At the other end of Friedrichstrasse, near the intersection with Kochstrasse, stood the famous Checkpoint Charlie, which in the days of division had served as the principal crossing-point for foreigners between West Berlin and East Berlin. After the Wall came down the area around the dismantled checkpoint became the focal point of another major commercial redevelopment project in Berlin-Mitte, the so-called “American Business Center.” In 1992 two Americans, the cosmetics baron Ronald Lauder, and Mark Palmer, formerly Washington’s ambassador to Hungary, formed a partnership with a German real estate magnate, Abraham Rosenthal, to develop a large office complex on the site. “Once again, Americans and Germans extend their hands to build together,” was the project’s motto. These developers, too, hired star architects, most notably Philip Johnson, the grand old man of modern architecture. Johnson put up a giant billboard picture of himself on the property. (Later, in a reference to the famous kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, some Berlin anarchists stole the billboard and cut off Johnson’s ear, which they sent to the developers with a note demanding a ransom for the return of the rest of the picture.) As construction progressed, the bottom dropped out of Berlin’s commercial real estate market, prompting Lauder and Palmer to pull out. When the complex opened in 1997, only half its space could be rented. The name was quietly changed from American Business Center to International Business Center, but it probably should have been called the Rosenthal Center, since the German was left holding the bag. “As early as 1993 it was clear that Berlin was not going to become the jumping-off place for American business in Eastern Europe, as I had originally thought,” admitted Rosenthal later. “I miscalculated.”
Although economic vagaries, not faults in design, caused the Business Center’s problems, the project was sharply criticized on aesthetic grounds as well. Johnson himself admitted that his building was a failure. He blamed this on Berlin’s regulations, stating that no other city would have forced him to produce such a boring and mediocre design. Palmer, too, was disappointed that the complex lacked stylistic assertiveness, and he likewise faulted the regulations imposed on the project, “the small-town mentality of Stimmannism.” Extrapolating from his experience at Checkpoint Charlie, Palmer drew unpromising conclusions for Berlin as a whole: “Berlin could be the most important center in the world,” he said in 1995, “but after being beaten down by the events of the past half-century, the Germans have become used to being self-effacing, not bold.”
Back in the days when the Germans had not yet lost their taste for grand gestures, they had laid out the parts of central Berlin that would serve as their primary political stage in the modern era: the Pariser Platz, Schloßplatz, and the connecting avenue, Unter den Linden. Like the rest of Berlin-Mitte, these places had been heavily bombed in World War II, and then had suffered under Communist redevelopment schemes from the 1950s through the 1970s. With the fall of the Wall and the decision to transfer the capital to Berlin, something clearly had to be done with this crucial corridor. Given its historical and symbolic significance, there was strong sentiment in favor of a traditionalist reconstruction. But what exactly did “traditionalist” mean in a place like Berlin? And how should one proceed in those cases where the ghosts of the past threatened to overwhelm the good intentions of the present?
Pariser Platz, named in honor of Prussia’s participation in the Allied victory over Napoleon in 1814, was often referred to as the “kaiser’s reception room” after 1871. With the second unification it was due to become, in the words of Berlin’s building senator Wolfgang Nagel, “the salon of the republic.” But in the early 1990s this was a room with virtually no furniture. With the exception of the Brandenburg Gate and a section of the Prussian Academy of Arts, all its grand buildings were gone. Like so many vacant spaces in central Berlin, it now served as an ad hoc flea market, with Ossis peddling pieces of the Wall and other relics of the GDR. The Senate proposed that the square be rebuilt in a style “appropriate to the age.” One critic derided this instruction as “a balloon without any air in it,” but, as it turned out, the balloon was filled with some pretty heavy historical ballast.
