In the Middle Ages the site was outside the city walls on the road to Spandau and contained a manor farmstead of the prince-elector of Brandenburg.

Dorothea spent the summer months at Monbijou, giving formal dinners, masquerade balls and concerts there, pleasures she had long done without under the Spartan reign of Frederick William I.

In 1786 it became the chief residence of Queen Frederika Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, who had been humiliated by her husband, King Frederick William II of Prussia (popularly known as "Der Dicke Lüderjahn", "the portly voluptuary") because of his girth and his numerous affairs and two official bigamous morganatic marriages; a monumental gate by Georg Christian Unger was added during this period.

[3] In 1883 Crown Prince Frederick William and Victoria provided a site in the park of Monbijou Palace close to Monbijoustraße and the Domkandidatenstift.

[4] As the collections regularly expanded with the addition of new categories (paintings, jewelry, porcelain), the German emperor Wilhelm I finally made the palace with its 42 rooms accessible to the public as the "Hohenzollern Museum" in 1877.

Its inventory remained in the possession of the dynasty but it was administered by the state, which made Monbijou Palace available for the purpose and assumed responsibility for maintaining the museum in the traditional way.

Monbijou castle was to be completely pulled down and rebuilt in the park of Charlottenburg Palace between the nearby Spree sluice and the Berlin Ringbahn.

[5] Only a few names remain as testimony to the former existence of the palace: On the grounds between Oranienburger Straße and the Spree there is a shady refuge of three hectares with a children's open-air swimming pool, today's Monbijou Park.