Hans Otto Theatre

The Waschhaus (English: wash house) is the largest nightclub of the Brandenburg state capital Potsdam in Germany. Founded in the summer of 1992 in the laundry rooms of the former garrison in the Schiffbauergasse, forty young people interested in art and culture started to present parties, events and exhibitions. Soon afterwards the Waschhaus e.V. club was founded. Now the Waschhaus Potsdam, it has established itself as a centre of art and culture with the main focus on music, film, dance and fine arts, has become a major attraction for the Potsdam cultural scene. Thousands of visitors attend the Schiffbauergasse every week to listen to concerts, see exhibitions, enjoy themselves at parties, watch movies or participate in dance workshops. Popular bands to have played here include Bloodhound Gang, Freundeskreis, Blumfeld, 17 Hippies and Wir sind Helden. Other highlights are the monthly exhibitions of nationally and internationally successful artists and the very popular open air cinema in the summer. In 2002, over 150,000 people visited the Waschhaus.

The museum FLUXUS+ is located in Potsdam, Germany and opened in the city's new cultural centre Schiffbauergasse in April 2008. It is Potsdam's first museum of modern art. The 1000 sqm exhibition space of the two-storey building comprehends artworks from private collections. With its large art+life-shop, its café, an “atrium” for temporary exhibitions and events, the museum FLUXUS+ has become a cultural meeting point not only for artists and art-lovers. The permanent exhibition of the museum FLUXUS+ consists of artworks, documents and films of and about the international and intermedia art movement fluxus. On the ground floor, it features works of Wolf Vostell, Emmet Williams, Ben Patterson, Nam June Paik, and other artists of the 1960s. Besides, works of artists like Arman, Lebel, Christo, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Hains, Leve, and Ann Noël are presented in order to give a general idea of the avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibits on the second floor of the museum focus on the art and lifework of Wolf Vostell. Here, rather the smaller art objects, sketches, and paintings than oversized works of Vostell reflect his motto “Leben ist Kunst. Kunst ist Leben”. The collection comprehends some of Vostell's earliest sketches as well as works that he completed shortly before his death, thus, illustrates his work as a fluxus-and happening-artist, designer, composer, painter, and video pioneer. Furthermore, the museum features today's interpretation of “Kunst ist Leben” by presenting the works of four contemporary artists: Costantino Ciervo, Hella De Santarossa, Lutz Friedel, and Sebastian Heiner.

Located in Potsdam, Germany, the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) aims to identify and promote development pathways for a global transformation towards a sustainable society. The IASS employs a transdisciplinary approach that encourages dialogue to understand sustainability issues and generate potential solutions in cooperation with partners from the sciences, politics, the economy, and civil society. A strong network of national and international partners supports the work of the Institute. Its central research topics include the energy transition, emerging technologies, climate change, air quality, systemic risks, governance and participation, and cultures of transformation in the Anthropocene.

The Berlin Gate (Berliner Tor) is a largely vanished city gate in Potsdam, on the corner Türkstraße of Berliner Straße— it was originally at the end of Charlottenstrasse, but when the city wall was moved in 1752 the gate was rebuilt on its final site by Jan Bouman. It was badly damaged by bombing in 1945 and only one wing remains.

Potsdam (German pronunciation: [ˈpɔt͡sdam] (listen)) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It directly borders the German capital, Berlin, and is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. It is situated on the River Havel some 25 kilometres (16 miles) southwest of Berlin's city centre. Potsdam was a residence of the Prussian kings and the German Kaiser until 1918. Its planning embodied ideas of the Age of Enlightenment: through a careful balance of architecture and landscape, Potsdam was intended as "a picturesque, pastoral dream" which would remind its residents of their relationship with nature and reason.The city, which is over 1000 years old, is widely known for its palaces, its lakes, and its overall historical and cultural significance. Landmarks include the parks and palaces of Sanssouci, Germany's largest World Heritage Site, as well as other palaces such as the Orangery Palace, the New Palace, the Cecilienhof Palace, or the Charlottenhof Palace. Potsdam was also the location of the significant Potsdam Conference in 1945, the conference where the three heads of government of the USSR, the US, and the UK decided on the division of Germany following its surrender, a conference which defined Germany's history for the following 45 years. Babelsberg, in the south-eastern part of Potsdam, was already by the 1930s the home of a major film production studio and it has enjoyed success as an important center of European film production since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Filmstudio Babelsberg is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world.Potsdam developed into a centre of science in Germany in the 19th century. Today, there are three public colleges, the University of Potsdam, and more than 30 research institutes in the city.

