Konzerthaus Berlin

This guide to Konzerthaus Berlin traces the building on Gendarmenmarkt through two fires a century apart, the first in 1817, after which architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel raised the theater you see today, opening with a prologue by Goethe and the premiere of Weber's opera Der Freischutz. It follows the second fire, in the last days of World War Two, and the decades the ruin stood untouched in a divided city before East German crews began rebuilding it in 1977, keeping Schinkel's facade but reworking the inside for a different purpose.