To help prevent it from becoming so, city officials sought to give West Berlin a true “downtown,” with trademark buildings, monuments, and a distinctive urban flair. Considerable commercial reconstruction had already commenced in the area around Wittenbergplatz, Zoo Station, and the Kurfürstendamm, so the decision was made to turn this district into West Berlin’s Piccadilly Circus or Times Square. At its center stood the ruins of the Gedächtniskirche, slated for demolition since the mid-1950s, but now preserved as a permanent monument to the horrors of war. In addition to shoring up what remained of the building, architect Egon Eiermann echoed its jagged spire with a hexagonal tower honeycombed with dark glass. The idea here was to represent “the new rising from the old,” though Berliners spoke derisively of a broken tooth flanked by a lipstick tube. Admittedly, the ensemble might have been more effective as a monument had not the “renewal” of the area around it been so undistinguished. On the bombed-out site of the old Romanisches Café arose the Europa Center, which featured an eighty-six-meter-high office tower crowned by an enormous revolving Mercedes star. Just as the nearby KaDeWe department store had signaled the victory of mammon over spirit when the Memorial Church was built in the 1890s, so the Europa Center set the tone for the district in the 1960s and beyond.
Although the Europa Center became the anchor of a bustling shopping district, it was quite clear that the walled city could not reestablish itself as a true “world-metropolis” on the strength of this kind of development alone. Because there was little likelihood that the town would regain its former economic or political status any time soon, municipal officials sought to focus their energies on Berlin’s other pillar of erstwhile glory: its cultural prowess. Much of that culture would have to be imported and subsidized, since Germany’s best artists no longer automatically flocked to the Spree metropolis. Beginning in the 1960s, West Berlin spent more on its culture than did any other West German city, including Munich, West Germany’s “secret capital.” To shift the frame of reference: by the time the Wall came down, West Berlin was spending DM 620 million on culture, or $365 million, which was more than Washington spent on all cultural projects in the entire United States.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a substantial part of West Berlin’s cultural budget went into the construction of new buildings. The city needed new homes for its leading cultural institutions, and it wanted these facilities to make daring architectural statements. The project that embodied this ambition most aggressively was the Kulturforum (Cultural Forum), an array of high-profile buildings that started to take shape in the early 1960s. The construction site, a windswept expanse near the southeastern edge of the Tiergarten, had been littered with partially ruined buildings until the late 1950s, when most of the structures were razed. The erection of the Wall on the eastern periphery of the site added to the sense of desolation. Here the Bremen-based architect Hans Scharoun put up what was to become West Berlin’s most famous modern building, the Neue Philharmonic (New Philharmonic Hall). This flamboyant structure, with its upward-sweeping surfaces covered in gold sheeting, looked like a giant tent or beached boat. In accordance with Scharoun’s idea that artistic performance should be a “co-creative experience” uniting performers and their audience, the Philharmonic’s interior featured an orchestral stage surrounded by seating space on various levels. As Scharoun explained: “Here you will find no segregation of ‘producers’ and ‘consumers,’ but rather a community of listeners grouped around an orchestra in the most natural of all seating arrangements. . . . Here the creation and experience of music occur in a hall not motivated by formal aesthetics, but whose design was inspired by the very purpose it serves. Man, music, and space—here they meet in a new relationship.” A nearby companion building, also designed by Scharoun, housed the State Library. Mies van der Rohe, who had reluctantly left Berlin during the Nazi period, returned to design the New National Gallery as another component of the Cultural Forum. The design he used was originally intended for the headquarters of the Bacardi Rum Company in Santiago de Cuba. The Cuban revolution of 1958, however, put an end to this project and left the architect with some unused plans. Unlike Scharoun, Mies did not believe that purpose mandated design: what would work for rum would work for art. Thus, courtesy of Fidel Castro, West Berlin got a new metal and glass box to house parts of its widely dispersed nineteenth- and twentieth-century art collections.
