Palace of Köpenick

Thirty minutes by S-Bahn from central Berlin, the city gives way to water, forest and the slower rhythms of the Köpenick district. Here, on an artificial island at the confluence of the Spree and Dahme rivers, stands a Dutch Baroque palace that most visitors to Berlin never find. The Palace of Köpenick is one of the oldest Hohenzollern buildings still standing in the city, a compact and elegant structure that has housed one of Germany's finest collections of decorative arts since 1963. It is also the stage for one of the most celebrated comic episodes in German history — an episode that says something pointed about the German relationship with authority and the uniform.

In October 1906, a 57-year-old unemployed cobbler named Wilhelm Voigt put on a second-hand captain's uniform, stopped a passing group of soldiers on a Berlin street, and ordered them — by the sole authority of the uniform — to accompany him to Köpenick. Once there, he marched into the town hall, formally arrested the mayor and the city treasurer, confiscated the municipal treasury (4,002 marks and 37 pfennigs, recorded with German precision), and then simply walked away. He was arrested ten days later, but the story delighted Berlin and reportedly amused even the Kaiser. The playwright Carl Zuckmayer turned the episode into Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (1931), a satirical masterpiece about German deference to authority that has remained in continuous production ever since. A statue of Voigt in his captain's uniform now stands in front of Köpenick's town hall, a permanent wink at the whole affair.

The palace on the island predates the town hall incident by more than two centuries. Prince Frederick of Brandenburg, who would later crown himself King Frederick I of Prussia, commissioned the current Baroque palace between 1677 and 1682, built by the Dutch architect Rutger van Langervelt. The island location was strategic rather than merely picturesque: Köpenick had been a Slavic settlement since the 9th century, and medieval German lords had maintained a fortress on or near this site from the 12th century onward. The Dutch Baroque style Frederick chose, similar to what he would later use at Oranienburg, reflects the strong pull of Dutch architectural taste on the Prussian court in the final decades of the 17th century, a generation before the more familiar French-influenced Baroque of Charlottenburg.

The palace's finest surviving interior is its chapel, which retains its original stucco decoration from 1682 to 1685 — one of the best-preserved Baroque chapel interiors anywhere in the Berlin region. The carved wooden panelling, the gallery, and the painted ceiling were largely spared the destruction that erased so much of Berlin's Baroque architectural heritage during the 20th century. The Gobelin Hall, named for its remarkable set of 17th-century Brussels tapestries, is the other standout room, its scale and decoration giving a sense of how the palace functioned as a genuine princely residence rather than a purely ceremonial backdrop.

Since 1963, the palace has housed part of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, the Museum of Decorative Arts, founded in 1867 as the oldest institution of its kind in Germany. The Köpenick branch focuses specifically on the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo periods: furniture, silver, glass, ceramics and textiles drawn from the 16th through 18th centuries, displayed within the palace's own period rooms rather than in a purpose-built museum setting. The basement holds a smaller archaeological exhibition tracing the history of settlement on the island from its Slavic origins through to the Hohenzollern era. This is not a museum built for visitors chasing dramatic castle interiors; it rewards those curious about how the material culture of the aristocracy, and the prosperous bourgeoisie beneath them, developed across three centuries of craftsmanship.

The island setting itself is a large part of the appeal. The palace sits surrounded by the Spree on one side and the Dahme on the other, connected to the mainland by a stone bridge, with the wooded shoreline visible from the palace windows. The surrounding area — the Müggelsee lake, the Köpenick forest, and an old town quarter lined with gabled burgher houses — makes the palace a natural anchor for a half-day exploring one of Berlin's most undervisited outer districts, far removed from the tourist density of Mitte or Charlottenburg.