It is too early to tell how the experience of ruling from Berlin will affect German foreign policy. Very probably, being back in the traditional capital—if one can use the word “traditional” for an experience that lasted only seventy-four years—will heighten the Germans’ desire to behave like a “normal” nation when it comes to the projection of power. At the same time, however, it will make an “escape from the past”—should that be anyone’s intention—even harder to manage than was the case when quiet little Bonn, the town “without a history” (in Adenauer’s phrase), set the tone. The “ghosts of Berlin” will see to that.
But even if these spirits were not dutifully hovering over the old Reichshauptstadt, waving their sheets like caution flags, the new capital is not the sort of place to inspire illusions of grandeur. Germany might be a powerful nation, but Berlin is not the political and economic center of gravity it once was. The decentralization of power and influence that began with the German division will be altered somewhat by the move to Berlin, but not as much as opponents to the shift have suggested. With six ministries and fully two-thirds of the central government’s 25,000 bureaucrats staying in Bonn, the Rhineland city will remain a significant player in German politics. Frankfurt, home of the new European Central Bank, will continue to be Germany’s (and the Continent’s) financial center, Hamburg will still be a major force in publishing, Stuttgart will remain the capital of cars, and Munich, despite much hand-wringing about “Der Sieg der Saupreussen,” will remain an important cultural center and power broker in national politics.
Moreover, the beginning of the governmental move to Berlin in the late 1990s did not manage to pull the city out of the economic doldrums that had set in after the reunification boomlet. In 1998 Berlin’s economy actually declined by 0.3 percent, registering the worst performance of any German region. Bankruptcies were about double the national rate. Industrial production continued to fall, while the unemployment rate climbed to 18 percent, almost eight points higher than the national average. Some 275,000 Berliners were receiving public assistance. Of the top hundred companies listed on the Dax, the Frankfurt-based stock exchange, not one decided to shift its headquarters to Berlin. The only Dax-30 company to have its main office in the capital was Schering, which had been in Berlin since its foundation. Berlin was rebuilding the old Lehrter Bahnhof to become Europe’s largest train station, but the city was anything but a hub of air transportation. By 1998 the number of intercontinental flights to Berlin had declined from fifteen to three: Ulan Bator, Singapore, and Havana. Lufthansa had reduced its flights to the city, and the big American airlines had stopped flying there altogether. To help the city adjust to its new responsibilities, the European Union promised DM 2 billion in aid for the period from 2000 to 2006, but as a condition for the aid it demanded that Berlin finally put its economic house in order and offer a plan for sustained renewal. Lamentably, the town’s political establishment showed no signs of being able to come up with such a plan, nor did it work to stimulate initiative in the private sector by stripping away the outdated business regulations that had stifled initiative for years. “Leere Kassen, leere Köpfe (empty treasury, empty heads)” is the harsh phrase that one local expert employed to sum up Berlin’s political-economic situation in late 1999.
United Berlin’s cultural scene—as often in the past—provided something of an exception to this empty-headed theme: once again a wealth of cultural offerings constituted the city’s strongest suit. Reunification allowed the old/new capital to consolidate, rationalize, refocus, and renovate its cultural institutions, which had previously been split between East and West. In this domain, at least, few would deny that the new Berlin was a genuine Weltstadt.
For Berlin’s vaunted art museums, reunification meant reuniting collections that had been dispersed during the war and then arbitrarily divided by politics. No longer was it necessary, as it had been during the Cold War, to make complicated exchanges—cultural equivalents of the famous spy swaps—to reassemble key collections or to return well-known treasures to their original locations. Shortly after the Wende parts of the Pergamum Altar that had been stored in West Berlin were reinstalled on the altar’s frieze in the Pergamum Museum on Museum Island. The 3,350-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti, which had also been held hostage in West Berlin, was reunited with the bust of her husband, King Akhnaton, in the Bode Museum. A collection of French impressionist paintings that Westerners had feared was lost, but which in actuality had been hidden away in East Berlin, rejoined the city’s other impressionists in the National Gallery. Adolf Menzel’s dispersed oeuvre was likewise brought together again in the same institution. Meanwhile, the severely dilapidated buildings on Museum Island, which now fell under the control of the well endowed Stiftung preussischer Kulturbesitz, could be refurbished and equipped with the technical devices necessary to preserve and protect their precious holdings.
The former Museum for German History on Unter den Linden required another form of renovation: as the GDR’s principal historical museum, it had combined traditional displays of armor, costumes, and documents with tendentious exhibits celebrating the Socialist Fatherland, including its infamous “Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier.” The structure in which the museum was housed, the old Prussian Zeughaus (Armory), was itself of historical importance, having been built by King Friedrich I of Prussia to hold his kingdom’s arms and war booty. Accordingly, it was covered in triumphant war deities and other bellicose motifs. Fortunately, the East Germans did not “demilitarize” the building when they appropriated it for their own use. Their claimed stewardship over German history was of course a source of irritation in the West. To trump the Communists in this domain, Helmut Kohl ordained in the mid-1980s that West Berlin must have a museum of its own focusing on the history of Germany up to 1945 (a museum devoted exclusively to the history of the Federal Republic was built in Bonn). The fall of the Wall, however, brought a change of plans: now Kohl’s government decided to take over and revamp the East Germans’ museum on Unter den Linden rather than to build a brand new structure in the capital. Without consulting with officials in Berlin, Kohl commissioned the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei to renovate the Zeughaus and to design an annex for traveling exhibits. The chancellor clearly hoped that Pei would do for Berlin’s musty old historical museum what he had done for the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. What “worked” in Paris and Washington, however, does not seem to have worked so well in Berlin. The new facility has not yet opened, but already it is possible to see that Pei’s brand of bland modernism does not harmonize with the classical-martial style of the original building.