While symbolically impressive, restoration of public buildings like Bellevue and the Charlottenburger Schloss was only a tiny part of the huge reconstruction effort that engulfed West Berlin in the 1950s. To clear space for new housing units and commercial districts, the rubble that still clogged much of the city was scooped up and dumped in an enormous pile on the grounds of a former Wehrmacht school in the Grunewald. The mound, which Berliners dubbed the Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain), eventually grew to a height of 120 meters, high enough for the Americans to place a radar station on its summit. Buried within this artificial Alp were the remains of many partly damaged buildings that had recently fallen victim to the wrecking ball. Some of these, like the still-functioning Anhalter Bahnhof, were of great historical significance. Architectural preservation had never been Berlin’s strong suit, but the postwar disregard for treasures of the past was cultural barbarism with a vengeance.
In West Berlin, as in the East, reconstruction was meant to symbolize, even facilitate, political transformation. The West wanted an architectural look that conveyed the Federal Republic’s commitment to internationalism, egalitarianism, individualism, and freedom. Unfortunately, the image thought to be most expressive of these values was the bland “internationalist” style that was sweeping across Western Europe and America in the postwar era. The construction materials used in the new buildings also had to be politically correct: in place of stone and brick, one had to use glass and steel. Thus much of West Berlin was covered over in glass boxes touted as “democratic.” The Spree metropolis had never been beautiful, but its postwar rebuilders managed, in their pursuit of a progressive new face, to make it even uglier than before.
The new approach to urban housing design was evident in the Hansaviertel, the residential district on the northwestern edge of the Tiergarten that had been built up in the Bismarckian era, only to be knocked flat by Allied bombs during the war. In 1953 the West Berlin Senate announced a competition for the construction of a new housing development in the area that would represent the democratic values of the Federal Republic. Commissions were awarded to a galaxy of international architects, including Le Corbusier, Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, and Scharoun. The results of their work were unveiled with great fanfare at an international exhibition, the Interbau, in 1957. In conscious contrast both to Berlin’s prewar residential housing and the new Stalinallee in the East, the Hansaviertel featured an assortment of modest structures dispersed in a parklike setting. Each building was unique. While the overall design made the project seem less fortresslike than the eastern housing units, not to mention the old Mietskasernen, the individual buildings turned out to be surprisingly uninspired—just a collection of concrete and glass blocks of varying sizes. The Hansaviertel was nonetheless hailed as an architectural showcase and as a model for future residential building. It might indeed have become so had not its low residential density made it economically impractical once land prices started to go up. Only its blandness carried over into vast new housing beehives like the Otto Suhr Settlement, the Gropiusstadt, and the Märkisches Viertel.
