Berlin State Opera

This guide to the Berlin State Opera follows Frederick the Great's opera house through a 1941 bombing that gutted it, Hitler's order to rebuild it at speed as the German army bled out at Stalingrad, and a second, near-total destruction in February 1945 that left only the eighteenth-century facade standing. It traces the postwar decision to raise the hall a third time, brick by brick, and the arguments and renovations that have followed it since.