The name alone draws you in, right!?

In English the name means the pleasure garden. It is the green space that fronts both the Altes Museum and Berlin Cathedral on Museum Island in Berlin

The Lustgarten is a park on Museum Island which, at various times in its history, has been used as a public park, a parade ground, and a place for mass rallies.

The area of the Lustgarten was originally developed in the 16th century as a kitchen garden attached to the palace which was then the residence of the Elector of Brandenburg. This area was the core of the later Kingdom of Prussia.  After the devastation of Germany during the The 30 Years War, Berlin was redeveloped by Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector) and his Dutch wife, Luise Henriette of Nassau. It was Luise, with the assistance of a military engineer Johann Mauritz and a landscape gardener Michael Hanff, who, in 1646, converted the former kitchen garden into a formal garden, with fountains and geometric paths, and gave it its current name, Pleasure Garden.

In 1713, Friedrich Wilhelm I became King of Prussia and set about converting Prussia into a militarised state. He ripped out his grandmother’s garden and converted the Lustgarten into a sand-covered parade ground. In 1790, Friedrich Wilhelm II allowed the Lustgarten to be turned back into a park, but during French occupation of Berlin in 1806 Napoleon again drilled troops there.

In the early 19th century, the enlarged and increasingly wealthy Kingdom of Prussia undertook major redevelopments of central Berlin. A large, new classical building, the Altes Museum, was built at the north-western end of the Lustgarten and between 1826 and 1829 the garten was redesigned by Peter Joseph Lenne, with formal paths dividing the park into 6 sectors. A 13-metre high fountain in the centre, operated by a steam engine, was one of the marvels of the age. Between 1894 and 1905, the old Protestant church on the northern side of the park was replaced by a much larger building, the Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom), designed by Julius Carl Raschdorff.

During the years of the Weimar Republic, the Lustgarten was frequently used for political demonstrations. The Socialists and Communists held frequent rallies there. In August 1921, 500,000 people demonstrated against right-wing extremist violence. After the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, in 1922, 250,000 protested in the Lustgarten. On 7 February 1933, 200,000 people demonstrated against the new Nazi Party regime of Hitler; shortly afterwards public opposition to the regime was banned. Under the Nazis, the Lustgarten was converted into a site for mass rallies. In 1934, it was paved over. Hitler addressed mass rallies of up to a million people there.

By the end of WWII in the year 1945, the Lustgarten was a bomb-pitted wasteland. A movement to restore the Lustgarten to its earlier role as a park began once Germany was reunified in 1990. In 1997, the Berlin Senate  commissioned the landscape architect Hans Loidl to redesign the area in the spirit of Lenné’s design and construction work began in 1998. The Lustgarten now features fountains and is once again a park in the heart of a reunited Berlin.