The International Business center at Checkpoint Charlie, 1999
Although economic vagaries, not faults in design, caused the Business Center’s problems, the project was sharply criticized on aesthetic grounds as well. Johnson himself admitted that his building was a failure. He blamed this on Berlin’s regulations, stating that no other city would have forced him to produce such a boring and mediocre design. Palmer, too, was disappointed that the complex lacked stylistic assertiveness, and he likewise faulted the regulations imposed on the project, “the small-town mentality of Stimmannism.” Extrapolating from his experience at Checkpoint Charlie, Palmer drew unpromising conclusions for Berlin as a whole: “Berlin could be the most important center in the world,” he said in 1995, “but after being beaten down by the events of the past half-century, the Germans have become used to being self-effacing, not bold.”
Back in the days when the Germans had not yet lost their taste for grand gestures, they had laid out the parts of central Berlin that would serve as their primary political stage in the modern era: the Pariser Platz, Schloßplatz, and the connecting avenue, Unter den Linden. Like the rest of Berlin-Mitte, these places had been heavily bombed in World War II, and then had suffered under Communist redevelopment schemes from the 1950s through the 1970s. With the fall of the Wall and the decision to transfer the capital to Berlin, something clearly had to be done with this crucial corridor. Given its historical and symbolic significance, there was strong sentiment in favor of a traditionalist reconstruction. But what exactly did “traditionalist” mean in a place like Berlin? And how should one proceed in those cases where the ghosts of the past threatened to overwhelm the good intentions of the present?
Pariser Platz, named in honor of Prussia’s participation in the Allied victory over Napoleon in 1814, was often referred to as the “kaiser’s reception room” after 1871. With the second unification it was due to become, in the words of Berlin’s building senator Wolfgang Nagel, “the salon of the republic.” But in the early 1990s this was a room with virtually no furniture. With the exception of the Brandenburg Gate and a section of the Prussian Academy of Arts, all its grand buildings were gone. Like so many vacant spaces in central Berlin, it now served as an ad hoc flea market, with Ossis peddling pieces of the Wall and other relics of the GDR. The Senate proposed that the square be rebuilt in a style “appropriate to the age.” One critic derided this instruction as “a balloon without any air in it,” but, as it turned out, the balloon was filled with some pretty heavy historical ballast.
The primary surviving structure on Pariser Platz, the Brandenburg Gate, had of course become the symbol of Berlin by the twentieth century. The Communists had restored it in the 1950s as a “gate of peace,” piously eliminating the Prussian eagle and iron cross from the reconstituted quadriga on the top. During the years of division, when the monument was closed off by the Wall, it took on new symbolic meaning as the gate that wasn’t. In addition to being Berlin’s most prominent symbol, it became an icon of the Cold War. In the heady days of November 1989, it symbolized the end of Germany’s, and Europe’s, division. In 1991, reunited Berlin decided to replace the politically corrected 1958 quadriga with a remake of the version that had stood atop the gate between 1814 and 1945 (which itself was a revision of the original sculpture that Napoleon had stolen in 1806). But if one wanted to return the gate to its former glory and function as the portal of an enclosed square, it would also be necessary to reconstruct some or all of the buildings that had once surrounded it, beginning with the two August Stüler–designed palaces that had flanked it from 1844 until their destruction in the war. The contract for this project went to the Berlin architect Paul Josef Kleihues, who, true to the doctrine of “critical reconstruction,” hued closely to the scale and volume of the Stüler buildings, while omitting most of their ornamental details. Kleihues also eliminated a series of arched windows that had harmonized with the facades of the two small wing-buildings attached to the gate. Unfortunately, these changes broke up the continuity of the original ensemble. Worse, the stark new “palaces,” which looked more like fortresses, threatened to overpower the central edifice. In 1939 Albert Speer had planned to reduce the Brandenburg Gate to a traffic island by tearing down the small wing-buildings. Kleihues had no intention of diminishing the power of Berlin’s most famous structure, but this, in effect, is exactly what his additions managed to accomplish.
Pariser Platz’s other surviving, or partly surviving, structure, the Prussian Academy of Arts, had, like the Brandenburg Gate, traversed a complicated odyssey that mirrored the political vagaries of modern Berlin. Having moved into the neoclassical Palais Armin-Boitzenburg on the southeastern corner of the square in 1907, the Academy quickly became caught up in the culture wars of imperial Germany: artworks approved by the kaiser hung here, but so did works by Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth. Heinrich Mann was elected president of the Academy in 1931—and dismissed from that position two years later by the Nazis. In 1937 Albert Speer expelled the Academy from the building and moved in his “General Directorship for the Reconstruction of the Reich Capital.” It was here that Hitler’s favorite toy, a thirty-meter-long model of “Germania,” was installed. The model and the original part of the Academy building fell victim to Allied bombs during World War II; only an annex and connecting wing survived intact. With the creation of the GDR, artists belonging to the East German Academy of Arts took over the structure. Here the sculptor Fritz Cremer prepared his sketches for the heroic-Communist monument at Buchenwald. When the Wall went up, East German border guards commandeered the connecting wing, consigning the artists to the annex. The collapse of the GDR and unification of Germany brought a decision to rebuild this history-rich institution around its surviving structures. But should all dimensions of its history be acknowledged, or just the “worthy” parts? The architect Günter Behnisch, who won the contract, designed a glass-fronted building exuding “transparency” and “openness,” but openness only to those aspects of the Academy’s history that were “consistent” with its original function as a house of the muses. This did not include Albert Speer and the East German guards.
One of the buildings that had flanked Pariser Platz on its southern side was the famed Hotel Adlon, Berlin’s grandest hostelry from its opening in 1907 to its sad end just after World War II, when drunken Red Army soldiers set fire to the parts of the structure that had survived Allied bombs. (The then proprietor, Louis Adlon, son of the founder, was deported to Russia and executed, apparently because the Soviets confused his title, “General-Director,” with a military rank.) After the ruins were carted away, few Berliners imagined that they would ever see another version of this grand edifice, but in 1995 the corner stone was laid for a new hotel of the same name on exactly the same place. This time, however, the builders were different: the Kempinski chain and a group of international investors. There was considerable irony here, for at the turn of the century old Kempinski, fearing competition with his own hotel, had tried his best to prevent the Adlon from being built.
Building a major new hotel in mid-1990s Berlin was a great risk—Kempinski’s director admitted that Berlin needed another big hotel “like a hole in the head”—so it was imperative to make this project stand out from the competition. The developers chose to do this by giving the hotel the look of its grand predecessor, while incorporating all the latest technical innovations, such as bulletproof windows and “steel-plated rooms for the celebrities.” The architect, Rüdiger Patzschke, came up with a “tradition-oriented” design that so reeked of “period authenticity” that even Stimmann found it stifling. To critics who accused him of wallowing in the past, Patzschke replied: “We find the claim that contemporary architecture is the nonplus-ultra of design to be a narrow-minded misjudgment on the part of the representatives of the modern.”