When the German government made its decision to shift most of its functions to Berlin, it announced that it intended to build brand new quarters for the federal chancellor, the federal president, and for the ministries that would make the move. The buildings that had housed the Communist government in East Berlin were to be torn down. These decisions, however, soon fell victim to the economic realities of reunited Germany and to protest actions by an energetic conservation lobby in Berlin. Bowing to the protests, and hoping to cut costs, the government declared in February 1993 that, while the chancellor and president would still get new buildings, the ministries would move into existing structures, which would be renovated and expanded as necessary. Most of the existing buildings that were earmarked for ministerial service had been used by the Nazis or the Communists, and often by both. This obviously raised difficult issues of political symbolism. Klaus Töpfer, who as federal building minister from 1995 to 1998 oversaw much of the governmental construction in Berlin, was willing to confront this problem head-on. He declared that the buildings in which state-evil had been conducted should be retained as “sites of inescapable memory,” so that would-be political criminals of the future “could never again entrench themselves behind bureaucratic desks.” Nonetheless, in addition to hiring architects to renovate these haunted houses, the new occupants might have found it advisable to bring in an exorcist or two.
Certainly Klaus Kinkel, who served as foreign minister at the time when a new home in Berlin was selected for his agency, was in the market for some serious political detoxification. He found it “unworthy” that a high-profile institution like the Foreign Ministry should be resettled in the former Nazi Reichsbank, which, to make matters worse, had also housed the headquarters of the SED from 1959 to 1989. Before grudgingly accepting this decision, he had fought for a brand new building on the Schloßplatz. He wanted, he explained, an architectural setting that “did justice to the ministry’s special concerns of political image in representing the Federal Republic of Germany abroad. . . . Future-oriented quarters for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin therefore require a new building.”
The historical building that the Foreign Ministry inherited in Berlin is a long, curving, sandstone-sheathed behemoth that had taken the Nazis six years to build (1934–40). During the Third Reich the structure’s facade was decorated with a frieze of muscled figures designed by Josef Thorak. Here Hjalmar Schacht and his colleagues worked out the financial dimensions of Germany’s rearmament. The complex had survived the war relatively intact, and in 1950 the East German Finance Ministry had moved in after making some cosmetic changes and structural modifications. In 1959 the Central Committee of the SED, along with the Politbüro, took over the building, making it the power center of the GDR. Erich Honecker had an office on the second floor.
When united Germany’s foreign minister (not Klaus Kinkel after all, but Joschka Fischer) took occupancy of his new quarters in 1999, his office stood in the same general area as Honecker’s old suite. The plenary assembly room of the SED Central Committee became a conference room. “I think it’s not at all bad for the federal government constantly to be conscious of living and working against the backdrop of a difficult history,” said Fritjof von Nordenskjöld, the Foreign Ministry official overseeing the move to Berlin. However, Foreign Minister Fischer and his successors were not likely to be reminded very often of Schacht and Honecker, for extensive modifications and the addition of a whole new wing gave the complex a very different look and feel.
United Germany’s Finance Ministry inherited an Altbau with an even more tainted pedigree than the Reichsbank: the former Nazi Aviation Ministry, which had mutated into the headquarters of the Soviet Military Administration for Germany (1945–49), then the House of Ministries of the GDR, and finally, after East Germany’s collapse, the Treuhand Anstalt. The various agencies that this building housed over the years shared commitments to power and control—impulses reflected in the complex itself, which commands the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Leipziger Strasse like a fortress. “All who approached here felt reduced in stature, whether they be ministerial officials or simple visitors,” wrote Günter Grass in his historical novel of Berlin, Ein Weites Feld (Too Far Afield). The quarters from which Göring ran the Nazi air campaign, Russian generals ruled their occupation zone, GDR ministers ran their country into the ground, and the Treuhand bureaucrats sold off what remained, was modified repeatedly over the years without altering the sinister aspect. The Soviets removed the Nazi ornamentation and remodeled the main reception hall in Stalinist-baroque. The SED commissioned a mural to commemorate the building’s status as the birthplace of the GDR. In 1992 the building was renamed “Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus” in honor of the Treuhand’s first Western director, who was murdered by a terrorist.
Four years later work began on transforming the building into the Finance Ministry. As the construction crews tore out wall sections and ceiling panels, they came across yellowed copies of the SS magazine, Das Schwarze Korps, and the GDR union periodical, Tribüne. They also found a small bronze chest containing a document commemorating the completion of the building’s structural frame “in the third year of freedom under the generous leadership of the Führer and Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler.” Despite extensive renovations, some interior details from the original building were carried over into the new structure. These include the number-plaques for the row upon row of office doors and the aluminum banisters that Göring had personally designed as an homage to his beloved aircraft. Understandably, however, the new occupants preferred to highlight another aspect of the building’s history: the presence there for a short time of the anti-Nazi resistance group, the Red Orchestra. During the renovation an exhibition on this group was installed in the lobby. In the interests of historical preservation, the occupants decided to retain the GDR-era mural glorifying the socialist state—which, however, they counterbalanced with a monument to the workers who had died in the uprising of 1953. Commenting in 1995 on the challenge that the designers faced in confronting this building’s tangled past, Wolfgang Keilholz, the architect in charge of the renovation, said that he and his employers were obliged “to respect the fact that guilt emanated from this building. The user who will now occupy this building must know that. And by occupying such a building one takes on an obligation, one that is greater than if one were just to tear down the building.”
United Germany’s Ministry of Labor also took on such an obligation, for this agency moved into what had once been Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Unlike Göring, the Nazi propaganda minister had not commissioned a totally new building; rather, in 1933 his ministry had occupied the former Ordenspalais and two smaller buildings on the Wilhelmplatz. The main building had been built in 1737 and extensively remodeled by Schinkel one hundred years later. Finding it “out of date and obsolete,” Goebbels ordered it redone in the “ocean-liner-style” he thought projected power and modernity. In 1937–38 the complex was expanded to include the former colonial ministry, while new wings extended Goebbels’s empire to the Mauerstrasse one block east. The historic core of the complex was wrecked in the war, but some of the Nazi-era additions survived to become the GDR’s Press Office and Ministry for Media Policy. Norbert Blum (GDU), who was labor minister at the time his agency was consigned to this building, was horrified by the choice. He signaled his displeasure by refusing to visit the structure as it was undergoing the necessary renovations.