The Nuthe is a river in Brandenburg, Germany, left tributary of the Havel. Its total length is 65 kilometres (40 mi). The Nuthe originates in the Fläming region, near Niedergörsdorf. It flows north through Jüterbog, Luckenwalde, Trebbin and Saarmund. The Nuthe joins the Havel in central Potsdam. It has been said that crossing the Nuthe three times in a row is good luck.

Heiliger See (English: Holy Lake) is a lake within the city limits of Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany, located northeast of the city center and bordering the historic park known as the New Garden. Together with the lakes Sacrower See and Groß Glienicker See to the north it forms a chain of lakes resulting from a glacial tunnel valley. The lake is 1.33 km long and 300 metres wide on average. Because of its picturesque location amidst the historic parks and palaces of Potsdam, with the Marmorpalais on its west shore and Cecilienhof near the north shore, the lake is a popular goal for excursions and has an attractive residential area on its eastern shore. On the north shore there are informal places for swimming and sunbathing, as well as a connection to Lake Jungfernsee and thus to the Havel River’s extensive network of waterways via the Hasengraben, a short canal where the water is kept dammed up to maintain a high water level for the lake. This is done to keep the wooden piles on which the Marmorpalais is built from being exposed to the air and drying out. The lake suffers from an overload of biomass, especially from falling leaves which are decomposed by bacteria on the shallow bottom, depleting the lake of oxygen in the process. In summertime the depths can be virtually without oxygen, causing dead ecological zones.

The Marmorpalais (or Marble Palace) is a former royal residence in Potsdam, near Berlin in Germany, built on the grounds of the extensive Neuer Garten on the shores of the Heiliger See (lake). The palace was commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm II (Frederick William II of Prussia) and designed in the early Neoclassical style by the architects Carl von Gontard and Carl Gotthard Langhans. The palace remained in use by the Hohenzollern family until the early 20th century. It served as a military museum under communist rule, but has since been restored and is once again open to the public.

The New Garden (German: Neuer Garten) in Potsdam is a park of 102.5 hectares located southwest of Berlin, Germany, in northern Potsdam and bordering on the lakes Heiliger See and Jungfernsee. Starting in 1787, Frederick William II of Prussia (1744-1797) arranged to have a new garden laid out on this site, and it came to be known by this rather prosaic name. The New Garden is one of the ensembles comprising the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin," a status awarded in 1990.

The Dutch Quarter (Holländisches Viertel) is a neighborhood in Potsdam, consisting of 134 red Dutch brick buildings, almost all of which have been renovated. It was built from 1733 to 1740 and designed by Jan Bouman following the order of Frederick William I of Prussia.

Potsdam Hauptbahnhof is the main station in the German city of Potsdam, capital of the state of Brandenburg. It lies on the Berlin–Magdeburg railway and was founded in 1838. However, it has had this name only since 1999. It was originally called Bahnhof Potsdam (Potsdam station) and it was called Potsdam Stadt (city) station from 1960. The station is the terminus of line S7 of the Berlin S-Bahn, which comes from Ahrensfelde. It is also connected with the central bus station, which is a transfer point between Potsdam and the southwestern region of Berlin, and has a stop on the Potsdam tram network. It is classified by Deutsche Bahn as a category 2 station.

The Palast Barberini, more recently also known as the Palais Barberini, was a classicist-baroque town house built under the Prussian King Frederick II according to designs by Carl von Gontard between 1771 and 1772 at Humboldtstraße 5/6 in Potsdam. Its main façade faces the Alter Markt with the Potsdam City Palace and the St. Nicholas church. The building was named after the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which the king had chosen as a model. The Potsdam recreation of the Italian model formed the monumental south-eastern end of the Alter Markt and, together with the neighboring Noacksches Haus at Humboldtstraße 4, also designed by Gontard, was one of the last buildings to be built around the square under Frederick II. In the middle of the 19th century, the palace building was extended by two side wings at the rear facing the Havel according to designs by Ludwig Persius and Ludwig Ferdinand Hesse and used as a venue for Potsdam's cultural and club life. The Palast Barberini was largely destroyed in an air raid on April 14, 1945 and the ruins were demolished during the Soviet Occupation Zone. The site was then used as a green space and parking lot for a long time. As part of the redevelopment of the center of Potsdam with the reconstruction of the city palace as a new state parliament building and other buildings in the neighborhood, the Palast Barberini was rebuilt from 2013 to the end of 2016 with an exterior largely based on the original for use as the art gallery Museum Barberini after donations from the entrepreneur Hasso Plattner.