The Reichstag: Berlin's parliament and its glass dome

First, the name

The building is the Reichstag; the parliament inside it is the Bundestag. The two are used interchangeably by visitors and never by Germans. The Reichstag was the imperial and Weimar assembly, a body whose name the Federal Republic chose not to revive, so the building kept the old word and the institution took a new one.

Empire

Paul Wallot's building went up between 1884 and 1894, with a steel-and-glass dome that was advanced engineering for its day. Wilhelm II opened it and disliked it, calling it the imperial monkey house. He objected too when the inscription Dem Deutschen Volke — to the German people — was finally added to the façade in 1916, in letters cast from French cannon captured a century earlier. By then the war made the sentiment harder to refuse.

The parliament that met beneath it had limited powers. It could not appoint or dismiss a chancellor, which is worth remembering before calling the building the birthplace of German democracy.

Fire

On the night of 27 February 1933 the chamber burned. Whether Marinus van der Lubbe acted alone remains argued over, though the weight of recent scholarship favours it. What is not in question is the use made of it: emergency decrees the following day suspended civil liberties, and within a month the Enabling Act had removed parliament from the equation entirely.

A detail that often surprises people is that the Nazis never repaired the building or sat in it. The rump parliament of the dictatorship met across the road in the Kroll Opera House, and the Reichstag spent twelve years as a damaged shell used for exhibitions and, later, as a maternity hospital and an anti-aircraft position.

1945

That shell was nonetheless what the Red Army fought towards through the last days of April 1945, because Soviet planners had fixed on it as the symbol of the regime. The photograph of a soldier raising the flag over the ruins was taken by Yevgeny Khaldei on 2 May, after the fighting, and staged — one of the century's most reproduced images and not quite a record of the moment it depicts.

Divided

The Wall ran within metres of the building, leaving it marooned at the edge of the British sector. The remains of Wallot's dome, structurally unsound, were demolished in 1954. Paul Baumgarten's reconstruction through the 1960s stripped out most of the surviving ornament and produced a serviceable, rather flat interior used for exhibitions and committee meetings.

Its strangest moment came in the summer of 1995, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the entire building in silver fabric for a fortnight, after more than twenty years of lobbying parliament for permission. Around five million people came to look at it. The renovation began once the fabric came down.

Foster

The Bundestag voted in 1991 to move from Bonn, and Norman Foster — now Lord Foster — won the competition to convert the building. His original entry had no dome at all; parliament asked for one, and what he produced in response has become the most recognisable thing about the building.

The dome is 23.5 metres high and 40 across. Two ramps spiral up its inner face to a viewing platform, so that the route deliberately carries the public above the chamber. At its centre a mirrored cone, clad in 360 panels, throws daylight down into the plenary hall and draws stale air upward. Energy comes largely from vegetable oil, with heat stored seasonally in aquifers below.

During the stripping-out, Russian graffiti left by Soviet soldiers in 1945 came to light on the interior walls. Rather than scrub it off, Foster and the Bundestag kept it in place, with a small number of obscene or racist inscriptions removed after consultation with Russian officials. The pencil and charcoal names are still there in the corridors, alongside shell damage left deliberately unrepaired.

Inside

The plenary chamber seats the Bundestag, which since the February 2025 election has had 630 members, cut from 736 by an electoral reform intended to stop the parliament growing indefinitely. Above the seats hangs the federal eagle, an outsized version of Ludwig Gies's original design, known to everyone in Berlin as the fat hen.

Visiting

Everything here is free, and everything has to be booked. The Bundestag handles it through its own portal, in English as well as German, at visite.bundestag.de, with background information at bundestag.de/en/visittheBundestag. There are three different visits, and choosing the wrong one is the usual mistake.

The dome and roof terrace on their own — self-guided, with an audio guide in twelve languages and a short talk from a guide on the terrace. Around an hour.

A guided tour of the building, roughly ninety minutes, covering the plenary chamber, the architecture and the workings of parliament, with the dome afterwards if time allows. These run only in weeks when parliament is not sitting.

A plenary session from the public gallery, which by definition is only possible in weeks when it is.

That alternation is why chamber places are so scarce. Requests are accepted for the current month and the two following, and in practice almost nothing comes up sooner than a fortnight out; anyone wanting a specific date, or a particular time of day, should be booking considerably earlier than that.

The dome is the one part with any give in it. Booking in person at the visitors' service centre on Platz der Republik, in front of the building, can work for the same day or the next if places remain — difficult, but possible, and worth trying. Confirmations must be issued at least two hours before the visit, and photo ID is required to book in person. It is not a realistic plan in high summer, and it does not extend to the chamber: that cannot be arranged on arrival at all.

Registration needs full name and date of birth, and everyone aged sixteen and over must present the original photo ID matching the booking. Photocopies and phone images are refused, which is the commonest reason visitors are turned away. Security is airport-grade.

The dome opens daily from 08:00 to midnight, last admission 21:45. It closes for cleaning several times a year — in 2026 that includes 14 to 18 September, 28 September to 2 October, and 19 to 30 October — and the roof terrace stays open during those periods, though without the audio guide. It also shuts all day on 24 December and from 16:00 on 31 December. Parliament can cancel visits at short notice for state business or security, so it is worth checking the official page before setting out.

Early morning is quietest and gives the best light across the Tiergarten. After dark the dome is lit and the city spreads out below it, which is the version most people remember.

Nearby

The Brandenburg Gate is five minutes south, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe a few minutes beyond it — 2,711 concrete slabs over an underground information centre. The Topography of Terror, on the site of the Gestapo and SS headquarters, is the harder and more necessary counterpart to the Reichstag's more hopeful story. The Tiergarten opens west towards the Victory Column, and is the right place to sit down afterwards.