Completed in 1894, the Reichstag building bears layers of imperial, republican, Nazi-era, wartime and reunified German history. The 1933 fire belongs to the context of dictatorship’s consolidation; the restored building became the Bundestag’s seat in 1999. It ranks fourth because one place makes institutional rupture and reconstruction visible. The elected Bundestag and the historical Reichstag are not interchangeable names for an unchanged political system.
Source: Reichstag building, Berlin.
Image credit: Jürgen Matern · CC BY-SA 3.0. Resized and JPEG compressed.
