A different set of ghosts haunts the house that became united Germany’s Economics Ministry. Originally hoping to move into the Prussian Herrenhaus (which instead was given to the Bundesrat), this ministry was shunted to a large structure on the Invalidenstrasse just to the east of where the Wall had run. Built in “Frederican-Baroque” style in 1903–5, this building served as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Akademie für die Ausbildung von Militararzten (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for the Training of Military Physicians) before World War I. The poet Gottfried Benn received his training there. The Nazis had used the building as a courthouse, which was also its function during the early years of the GDR, when it was home to “Red Hilda” Benjamin, a relative of Walter Benjamin and East Germany’s most zealous political prosecutor. At the height of her influence in the late 1950s, the West German press likened her to the Nazi hanging judge Roland Freisler. In the late 1960s the building was transformed into a government hospital that catered mainly to foreign diplomats, who were cared for by specially selected nurses; work crews remodeling the building in the 1990s discovered an entire room full of condoms.
As noted above, the Ministry of Defense’s main office remains in Bonn, with a secondary office transferred to Berlin. The ministry’s home on the Spree is the storied “Bendlerblock” on the Landwehr Canal. Having been constructed in 1911–14 for the Reichsmarineamt, this stately gray building housed Admiral von Tirpitz, orchestrator of imperial Germany’s fateful naval race with Great Britain. After World War I it became the Reichswehr Ministry. Here, on February 3, 1933, Germany’s top generals received Hitler and learned of his plans to expand Germany’s “Lebensraum” (living space) to the east. The early campaigns of World War II were directed from this complex when it served as the headquarters of the Wehrmacht High Command. Also housed here were the offices of many of the military resisters against Hitler, including Count von Stauffenberg, who was executed in the Bendlerblock courtyard following the coup’s failure. With the exception of a memorial to the resisters and a small museum (about which more below), extensive renovations to the complex obliterated all traces of the past.
Because the challenges of living with the ghosts of Berlin were made necessary by the Bundestag’s decision to shift Germany’s seat of government to the Spree, it is perhaps fitting that this body inherited the former capital’s epitome of symbolically difficult buildings: the Reichstag. In actuality, some of that difficulty is undeserved, since neither the kaiser nor Hitler had had much to do with the place. Nonetheless, this war-scarred fossil was so laden with conflicting, mainly depressing, historical associations that many parliamentarians did not want to have anything to do with it. For them the site bore the uneradicable stink of grand pretensions and tragic failure. The building’s very name was a problem, since “Reichstag” translates as “Imperial Diet.” “We are not a German Reich but a Federation,” protested Renate Schmidt (SPD), “and we want to underscore that federalism.” In addition to its heavy symbolic baggage, the old building had the disadvantage of being architecturally inadequate for the demands of united Germany’s parliament. The postwar renovations, such as they were, had not brought the structure up-to-date in terms of creature comforts and technical requirements. Günther Behnisch, the architect who had designed Germany’s brand new and then promptly abandoned parliament building in Bonn, likened the Bundestag’s decision to take over the Reichstag to the federal president’s donning the kaiser’s moth-eaten uniform in the 1990s. If it was to be put back into service as united Germany’s parliament, the building would have to be extensively renovated and supplemented with additional structures.
