Abstract
To document what would become the six panels of the Panorama of Berlin,
Gaertner placed his camera obscura on the roof of the Friedrich-Werdersche Kirche,
completed by Schinkel in 1830.4 The church’s terrace was open to the public and
quickly became a select promenade of the Berlin bourgeoisie.5 There on the
ground, rising from the pre-industrial labyrinth of the old city, was Schinkel’s new
Berlin, which included the Neue Wache (1818), the Kreuzberg War Memorial
(1820), the Schauspielhaus at the Gendarmenmarkt (1821), the facade of the Dom
(1822), the Schloßbrücke (1823), the Museum am Lustgarten (1830), the Packhof
am Kupfergraben (1832), and the Bauakademie (1836). Berlin was not yet sprawling like London where “the city is, it seems, never-ending,” however, the painting
showed the first smokestacks of the emerging industrial metropolis, the Borsig
Rail Factory complex near the Oranienburger Tor, at the edge of the still
agricultural landscape.6 “In the panorama,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “the city
opens out to landscape – as it will do later, in subtler fashion, for the flâneurs.”7 At
the heart of the Panorama von Berlin Gaertner depicted the remodeled Lustgarten
between the castle and the Altes Museum, the center of the new Berlin illustrating
the neoteric relation between city and landscape.