The new Hotel Adlon opened in June 1997, fifty-two years after its predecessor’s destruction. The central foyer contains a fountain that had once graced the old building. The piano music featured in the main salon consists largely of teatime tunes from the 1920s. In another bow to the past, the Adlon boasts suites for visiting heads of state (along with adjoining space for their bodyguards) and a small balcony from which dignitaries can acknowledge the crowds below. The hotel’s literature does not point out that it was from just such a balcony in the old Adlon that Nazi dignitaries watched the SA parade through the Brandenburg Gate on January 30, 1933.
The Hotel Adlon had stood next to the British embassy from 1907 to 1945. Such will be the case again in the new millennium, since the British are scheduled to open a new embassy on the same site in the year 2000. Berlin’s government welcomed London’s decision to build on this historic place as another crucial step in the Pariser Platz’s phoenixlike rejuvenation. Like their neighbor, the Adlon, the British elected to employ a traditionalist and “restrained” design for their embassy.
France, whose stately embassy had graced the northern side of Pariser Platz, also made a commitment to return to its old site. However, when it came to the design of its new building, the French Foreign Ministry was not nearly so respectful of local standards as its British counterpart. The French had always been somewhat condescending toward Berlin, which tried so hard to be like Paris. Now, upon returning to the square named after their own capital, they were determined to remind the Germans that, though France might no longer be the Continent’s leading power, it still set the tone in the realm of grand public construction. Their architect, Christian de Portzamparc, planned a striking structure featuring two-story-high windows in the facade. Upon unveiling this plan, Foreign Minister Hervé de Charette was careful to distinguish the French project from Kleihues’s palaces and Patzschke’s Adlon: “The buildings [on the square] are all stiff and tasteless,” he said. “Our project will bring some French flair.”
The United States, the other great Western power to have occupied a niche on Pariser Platz, was expected to join its allies in returning to its former location. Washington, after all, had been Berlin’s most stalwart backer since the days of the airlift, and rebuilding on Pariser Platz would constitute an important gesture of support for the city. Yet America’s return to the historic square was not a foregone conclusion. Washington worried that there might be too many restrictions, and too little space, at its old site. America’s then ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke, declared ominously in 1996: “It is our hope that we will be able to build at Pariser Platz, but we haven’t made a final decision yet because we don’t have the final German specifications. If the Germans can accommodate us, we’ll end up there. But we are looking at alternative sites, and if we are faced with deal-breaking specifications, we’ll go another way.”
Holbrooke’s comments alarmed and horrified the Berliners. Rüdiger Patzschke, the Adlon architect, fumed: “Nowhere else can you achieve what you can achieve at Pariser Platz. Plenty of countries would love to have their embassies there. It just wouldn’t make sense for the Americans to go anywhere else. If they find the site too small or the rules too restrictive, they could put just their reception rooms and a few offices there. But to abandon the site altogether would not make sense.”
Washington soon smoothed the Berliners’ feathers by making a commitment to the Pariser Platz. Holbrooke, in fact, may have been bluffing in order to scare the Germans into imposing fewer restrictions. But no sooner had the decision been made to build at the old site than a new problem arose: a shortage of funds. Washington had planned to finance the construction of its new embassy from the sale of American-owned property in Germany, especially in West Berlin. The proceeds from these sales, however, were less than expected. The State Department therefore announced in 1997 that it was putting the new construction on hold; when its embassy moved to Berlin in 1999, it would make use of existing buildings, including the cramped former American embassy in East Berlin. In other words, because of its professed poverty, the richest country in the world was going to have to camp out in the German capital. Learning of this dire state of affairs, Berliners offered to take up a collection for Washington’s new embassy. They said that America could think of such assistance as partial compensation for the Marshall Plan.
Chagrined by this turn of events, Washington insisted that it could find the funds to build an appropriate home on the Spree. The American embassy saga was not over yet, however, for a dispute over security measures put off construction once again. In the wake of terrorist attacks against its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Washington demanded security provisions for its future embassy in Berlin that sparked resistance from the Berlin Senate. The Americans insisted on a thirty-meter traffic- and pedestrian-free zone facing the open (western and southern) sides of its complex. This would require closing off two main avenues and rerouting the traffic. The Berlin Senate rejected the demand on grounds that, as one senator declared, the changes “would diminish the Brandenburg Gate and its environs.” This response reflected a new attitude on the part of the Berliners toward their erst-while “protective power.” No longer was America’s wish the locals’ command. Once again, Washington threatened to build elsewhere in Berlin, though America’s new ambassador, John Kornblum, was known to favor quarters, “preferably without windows,” on Pariser Platz. Until the security issues could be resolved, the plot at Number 2 Pariser Platz remained empty, save for a small metal sign reading, “The once and future site of the American Embassy in Berlin.”
Berlin’s tradition-oriented planners and architects saw the Pariser Platz as a base from which to extend their influence down Unter den Linden to the city’s other showplace square, the Schloßplatz. Like Pariser Platz, the Schloßplatz had been badly smashed up in the war, but, as we have seen, the old Hohenzollern Palace itself had survived partly intact until the Communists demolished it in 1950. The site was used for government-approved demonstrations and as a parking lot until the Honecker regime covered part of it with the GDR’s own “palace,” the Palast der Republik, in the mid-1970s.
Given the historic significance of the Schloßplatz and its missing and extant palaces, it was perhaps inevitable that the square’s fate in the new Berlin would become the subject of heated debate. The Wall had barely come down when a call went up to demolish the GDR palace and to rebuild the old Hohenzollern Schloß in its place. The idea sparked spirited, albeit differentiated, resistance. Some of those who objected to rebuilding the old palace were quite prepared to tear down the newer one; other opponents of reconstruction were avid partisans of the existing GDR structure. There were thus “rival nostalgias” at work here, competing visions of the past that impeded any consensus about the future. And, as usual, the rival memories of Berlin were emblematic of conflicting collective identities and images of the German nation.
Those in favor of rebuilding the Hohenzollern Palace and tearing down the Palast der Republik had recourse to aesthetic, historical, and ideological arguments. The demolition of the Palast der Republik was easier to justify than the reconstruction of the old Schloβ. The GDR building was undoubtedly ugly, and it stood at a pivotal location at the eastern end of the Linden, Berlin’s most important avenue. Its presence there, argued one commentator, “blocks an urbane future for the socialist-usurped city center.” Moreover, an inspection revealed that it was stuffed with asbestos, which made it a health hazard as well as an eyesore. Tearing it down could also be seen as belated revenge for the demolition of the old palace in 1950. Since the construction of the Palast had been meant to symbolize the triumph of communism, its destruction would symbolize that system’s ultimate defeat in the Gold War. Finally, clearing away this relic of the GDR would eliminate a possible shrine for Ostalgie. In 1993 the Berlin Senate made a formal decision to tear down the Palast, though no specific demolition date was fixed.