The issue of the Reichstag’s complicated historical associations could be dealt with in part through a new set of symbols, a reorientation of the building’s imagery. It so happened that a dramatic means of underscoring such a reorientation lay ready to hand. Since the early 1970s the Bulgarian-born artist Christo, whose favorite form of creative expression was wrapping up very big things in all manner of material, had been lobbying to “wrap” the Reichstag. He had been repeatedly rebuffed, most recently by Helmut Kohl, who feared that Christo secretly wanted to wrap him. Many politicians opposed the idea as an insult to the building’s dignity. Wolfgang Schäuble protested that no other country would allow a structure of comparable historical importance to become the centerpiece of a conceptual art experiment. Would the British so disgrace Westminster, the Americans Capitol Hill, or the French the Palais Bourbon? Nevertheless, after the Wall came down Christo’s plan found support among politicians who believed that through such a gesture the once and future parliament building could, so to speak, undergo a ritual rebirth: it could be wrapped as the Reichstag and unwrapped as the Bundestag. The CDU politician Heiner Geissler argued that “through Christo we get the chance to show the world Germany’s tolerant and open-minded character.” Christo himself suggested that the project would stimulate viewers to reflect on “what this building means to Europe, Germany, and many people around the world.” With the backing of Mayor Diepgen and Bundestag president Rita Süssmuth, the plan was approved by a vote in the Bundestag on February 25, 1994.
As it turned out, the Reichstag-wrap was a huge public-relations coup for Berlin. Thousands of people came to view the old Prussian pile enveloped, like a rich bride, in a million square feet of silver-covered fabric. The cover-up made Berliners “see” the building again, just as the mock-up of the Hohenzollern Palace had made them revisualize that historic structure on its original site. When the wrapping came off in July 1995, the Reichstag was ready for its renovation.
But exactly what kind of renovation? A design competition in 1992/93 yielded very different answers to this question. Unable to select a clear winner, the jury awarded three first prizes: to the Dutchman Pi de Bruijn, the Spaniard Santiago Calatrava, and the Englishman Sir Norman Foster. Eventually, after further scrutiny and many heated discussions, Foster was given the contract to redesign Germany’s most important building. The fact that he and the other finalists were all foreigners was quite telling. Clearly, the parliamentary officials had a fear of seeming too assertive, too “German” in the traditional sense. As the chairman of the Bundestag Building Committee admitted: “There was perhaps some anxiety that if we did it in a purely German manner we would have taken a whack.”
The Reichstag “wrapped” by Christo, 1995
Foster, who had made his name by designing skyscrapers in Hong Kong and Frankfurt, won the Reichstag contract because his design seemed most likely to project the openness and transparency that were the cherished hallmarks of the modern German democracy. By matching the parliamentary building’s new look with the principles and confident aspirations of its new tenants, Foster’s Reichstag would show the world that the German government’s return to Berlin meant neither an abandonment of the ideals of Bonn nor a relapse to the weaknesses of the pre-Bonn parliamentary order.
Once he began working in earnest on the renovation, however, Foster discovered that having a parliamentary committee as his boss meant having to entertain a dozen different concepts regarding the work at hand. Like Wallot, the original builder, he had to change his design repeatedly and accept countless compromises. His original design called for the existing structure to be surrounded by an outer framework of steel columns supporting a flat glass canopy. Foster explained that this accommodated “the need for a new symbol, a symbol that corresponds to our age, a new image of an open future.” But some members of the Bundestag Building Commission objected that this design would make Germany’s parliamentary headquarters look like a gas station or an airplane hangar. Forced to drop the canopy, Foster proposed a glass cylinder instead, which he said would suggest a “lighthouse of democracy.” The SPD people liked this idea, but the CDU delegates on the commission insisted on a glass dome, which the original building had possessed. Originally, the conservatives wanted an exact replica of Wallot’s dome, while the FDP favored a modern rounded dome, and the Greens stood for no dome at all. Eventually the GDU conceded that a remake of Wallot’s dome would be too expensive and accepted a more modern version. Foster reluctantly complied and designed an inverted glass cup that suggested, according to different observers’ imaginations, a half-egg, a space station, a greenhouse, a pimple ripe for popping, or Kohl’s bald pate. Foster got his revenge by making the dome such a high-tech tour de force that it ended up costing much more than a Wallot-replica would have done. On the other hand, with its platform from which visitors could look down on the plenary hall below, the dome proved to be an effective symbol of political transparency. One could only hope that many Germans would visit their new house of democracy, since the overall price tag—DM 600 million, or $331 million—made it the most expensive public building in Berlin.