This decision generated more opposition than the politicians had bargained for. Former citizens of the GDR, along with some sympathetic Wessis, mounted a petition campaign to save the Palast and flooded the newspapers with protests against the demolition plan. They insisted that the Palast had been less a repository of repression than “a site of popular amusement.” Ossis recalled with fondness the hours they had spent in its restaurants, cafés, and bowling alley. They remembered it as one of the few places in East Berlin where an ordinary citizen could find clean public toilets and functioning East-West telephones. Admittedly, they conceded, the Palast was a little off-putting aesthetically, but no more so than most of the buildings thrown up in West Berlin during the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, this faction contended, compared to West Berlin’s International Congress Center, which was built at the same time, the Palast was downright “humane and friendly.” As for the asbestos issue, this too was not just a Palast problem, since many western buildings were also filled with the stuff, and at any rate there were ways to get rid of it (and plenty of illegal Polish laborers to do the nasty work). The real “contamination,” these folks said, had to do with the Palast’s alleged pollution with GDR ideals, but it was precisely as a legacy of the former GDR, as a piece of municipal and national history, that the building should be retained. It was here, after all, that on August 23, 1990, the GDR had voted to join the Federal Republic. Berlin had precious few recent buildings of such singular historical importance, it was argued. To tear down this one would be to commit another of those offenses against history with which the city was all too familiar.
Even if the Palast der Republik were to be torn down as planned, rebuilding the old Hohenzollern Schloß in its place struck many observers as an outlandish, not to mention reactionary, idea. It would be much better, they argued, to put up a modern building on the site—a structure representative not of Berlin’s feudal past but of its role as a trendsetter in architectural design. The opposition to reconstruction was also fueled by concern over the message that this action might send about the new Germany and its capital. The worry was not that the outside world would get the idea that the Germans wanted to bring back their monarchy, but that such a gesture could be interpreted as a revival of the German nationalist spirit.
That symbolic gestures involving Germany’s monarchical past were capable of igniting widespread anxiety had become painfully evident in August 1991 when the body of Frederick the Great, who had once said that territorial expansion was “the first rule of government,” was reburied at Sanssouci in nearby Potsdam. This reinterment was the end of a long odyssey for Frederick, who died in 1786. In his will the king had stated that he wished to be buried “without pomp or ceremony” at Sanssouci, but instead he was interred with great pomp at the Garrison Church in Potsdam. There he stayed until World War II. To protect the royal relic from Allied bombs, Göring moved the coffin in 1943 to a Berlin cellar, and two years later, to protect it from the advancing Russians, Hitler ordered it removed to a salt mine in Thuringia. The Americans found Frederick and placed him in a church in Marburg. In 1953 the king’s Hohenzollern heirs moved him once again, this time to the family plot near Stuttgart. Finally, German unification prompted the family, some 205 years after Frederick’s death, to grant him his last wish by interring him next to his beloved dogs in the soil of Sanssouci. The king’s wish for simplicity, however, still eluded him. Helmut Kohl turned the reburial into a state occasion by insisting upon being present; the Bundeswehr sent an honor guard. The affair reminded some observers of the “Day of Potsdam” (March 21, 1933), when Hitler and Hindenburg bowed before Frederick’s grave at the Garrison Church, thereby claiming an alliance between the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich. Kohl of course had no intention of signaling a revival of Frederick’s expansionist ideals; rather, he simply wanted to “stand before our entire history.” Nonetheless, his inept and controversial gesture, like his effort six years before to promote reconciliation with one of Germany’s conquerors through a joint visit with President Ronald Reagan to the military cemetery at Bitburg, where Waffen-SS-men were buried, could not help but be misinterpreted.
Concerns about Germany’s national image, combined with the other objections to a Schloß reconstruction, might have killed this idea immediately had it not found some influential supporters on the local and national levels. Once again Helmut Kohl made his influence felt as a champion and protector of Germany’s national heritage. Believing (like Kaiser Wilhelm II) that Berlin needed a lot of historical ballast to keep it from floating off into a political cloud-cuckoo land, he offered his personal backing for the Schloß project. On the municipal front, Mayor Diepgen and the local CDU endorsed the scheme. One of Germany’s best known journalists, Joachim Fest, used his pulpit at the FAZ to argue that the old palace, far from being a forbidding bastion of authoritarianism, had been an approachable, even folksy place whose courtyard was open to ordinary citizens. Wolf Jobst Siedler, the influential publisher, likened a possible Schloß reconstruction to Warsaw’s restoration of its historic old city after World War II, and to Venice’s rebuilding of its trademark Campanile in the early twentieth century. In his view, Berlin needed a reconstituted Schloß to bring coherence back to its devastated center. He pointed out that Schinkel’s neoclassical Neues Museum had been designed to interact with the baroque facade of the old palace. The publisher could have countenanced a modern building that performed this function, but he had no faith that the modernists were capable of coming up with an appropriate design. Thus it was with “resignation” that he opted for a reconstruction of the old palace.
The figure who did the most to promote the idea of a palace reconstruction, Wilhelm von Boddien, came at his task with no such hesitation or regret. Interestingly, Boddien was not a local pillar of the community, not even a Berliner, but a Hamburg farm equipment magnate (“the John Deere of Germany”) who described himself as a history buff and “Prussia-fan.” Rather than simply talk up or write about a putative Schloß revival, he hit upon the idea of erecting a mock-up of the building’s facade in order to show the Berliners, and visitors to the city, what they had been missing all these years. In 1993, at his direction, a trompe l’oeil canvas curtain painted to replicate the old palace’s baroque facade went up next to the Palast der Republik, in whose gold-tinted windows the faux facade was gloriously reflected. The mock-up was itself a masterful piece of work, and it spoke much more eloquently for the Schloß than all the boosterish newspaper articles and speeches. As an additional promotional gambit, Boddien organized an exhibition on the Schloß that was housed in a temporary structure behind the facade. This exhibit allowed visitors to get a sense of how the palace had fit into the life of old Berlin, and how a reconstituted palace might serve the new Berlin. Boddien’s promotional material made clear that he and other friends of the palace did not envisage a complete reconstruction, replete with the old royal interior. This would have been pointless, not to mention prohibitively expensive. (Boddien and his backers promised to raise private financing for the project.) In place of the old palace’s warren of rooms, the new space might contain a hotel, library, ballrooms, and a conference center.