The Guard’s House from Checkpoint Charlie at its new location in the Allied Museum
Shortly before the America-dominated Allied Museum opened in Zehlendorf, a rival “German-Russian Museum” opened across town in Karlshorst, where the Soviet occupation had been based. The museum is located in the villa in which Field Marshal Keitel and Marshal Zhukov signed Germany’s capitulation to the Soviets just before midnight on May 8, 1945. In 1968 the building was converted into the “Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945.” The new facility, which opened in May 1995, fifty years after the capitulation, seeks to enshrine “common forms of memory,” though it is doubtful that the Russians and Germans have much in common when it comes to interpretations of the past. Not surprisingly, the Karlshorst collection places considerable emphasis on the Second World War. A prize attraction is Hitler’s campaign-map for the attack against Poland in 1939; a constantly running film clip shows Keitel driving across the destroyed Reich capital to the capitulation ceremony. The Karlshorst museum operates under combined German and Russian supervision, but this joint administration cannot disguise the fact that the institutionalized memory of Berlin’s recent past, like the city itself, remains sharply divided.
The restored Reichstag building with its new high-tech dome. The Brandenburg Gate with its quadriga is in the foreground
11
THE BERLIN REPUBLIC
Every nation needs a center of power. The influence, the role, the pride, the self-confidence of a people, also their will-to-action, are reflected in their national capital and projected outward from that space.
—Arnulf Baring, “Eine Zukunft für
unsere Vergangenheit” (1995)
ON FEBRUARY 9, 1997, an old Wehrmacht hand grenade exploded in Berlin-Mitte, wounding five children. Three years earlier construction workers in the eastern district of Friedrichshain had struck and detonated an American bomb from World War II; the explosion killed three people and injured seventeen. These pieces of ordnance were among the tens of thousands of unexploded grenades, shells, and bombs lurking in Berlin’s soil, waiting to claim belated victims. “The new capital,” said a member of Berlin’s fire department, “sits on one big time bomb.”
Of course, unexploded bombs from World War II were only the most obvious relics of a dangerous past in the new German capital, whose landscape was haunted by a host of historical “ghosts.” Many of these goblins were associated with the Nazi period, while others derived from the Prussian, imperial, Weimar, and post-World War II Stalinist eras. Those responsible for shaping post-Wall Berlin’s renovation were not able simply to banish these spirits, much as some of them might have wished to do so; they had to find ways to live with their haunted past.
The fall of the Wall, the unification of Germany and Berlin, and the decision to move the seat of government from the Rhine to the Spree produced a dramatic physical transformation of the once and future German capital. There had been extensive rebuilding programs in both halves of the city during the forty-year division, but the post-Wall reconstruction was qualitatively more ambitious. No other city in modern times has witnessed such a far-reaching overhaul in so short a time. But Berlin’s makeover was unique in spirit as well as in scale; given all those evil spirits in the firmament, the task presented a singular complex of political, psychological, and moral dilemmas.
In addition to dredging up political ghosts, the reconstruction of Berlin in the postunification era rekindled an old debate about the nature of the city. Was Berlin so lacking in coherent patterns of urban development and discernible aesthetic traditions that one could reshape it without paying much attention to the architectural past? “The only tradition in Berlin is that no phase of construction ever gave a damn about fitting in with the phase that went before,” wrote the modernist architect, Christoph Langhof. Alternatively, was there a unifying aesthetic that needed to be respected? Here, two images of Berlin sharply collided: the city that “is always becoming and never is”; and the city that “already exists and need not be discovered anew.”
New Teutonia
The battle for the architectural soul of the new Berlin began, appropriately enough, in the Potsdamer Platz, the once-bustling commercial hub that had become a gaping void as a result of World War II and the Wall. Over time the place had returned to nature, with rabbits multiplying in the weeds. It was as if, wrote the American architectural critic Paul Goldberger, “Times Square had been replaced by a chunk of the New Jersey Meadowlands.” In Wim Wenders’s classic film of 1980s West Berlin, Himmel über Berlin, an old man wanders across the western section of this wasteland, muttering, “It’s got to be here somewhere. I can’t find the Potsdamer Platz.” When it came to ghosts of the past, this area had more than its share. In the vicinity of the Potsdamer Platz and the adjacent Leipziger Platz had stood Hitler’s Neue Reichskanzlei and bunker, Roland Freisler’s Volksgerichtshof, and Heinrich Himmler’s Gestapo and SS Headquarters. Spartacists had fought against the army here in 1919, and in 1953 Soviet tanks had formed a barrier at the sector border against rioting East German workers. When the Wall came down, Berliners hoped that the area would be the centerpiece of a renewal that was at once forward-looking and reverential—a leap into the future via a return to pre-Nazi vitality.
City leaders hoped this too, but in 1990 long-term planning took a back seat to aspirations for a quick burst of progress. As we have seen, the Momper government immediately sold off large sections of the square to Daimler-Benz and Sony. Other plots went to Hertie, a West German department store chain, and to Asean Brown Boveri (ABB), a multinational engineering firm. The companies all planned to develop major projects on their properties, and they were more interested in making a big commercial splash than in fitting in to some larger aesthetic design. Nor were they overly worried about the historical ghosts. As Daimler-Benz’s cheerleading publicist explained to a visiting journalist, “Potsdamer Platz is a free land. It has no memory. It is a new country.” To reinvent the square, the developers hired famous architects like Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, José Moneo, and Arata Isozaki (Daimler-Benz); Helmut Jahn (Sony); and Giorgio Grassi (ABB). Daimler’s Isozaki was especially enthusiastic about his assignment because Berlin perfectly fit his definition of a city as “a thing perpetually in a state of ruin.” Echoing Albert Speer, Isozaki envisaged something like “ruin value” in the things he built. “For me,” he said, “the moment of ecstasy is when everything that is built vanishes in a catastrophe.” He and his colleagues saw the void in the middle of Berlin as a perfect place in which to build monuments to themselves.