The Stalinallee stood a good distance from the old governmental quarter in Berlin-Mitte, which was the part of the city most devastated by the war. In the first years of its existence, the East German regime did not try to reclaim this quarter for its own headquarters, settling instead in the northern district of Pankow. Yet if the Communists did little building in the city center at this point, they did not hesitate to demolish the quarter’s signature structure, the Royal Palace, which during the Weimar era and Third Reich had served primarily as an art museum. Allied bombs had badly damaged parts of the building, but enough of it remained intact for a number of public exhibitions to be held there between 1946 and 1948. The GDR leaders might have made use of this property themselves, much as the Soviets had appropriated the Kremlin, but they had other ideas for the land it occupied. Ulbricht dreamed of building a giant skyscraper on the site to rival the Stalinist towers in Moscow. There was also talk of moving Marx’s remains from London’s High-gate cemetery to a mausoleum on the former palace square, creating an answer to Lenin’s tomb on Red Square. Pending the realization of such grandiose schemes, the area was converted into a stage for mass rallies. As Ulbricht said in a speech in July 1950: “The center of our capital, the Lustgarten and the area of the palace’s ruins, must become a grand square for demonstrations, upon which our people’s will for struggle and for progress can find expression.” A few weeks later the government announced that the palace would be demolished. The announcement prompted widespread protest, even within the GDR. The regime sought to deflect the protest by claiming that the palace had been too badly damaged by “Anglo-American terror-bombers” to be salvaged. But everyone knew that the real issue was the building’s political associations. As Neues Deutschland editorialized: “May it [the palace] no longer remind us of an unglorious past.” The demolition began in September 1950. When it was completed four months later, a gaping void occupied the former center of royal and imperial power. Aside from hosting demonstrations, the area served mainly as a parking lot, with little Trabant cars standing where the masses had once cheered the kaiser.
The public outcry over the demolition of the Royal Palace helped convince the authorities in West Berlin to proceed differently with their main Hohenzollern palace, the Gharlottenburger Schloss, which had also been heavily damaged in the war. Rather than knock it down, they embarked in 1951 on a long and painstaking restoration process that eventually yielded one of postwar Germany’s preeminent historical showplaces. Shortly after the work began, Andreas Schlüter’s famous equestrian statue of the Great Elector, which heretofore had graced the Lange Brücke outside the Royal Palace, was installed in the forecourt of the Schloss.
Schloss Bellevue, a beautiful palace on the edge of the Tiergarten, which had been built in the 1780s for Frederick the Great’s brother, Prince August Ferdinand, was also restored at this time. Although it had been used by the Nazis as a guest house for foreign dignitaries, the West German authorities decided that it would make an ideal residence for their federal president when he stayed in Berlin. By putting the elegant property to this use, the Federal Republic staked out its first official presence in the divided city.
Of course, the most symbolically significant building in West Berlin—indeed in the whole city—was the Reichstag, which sat just inside the British sector. As we have seen, Hitler had refused to allow the building to be torn down after the fire in February 1933. In the wake of World War II the edifice was in truly sad shape, a rotting hulk of stone and iron, its facade pockmarked with bullet holes and its interior covered in Cyrillic graffiti. The Russians had proposed that it be exploited like a quarry for building projects in the city, but the Berliners preferred to use it for one of their black markets. During the blockade it served as a backdrop for the rallies at which Ernst Reuter hurled his defiance at the Soviets. With the division of Germany, sentiment arose in the West to restore the building as a symbol of the Federal Republic’s determination to make Berlin the capital of a reunified nation. In 1949 Jakob Kaiser spoke of it as “a crystallization point for German reunification.” But at this stage there was no money for restoration, and the only alteration to be carried out in the 1950s was the demolition of the sagging dome.
