As far as Berlin was concerned, the most important historical revision involved Prussia, the political entity through which the old royal capital had risen to prominence. Prussia had been abolished as a state in 1947 by the Allies, but it lived on as an idea, a complex of images, principles, and traditions. On the grounds that Prussia had been the core of German autocracy and militarism, Ulbricht’s government had literally blown away some of the most prominent architectural symbols of Berlin’s Prussian past. Honecker, on the other hand, hoped to harness the residual power in the Prussian idea by transforming it—after careful sanitation—into a worthy ancestor of the GDR state. Historians were ordered to emphasize the forward-looking side of Prussia’s legacy, its contributions to industrial progress and urbanization, its pioneering advances in social legislation. Prussia’s most famous king, Frederick the Great, who had been condemned in Ulbricht’s era as an archmilitarist, found his way into revised East German history books as an incorruptible servant of the state, champion of tolerance, patron of the arts, and promoter of social and economic progress. As a symbol of Frederick’s rehabilitation, the regime returned his bronze equestrian statue from Potsdam, whence it had been banished by Ulbricht, to its former place of prominence on Unter den Linden. Funds were also set aside for the restoration of his grand palace in Potsdam, Sanssouci.
Frederick’s return to Unter den Linden was a small part of an ambitious restoration program focused on the historic core of old Berlin, which some thirty years after the war was still dotted with the burned-out skeletons of great buildings and monuments. In an effort to reinvest the Linden with a measure of its former grandeur, the regime restored the Royal Library and rebuilt the Royal Arsenal as a museum of German history. Tellingly, the museum’s exhibits emphasized the historical ties between eastern Germany and Prussia, while studiously ignoring events in the West, including West Berlin. The Gendarmenmarkt (renamed Platz der Akademie), also underwent extensive renovation after standing in ruins since the war. In addition to rebuilding the square’s two churches, builders painstakingly restored Schinkel’s elegant Schauspielhaus, perhaps the most beautiful building in Berlin. Converted into an orchestra hall, the Schaupielhaus was meant to compete with West Berlin’s Neue Philharmonie as a center of musical life. At the gala opening ceremony in 1984, one of the architects expressed pride “over a work that finally brought [the GDR capital] recognition from the international musical world.”
The restoration program took on particular urgency because of the upcoming 750th anniversary of Berlin’s foundation, which, as mentioned above, East Berlin decided to commemorate independently of West Berlin. A brochure published by the tourist office of the GDR stated: “In 1987, Berlin—the capital of the German Democratic Republic—celebrates the 750th anniversary of the first documentation of the city with a year-long salute to its history and culture.” Capitalizing on the fact that East Berlin had the lion’s share of the old capital’s historic buildings, Honecker’s men hoped through their restoration efforts to show that their state, not the Federal Republic and West Berlin, harbored the most noble German traditions.
In 1972 a plan was put forth to restore East Berlin’s largest surviving ruin, the hulking Berliner Dom. Ulbricht had intended to tear the structure down in the early 1950s, but with so many jobs on his demolition list he never got around to it. Honecker, by contrast, saw the Dom’s restoration as a chance both to display reverence for Berlin’s Prussian past and to improve relations with the Evangelical Church. The project was enormously expensive, however, and it might not have gotten off the ground had not West Germany’s Protestant community agreed to pay most of the costs. By 1983 the church loomed once again in all its bombastic pomposity over the Lustgarten. Renovation of the interior was still going on when the GDR itself passed into history.
