Depicts the House of Lords of Prussia, seat of the Bundesrat. Date above and inscription below the building. National identifying mark (D for Deutschland / Germany) is below the inscription. Mintmark (A for Berlin, D for Munich, F for Stuttgart, G for Karlsruhe, J for Hamburg) on the upper left and engraver's privy mark on the upper right. The Prussian House of Lords in Berlin was the upper house of the Preußischer Landtag, the parliament of Prussia from 1850 to 1918. Since 1856 the House of Lords met at a Baroque city palace on Leipziger Straße No. 3, near Leipziger Platz. Upon German unification in 1871, the neighbouring building on Leipziger Straße No. 4 was rebuilt as the seat of the Reichstag of the German Empire, before it moved into the new Reichstag building in 1894. Both the Leipziger Str. No. 3 and 4 buildings were demolished in 1898 to make space for a new building for the House of Lords. The Neo-Renaissance Herrenhaus building, designed by the architect Friedrich Schulze, was completed in 1904. Heavily damaged by Allied bombing and the Battle of Berlin, the building was restored after the war and from 1946 served for the East German Academy of Sciences. Since 2000, it is again the site of the parliamentary sessions of the Federal Council (Bundesrat) of Germany. The German Bundesrat is a legislative body that represents the sixteen Länder (federated states) of Germany at the national level. The Bundesrat participates in legislation, alongside the Bundestag, the directly elected representation of the people of Germany, with laws affecting state competences and all constitutional changes requiring the consent of the body. For its similar function, it is sometimes described as an upper house of parliament along the lines of the US Senate, the Canadian Senate or the British House of Lords.

A geographical image of Europe

Edge lettering, fine milled

Since 2006, Germany issues every year a Bundesländer coin for a specific state that has that’s year’s presidency of the Bundesrat. The series has started in 2006 with the presidency of Schleswig-Holstein. But, due to changes in the population quantity in some states, the sequence of the presidency was changed. In 2019, Schleswig-Holstein will again have the presidency of the Bundesrat. To avoid a second issue that would be dedicated to the presidency of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany has decided to delete the Bundesländer issue of 2019 and replace it by a coin that will be dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Bundesrat.