of the royal palace. Since then it is called Neue Wache and is one of the main works of German classicism.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel: New Guard (Königswache), Berlin. Perspective view 1819 Wilhelm Brücke: Zeughaus and Neue Wache 1828 ©Collection of Architectural Designs, Berlin 1858. TU Berlin Architecture Museum, Inv. No. SAE 1858,002

After reunification, then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl personally lobbied for the Neue Wache to be established in 1993 as a central memorial to the victims of war and tyranny in the Federal Republic of Germany. An enlargement of Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture Mother with Dead Son, also known as Pietà, was placed in the center of the interior. The sculptor Harald Haacke – a student of Fritz Diederich, who in 1932 had made the life-size figures of the Mourning Parents for the Roggefelde military cemetery by order of Käthe Kollwitz – created the enlargement of the 38 cm tall sculpture.

Photograph of the enlarged bronze sculpture "Mother with Dead Son" by Käthe Kollwitz. It is located in the interior of the Neue Wache. It stands isolated in the middle of the room, above which the circular roof of the hall opens. In front of the sculpture of a seated, clothed woman holding her dead son in her lap, the words "Den Opfern von Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft" (To the victims of war and tyranny) are embedded in the floor.
Pietà at Neue Wache, Unter den Linden 4, Berlin

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