Charlottenburg: The lavish Prussian palace in the heart of Berlin
The royal past is hard to ignore in Germany's capital. So let's indulge.
If you haven’t figured it out from the title, I’m in the middle of a week-long holiday in Berlin. Since freelance holidays still involve work, I’ve decided to combine a rather fabulous royal outing with this newsletter. Welcome to my take on Charlottenburg Palace, the largest royal residence in Berlin.
Now the first thing to know is that there are a lot of palaces in and around Berlin. A lot. So when my travel companion (who does not share my fascination with all things royal) agreed to a day of royalty, I had to winnow my long list down to one option. If you have more time and want to indulge in more of the castles and palaces on offer, may I suggest you follow Svenja’s fabulous Castleholic feed on Instagram.
For me, the most logical choice was Charlottenburg Palace. It’s really easy to access by transit — we are based half way across the city and it took us just 30 minutes to get there. You get off the bus and the main entrance is straight ahead.
A very short, edited history
The first thing you see is a rather imposing statue of Elector Frederick William. His son, Frederick I of Prussia, started construction in 1695 as a “small” pleasure palace for his wife, Sophie Charlotte. Everything is relative when it comes to royal palaces as even the original layout was pretty massive. He kept building after her death in 1705, and construction only stopped when he died in 1713. Fast forward another three decades, and construction resumes under Frederick the Great, who significantly expanded the complex. No major changes happened at Charlottenburg until the palace was heavily damaged during the Allied bombing of the Second World War. Much of the original structure and almost all the furnishings were destroyed, which necessitated two decades of repairs, including sourcing appropriate replacement furnishings and decorations from all over Germany.
The outside may look like one cohesive building, but the inside is separated into two radically different sections, known prosaically as the Old Palace (the original 18th century building) and the New Wing (Frederick the Great’s expansion).
My impressions
Start with the Old Palace. The audience chambers and bedrooms feel a bit small and claustrophobic by palace standards, in part because its baroque style demands a flamboyant amount of gilding and ornamentation — the Red Damask Chamber and the chapel are prime examples.
The most over-the-top room is the Porcelain Cabinet, a corner room filled with 2,700 pieces of porcelain. The Red Army carted the originals back to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War, but photos allowed conservators to replicate those treasures with other pieces. Be sure to look up at the lower edge of the painted ceiling for an enhanced 3D effect, including what looks like a dead stag, artfully draped above the top row of porcelain.
I enjoyed the exhibition that took up most of the upper floor, “The Royal House of Prussia,” especially the Silver Vault, filled with 600 pieces used by the Hohenzollern family to showcase its power and influence. The porcelain, especially the dinner services, is just as impressive. Fun fact: daughters received porcelain services as wedding gifts, sons got silver ones. And then there are the snuff boxes, decorated with old-cut diamonds the size of the tapioca pearl in a glass of bubble tea.
You can tear through the New Wing at roughly double the speed of the Old Palace — the rooms are larger and sparsely furnished. The style is still baroque but lighter with more joie de vivre. The gold still thrown around with abandon in the main public spaces, but some of the private rooms are comparatively bereft of gold. In the East Indian Room, a floral chintz pattern covers the walls, ceiling, and window drapes.
Where to hang out
My favourite room was the Golden Gallery, a long gallery designed “with the intention of eliminating the boundaries between inside and outside, between nature and art,” the app guide explains. The blue-green of the walls, which is highlighted by restrained touches of pink (look up at the ceiling), balances the sinuous gilt trellis pattern, resulting in a harmonious design. Resplendent? Oh yes. Designed to overwhelm? Well, that’s what palaces were for. But the proportions of the room, and the balance of design works cohesively. It reminded my non-royalist friend of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors.
I spent a lot of time in this room, as these photos show.
Practicalities:
You should buy timed-entry tickets in advance. We didn’t. Don’t be like us.
Download the official app (it’s called Sanssouci, and is for palaces in the Berlin area), and then you may want to download the Charlottenburg tour info (if not already downloaded, I strongly suggest logging onto the palace’s free wifi to speed up that effort). The app is full of interesting information, and you don’t have to crowd around the in-room display.
Take a break between the Old Palace and New Wing by going outside to explore and sit in the park.
Take transit everywhere. To be blunt, Berlin’s transit system is the platinum standard of what an interconnected system can and should be. Every time we’ve looked at a bus timetable at a stop, the bus arrives precisely on its scheduled time. Every time. A weekly ticket for unlimited travel throughout of Berlin on all forms of transit cost me 41.50 euros and here’s the kicker: the entire system works on the honour principal. There are no turnstiles and nothing to tap, you just walk onto buses and platforms. You only show your proof of purchase if the (non-uniformed) inspectors board the vehicle. There’s a hefty fine for scofflaws. That 30-minute trip from our base to the palace involved an underground train (U-Bahn), an overground train (S-Bahn), and a very short bus ride (5 minutes), which could also be a nice 15 minute walk — all of which was remarkable in its unremarkableness. The system works.