As far as Berlin was concerned, the most important historical revision involved Prussia, the political entity through which the old royal capital had risen to prominence. Prussia had been abolished as a state in 1947 by the Allies, but it lived on as an idea, a complex of images, principles, and traditions. On the grounds that Prussia had been the core of German autocracy and militarism, Ulbricht’s government had literally blown away some of the most prominent architectural symbols of Berlin’s Prussian past. Honecker, on the other hand, hoped to harness the residual power in the Prussian idea by transforming it—after careful sanitation—into a worthy ancestor of the GDR state. Historians were ordered to emphasize the forward-looking side of Prussia’s legacy, its contributions to industrial progress and urbanization, its pioneering advances in social legislation. Prussia’s most famous king, Frederick the Great, who had been condemned in Ulbricht’s era as an archmilitarist, found his way into revised East German history books as an incorruptible servant of the state, champion of tolerance, patron of the arts, and promoter of social and economic progress. As a symbol of Frederick’s rehabilitation, the regime returned his bronze equestrian statue from Potsdam, whence it had been banished by Ulbricht, to its former place of prominence on Unter den Linden. Funds were also set aside for the restoration of his grand palace in Potsdam, Sanssouci.
Frederick’s return to Unter den Linden was a small part of an ambitious restoration program focused on the historic core of old Berlin, which some thirty years after the war was still dotted with the burned-out skeletons of great buildings and monuments. In an effort to reinvest the Linden with a measure of its former grandeur, the regime restored the Royal Library and rebuilt the Royal Arsenal as a museum of German history. Tellingly, the museum’s exhibits emphasized the historical ties between eastern Germany and Prussia, while studiously ignoring events in the West, including West Berlin. The Gendarmenmarkt (renamed Platz der Akademie), also underwent extensive renovation after standing in ruins since the war. In addition to rebuilding the square’s two churches, builders painstakingly restored Schinkel’s elegant Schauspielhaus, perhaps the most beautiful building in Berlin. Converted into an orchestra hall, the Schaupielhaus was meant to compete with West Berlin’s Neue Philharmonie as a center of musical life. At the gala opening ceremony in 1984, one of the architects expressed pride “over a work that finally brought [the GDR capital] recognition from the international musical world.”
The restoration program took on particular urgency because of the upcoming 750th anniversary of Berlin’s foundation, which, as mentioned above, East Berlin decided to commemorate independently of West Berlin. A brochure published by the tourist office of the GDR stated: “In 1987, Berlin—the capital of the German Democratic Republic—celebrates the 750th anniversary of the first documentation of the city with a year-long salute to its history and culture.” Capitalizing on the fact that East Berlin had the lion’s share of the old capital’s historic buildings, Honecker’s men hoped through their restoration efforts to show that their state, not the Federal Republic and West Berlin, harbored the most noble German traditions.
In 1972 a plan was put forth to restore East Berlin’s largest surviving ruin, the hulking Berliner Dom. Ulbricht had intended to tear the structure down in the early 1950s, but with so many jobs on his demolition list he never got around to it. Honecker, by contrast, saw the Dom’s restoration as a chance both to display reverence for Berlin’s Prussian past and to improve relations with the Evangelical Church. The project was enormously expensive, however, and it might not have gotten off the ground had not West Germany’s Protestant community agreed to pay most of the costs. By 1983 the church loomed once again in all its bombastic pomposity over the Lustgarten. Renovation of the interior was still going on when the GDR itself passed into history.
Berlin’s impending 750th anniversary was also the catalyst for the restoration of the city’s oldest district, the Nikolaiviertel, named for its Gothic church, St. Nikolai. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries merchants had built row houses along the quarter’s narrow streets, and the great humanist writer Gotthold Lessing had lived there in the eighteenth century. World War II, however, had transformed the area into a ruin-field, which is how it had remained for over thirty years. Beginning in 1979, Honecker’s architects restored the church and most of the district’s housing. The fact that these houses had belonged to merchants presented no problem to the regime, since according to Marxist theory the rise of the bourgeoisie was a necessary precursor to the proletarian revolution. Although the restorers tried to recapture the district’s historic flavor, a lack of resources necessitated the use of prefabricated concrete slabs on the facades, which hardly made for authenticity. West German visitors, whom the regime had desperately wanted to impress, condemned the endeavor as an insult to true historical restoration—a piece of pretentious Communist kitsch. Visitors from other parts of East Germany bristled at the expense. They were appalled that large sums of money were being expended on a show-project in the capital while the rest of the country continued to suffer from shortages of every kind.
Similar complaints were raised about another belated grasp for historical legitimacy (not to mention tourists’ hard currency): the restoration of the Huse-mannstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg. This small street was reconstructed in the early 1980s as a “typical workers’ neighborhood,” complete with historic street lamps, a restaurant called “1900,” and a museum devoted to working-class history. In reality, however, Husemannstrasse had never housed many workers, and its solid apartment buildings had remained a bourgeois enclave through the Third Reich. Moreover, the Honecker regime’s new theme park of working-class life represented a glaring contrast to the crumbling facades and sagging balconies typical of the genuine working-class streets surrounding it. Rather than highlighting the GDR’s proletarian roots, it showed how far the Communist state had yet to go to create a decent living environment for the vast majority of its citizens.
By the late 1970s the East German government was firmly established in the old governmental quarter in central Berlin. Although the Nazis had also ruled from this quarter, their Communist successors did not feel terribly haunted by ghosts in brown sheets; after all, as a “tool of monopoly capitalism,” Nazism allegedly had nothing to do with the GDR. Some of the East German ministries even moved into Nazi-era buildings. As we have seen, the House of Ministries was harbored in Göring’s vast Aviation Ministry from 1949 on. The only rite of exorcism that the new tenants had performed in that building was to replace a relief of marching Wehrmacht soldiers with a mural depicting the establishment of the GDR, which had taken place there. As of 1959, the SED headquarters was located in the former Reichsbank, one of the central sites of Nazi financial policy. Equally ironic—yet perhaps fitting—was the fact that the GDR elected to house its Government Press Office and Ministry for Media Policy in the former headquarters of Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.
The GDR government took over these Nazi buildings primarily because it was cheaper to refurbish existing structures than to build entirely new ones. From the beginning, however, East Germany’s rulers had hoped to erect at least one governmental structure that could serve as an architectural symbol of the new state. Shortly after taking over from Ulbricht, Honecker decided to build a new home for East Germany’s parliament on the site of the former Royal Palace. The choice of this location was at once another reach for historical legitimacy and a symbol of victory over the imperial past. The building that arose in the mid-1970s, and which still stands today (though perhaps not for long), is a squat rectangular structure sheathed in white Bulgarian marble and gold-tinted glass. Inside, the building contains an auditorium that was used for meetings of the GDR’s rubber-stamp parliament, a 5,000-seat hall for party congresses and other mass functions, a restaurant and cafe, and even a bowling alley. At the dedication ceremony on April 23, 1976, the government heralded the Palace of the Republic as a true “house of the people.”