Which neoclassical guardhouse in Berlin serves as a war memorial?

The neoclassical guardhouse in Berlin that serves as a war memorial is the Neue Wache.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed the building, constructed from 1816 to 1818 on Unter den Linden. It originally functioned as a guardhouse for the Royal Palace and also commemorated Prussia’s wars of liberation against Napoleon. Its severe Greek Revival design includes a Doric portico and fortress-like corner projections.

The Neue Wache became a formal war memorial in 1931, when Heinrich Tessenow redesigned its interior as a memorial hall for those killed in the First World War. After damage during the Second World War and changing memorial uses under East Germany, it was rededicated in 1993 as Germany’s central memorial to the victims of war and tyranny.

A common mix-up is to treat it as merely a military guard post. Although its name means “New Guardhouse,” its principal present-day identity is a national memorial, with Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture Mother with her Dead Son beneath the central oculus.