While symbolically impressive, restoration of public buildings like Bellevue and the Charlottenburger Schloss was only a tiny part of the huge reconstruction effort that engulfed West Berlin in the 1950s. To clear space for new housing units and commercial districts, the rubble that still clogged much of the city was scooped up and dumped in an enormous pile on the grounds of a former Wehrmacht school in the Grunewald. The mound, which Berliners dubbed the Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain), eventually grew to a height of 120 meters, high enough for the Americans to place a radar station on its summit. Buried within this artificial Alp were the remains of many partly damaged buildings that had recently fallen victim to the wrecking ball. Some of these, like the still-functioning Anhalter Bahnhof, were of great historical significance. Architectural preservation had never been Berlin’s strong suit, but the postwar disregard for treasures of the past was cultural barbarism with a vengeance.
In West Berlin, as in the East, reconstruction was meant to symbolize, even facilitate, political transformation. The West wanted an architectural look that conveyed the Federal Republic’s commitment to internationalism, egalitarianism, individualism, and freedom. Unfortunately, the image thought to be most expressive of these values was the bland “internationalist” style that was sweeping across Western Europe and America in the postwar era. The construction materials used in the new buildings also had to be politically correct: in place of stone and brick, one had to use glass and steel. Thus much of West Berlin was covered over in glass boxes touted as “democratic.” The Spree metropolis had never been beautiful, but its postwar rebuilders managed, in their pursuit of a progressive new face, to make it even uglier than before.
The new approach to urban housing design was evident in the Hansaviertel, the residential district on the northwestern edge of the Tiergarten that had been built up in the Bismarckian era, only to be knocked flat by Allied bombs during the war. In 1953 the West Berlin Senate announced a competition for the construction of a new housing development in the area that would represent the democratic values of the Federal Republic. Commissions were awarded to a galaxy of international architects, including Le Corbusier, Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, and Scharoun. The results of their work were unveiled with great fanfare at an international exhibition, the Interbau, in 1957. In conscious contrast both to Berlin’s prewar residential housing and the new Stalinallee in the East, the Hansaviertel featured an assortment of modest structures dispersed in a parklike setting. Each building was unique. While the overall design made the project seem less fortresslike than the eastern housing units, not to mention the old Mietskasernen, the individual buildings turned out to be surprisingly uninspired—just a collection of concrete and glass blocks of varying sizes. The Hansaviertel was nonetheless hailed as an architectural showcase and as a model for future residential building. It might indeed have become so had not its low residential density made it economically impractical once land prices started to go up. Only its blandness carried over into vast new housing beehives like the Otto Suhr Settlement, the Gropiusstadt, and the Märkisches Viertel.
Early commercial reconstruction, meanwhile, focused on the area around Zoo Station and the Kurfürstendamm, whose revival, it was hoped, would help jump-start the local economy. In 1950 the luxurious KaDeWe department store reopened its doors to hordes of shopping-starved citizens. They stormed the place with such zeal that two clerks were injured while trying, in good Prussian fashion, to keep order. An automobile showroom on the “Ku-Damm” proudly displayed that symbol of West Germany’s emerging Wirstschaftswunder (economic miracle), the Volkswagen Beetle. The most impressive new building on the avenue was the rebuilt Hotel Kempinski, which opened in 1952 on the site of the original hotel, destroyed in 1945. Erected with money from the Marshall Plan, the new hotel was, as the Tagesspiegel wrote, a prime symbol for “the faith that’s being shown in our city.” Such symbols were desperately needed in a town that was already feeling the ill effects of isolation and exclusion from the nexus of political power. Thus the Kempinski was more than just a hotel. It was, in the words of a recent retrospective, “an outpost of glamour in the frightening arena of the Cold War [and] . . . a bridge back to the urbane world of the Twenties, before all the horrors began.” The part of West Berlin in which the Kempinski is located was not yet the world famous mecca of consumerism and glitzy entertainment it would become in the 1960s, when its reigning symbol was a revolving Mercedes star atop a high-rise office building, but for many inhabitants of the city, including those who lived in the East, the Zoo/Kurfürstendamm area was now the one place in town where they could feel truly alive—could feel, that is, like Berliners again.