The Build -

The Reichstag building has always been a favorite of mine. Multiple failed attempts to recreate it have taken place in many of my Minecraft worlds. I finally took it upon myself to recreate the building as historically accurate as possible, including its Berlin surroundings. This will eventually include such landmarks as: the Siegessäule (the Berlin Victory Column), the Brandenburg Gate, the Siegesallee, Unter den Linden, the Kroll Opera house, Berliner Stadtschloss and other Berlin landmarks. The “setting” of the map is approximately 1920, during the Weimar Republic.

Currently, only the Reichstag is in an acceptable state of completion to show off. The build is approximately in a 1:2 scale, with some artistic flexibility taken to appropriately transcribe the building into Minecraft. It is being built entirely by hand, as I have no access to any world-editing applications within Bedrock Edition of Minecraft. This provides myself with a challenge, as frustrating as it is, as I am very accustomed to having World Edit to assist in building. I have been using countless reference images of the exterior to plan and fine-tune the recreation. The interior of the building is currently in the planning stages. I have a folder of nearly a hundred reference images (growing as I find more) to assist in the accurate recreation of the interior. To keep with historical accuracy, I have made a point to include pipes, exhausts, and maintenance passageways on the roof of the building (ones that can be seen from reference images, I should add). I hope to keep this maintain of realism with the interior, as well.

Don't worry, fire spread is turned off (;

As a treat, here is a comparison of what is currently built with an aerial view of the actual Reichstag:


As can be seen, there are some issues with positioning and scaling between the in-game build and the aerial shot; these discrepancies will be dealt with as I progress further into building. Most notably, the circle for the Siegessäule is too far left and its inner sidewalks are angled incorrectly, the plaza for the Bismarck-Nationaldenkmal is disproportional, and the roads are not exactly the right width.

I am building this using Bedrock Edition, but I plan to port it to Java Edition when I upload a map download.

History -

It was 1870, nearly 30 years since the failed attempt to unify Germany under one republican banner in the Romantic, nationalist revolutions of the late 1840s. Otto von Bismarck, a man with a plan, was determined to expand his homeland of Prussia’s power by binding the other various German states under one crown. Under King Wilhelm I of Prussia, Bismarck orchestrated a series of wars that gathered more and more German states and principalities under Prussian hegemony, starting by wrestling Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, embarrassing the Austrian Empire (so badly, in fact, that it became the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and finally culminating in what many Germans at the time saw as revenge for Napoleon: the invasion of France. After a series of victories, the Prussian and German allies marched into Paris and captured the city. On 18 January, 1871, Germany was united under Kaiser Wilhelm I in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.

The German Empire was to be a constitutional monarchy with a federal parliament representing the 27 states that had united to form the nation, except, it had no official building in which the Reichstag (said parliament) could meet. The body voted to construct a new building to house itself, but deliberations, debate, and heated arguments delayed the opening of the building for 23 years, the Reichstag in the meantime ‘temporarily’ meeting in a former porcelain factory. In 1882, a contest was held to design the building, ending with Frankfurt architect Paul Wallot winning with his design inspired by the Memorial Hall built in Philadelphia for the 1876 Centennial Exposition.

The building was steeped in imperial symbolism, including its very design. The four corner towers each represent the four Kings of the German Empire (Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg), while the imposing dome in the center of the building represented the Imperial Crown, which bound them all. There are multitudes of representations of the 27 German states and the Empire itself in the façade wrapping around the building. Despite this, the building itself came to represent the realization of the 1848 ideals of a free, united, and democratic Germany.

The famous dome was a marvelous wonder at the time of construction, made of glass and steel and ingenuity. It provided natural light down into the plenary chambers where the Reichstag itself met. It had to be decreased in height (from the ground) from its original 85 meters to 75 meters because certain members of the Reichstag, who had participated in the architectural contest and lost, tampered with construction plans to move the dome from the center of the building to the front to ‘get back at’ Wallot for winning the contest. Wallot petitioned the Kaiser for years to move the dome back, eventually getting his wish, but much too late: the load-bearing walls inside the building had already been built and could not support the massive weight of the original dome. Engineer Hermann Zimmermann would design the famous glass and steel design that eventually topped the building, solving the issue.

In 1894, the Reichstagsgebäude was finished and opened. A symbol of democracy, it was often at odds with the Kaiser. Kaiser Wilhelm II, the grandson of Wilhelm I, was less democratically inclined and hated the institution the building stood for. He called the building a “Reichsaffenhaus” (English: “Imperial ape house”). Paul Wallot had originally planned for the words “Dem deutschen Volke” (English: “for the German people”) to be inscribed above the steps of the building, but Wilhelm II prevented this from coming to fruition when the building was built, leaving the provided space empty for over 20 years. Instead, the words were finally put onto the building in 1916 during the Great War as a way to ferment some public support for the Kaiser during the slog of a war.

The Reichstag building was constructed east of the Königsplatz, where the famous Siegessäule (English: Berlin Victory Column) had been erected in 1873. Later, in 1901, the Bismarck-Nationaldenkmal (English: Bismarck Memorial) was erected directly in front of the Reichstag building itself, featuring a towering bronze statue of Bismarck himself. These monuments would later be moved further west to the Tiergarten in 1938 to make way for Hitler’s plans to renovate Berlin into the ‘capital of the world.’
In the early hours of 27 February, 1933, the building caught fire, an event that has never been completely explained. The Nazi Party, with their leader Hitler serving as the Chancellor of Germany at the time, pinned the blame on communists, utilizing the event to seize power and install Hitler as a dictator. There are theories that the Nazis themselves set the building ablaze. The building stood empty for the rest of Nazi Germany, as Hitler personally did not like it. The so-called ‘Reichstag’ (thereafter turned into a powerless institution meant only to ‘approve’ Hitler’s decisions) instead met in the Kroll Opera house that sat opposite of the Königsplatz, which provided more space for Hitler’s preferred theatrics.

The Reichstag building suffered severe damage during the latter days of the Second World War, being one of the last German holdings in Berlin. The Soviets, seeing the Reichstag building as a symbol of Nazi Germany, fought intensely for the occupation of the building in one of the more infamous ‘battles’ of the war. On 2 May, 1945, the Soviet flag was raised over the southeast wing of the building.

After decades of a split Germany, West and East Germany finally reunited in 1990. The capital of the reunited Germany was to be Berlin and talks were had over whether the old Reichstag building should be renovated to represent this new Germany. Reconstruction was completed in 1999, with the building now sporting the famous glass dome designed by Norman Foster. Just as it did before, the building represents the realization of a free and democratic Germany and is a popular tourist attraction.