The Rousseau Island in the Großer Tiergarten, early-19th-century engravingSt Matthew Church
Once a hunting ground of the Electors of Brandenburg the Großer Tiergarten park of today was designed in the 1830s by landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné. In the course of industrialization in the 19th century, a network of streets was laid out in the Hobrecht-Plan in an area that came to be known architecturally as the Wilhelmine Ring.[3] In 1894 the Reichstag building by architect Paul Wallot opened as the seat of the German parliament. The lawn between the contemporary Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) and the Reichstag building was the site of the Krolloper opera house, built in 1844, which served as parliament house after the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933 and was demolished by air raids in 1943.
On 15 January 1919 the socialist Karl Liebknecht was shot by Freikorps soldiers within the park near the lake Neuer See. The corpse of Rosa Luxemburg, murdered on the same day, was found in the nearby Landwehrkanal on 1 June 1919.
The first Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Research) of Magnus Hirschfeld was situated at the former In den Zelten street, near the contemporary Haus der Kulturen der Welt, from 1919 until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933.[4]
A site next to the Tiergarten park is the former location of a villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4 where more than 60 Nazi bureaucrats and doctors worked in secret under the "T4" program to organize the mass murder of sanatorium and psychiatric hospital patients deemed unworthy to live.[5] The German national memorial to the people with disabilities systematically murdered by the Nazis was dedicated in 2014 in Berlin at that site.[6][5] Although the villa was destroyed, a Stolperstein set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location and historic significance.
After 1944, the park was largely deforested because it served as a source of firewood for the devastated city. In 1945, the Soviet Union built a war memorial along the Straße des 17. Juni, the Tiergarten's main east–west artery, near the Brandenburg Gate. The Tiergarten itself became part of the British sector.
Tiergarten today
Luiseninsel in autumn
The locality houses many parliamentary and governmental institutions, among others the Bundestag in the Reichstag building and the new German Chancellery. The residence of the German President, Schloss Bellevue and the Carillon are also located in the Tiergarten park. It contains several notable sculptures including the four-tiered Victory Column (Siegessäule), the Bismarck Memorial and several other memorials to prominent Prussian generals, all of which were located in the ceremonial park facing the Reichstag before they were moved to their present location by the Nazis. In addition, the tree-lined pedestrian avenues emanating from the Victory Column contain several ceremonial sculptures of Prussian aristocrats enacting an 18th-century hunt.
Since 1987, the annual Berlin Marathon starts at Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate.
Between 1996 and 2003 and then in 2006, the Love Parade music festival took place at the Victory Column and Straße des 17. Juni. On 2 July 2005, the Live 8 concert, Berlin took place at the Victory Column.
On 24 July 2008, then-US presidential candidate Barack Obama spoke at the Victory Column in front of a crowd of over 200,000 people.[7]
^As still recalled in Tiergarten's coat of arms the meaning of 'Tier' used to be narrower in history than in modern German, originally describing 'game', i.e. non-domesticated animals hunted, and among them preferently the deer.
^Uebersicht der neuen Eintheilung der Stadt Berlin in Stadtteile und Bezirke [Overview of the new division of the city of Berlin in neighborhoods and districts]. Grunert, Berlin 1884.
^Friedrich Leyden: Gross-Berlin. Geographie der Weltstadt. Hirt, Breslau 1933 (darin: Entwicklung der Bevölkerungszahl in den historischen Stadtteilen von Alt-Berlin. S. 206).
