Berlin полностью

The primary surviving structure on Pariser Platz, the Brandenburg Gate, had of course become the symbol of Berlin by the twentieth century. The Communists had restored it in the 1950s as a “gate of peace,” piously eliminating the Prussian eagle and iron cross from the reconstituted quadriga on the top. During the years of division, when the monument was closed off by the Wall, it took on new symbolic meaning as the gate that wasn’t. In addition to being Berlin’s most prominent symbol, it became an icon of the Cold War. In the heady days of November 1989, it symbolized the end of Germany’s, and Europe’s, division. In 1991, reunited Berlin decided to replace the politically corrected 1958 quadriga with a remake of the version that had stood atop the gate between 1814 and 1945 (which itself was a revision of the original sculpture that Napoleon had stolen in 1806). But if one wanted to return the gate to its former glory and function as the portal of an enclosed square, it would also be necessary to reconstruct some or all of the buildings that had once surrounded it, beginning with the two August Stüler–designed palaces that had flanked it from 1844 until their destruction in the war. The contract for this project went to the Berlin architect Paul Josef Kleihues, who, true to the doctrine of “critical reconstruction,” hued closely to the scale and volume of the Stüler buildings, while omitting most of their ornamental details. Kleihues also eliminated a series of arched windows that had harmonized with the facades of the two small wing-buildings attached to the gate. Unfortunately, these changes broke up the continuity of the original ensemble. Worse, the stark new “palaces,” which looked more like fortresses, threatened to overpower the central edifice. In 1939 Albert Speer had planned to reduce the Brandenburg Gate to a traffic island by tearing down the small wing-buildings. Kleihues had no intention of diminishing the power of Berlin’s most famous structure, but this, in effect, is exactly what his additions managed to accomplish.

Pariser Platz’s other surviving, or partly surviving, structure, the Prussian Academy of Arts, had, like the Brandenburg Gate, traversed a complicated odyssey that mirrored the political vagaries of modern Berlin. Having moved into the neoclassical Palais Armin-Boitzenburg on the southeastern corner of the square in 1907, the Academy quickly became caught up in the culture wars of imperial Germany: artworks approved by the kaiser hung here, but so did works by Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth. Heinrich Mann was elected president of the Academy in 1931—and dismissed from that position two years later by the Nazis. In 1937 Albert Speer expelled the Academy from the building and moved in his “General Directorship for the Reconstruction of the Reich Capital.” It was here that Hitler’s favorite toy, a thirty-meter-long model of “Germania,” was installed. The model and the original part of the Academy building fell victim to Allied bombs during World War II; only an annex and connecting wing survived intact. With the creation of the GDR, artists belonging to the East German Academy of Arts took over the structure. Here the sculptor Fritz Cremer prepared his sketches for the heroic-Communist monument at Buchenwald. When the Wall went up, East German border guards commandeered the connecting wing, consigning the artists to the annex. The collapse of the GDR and unification of Germany brought a decision to rebuild this history-rich institution around its surviving structures. But should all dimensions of its history be acknowledged, or just the “worthy” parts? The architect Günter Behnisch, who won the contract, designed a glass-fronted building exuding “transparency” and “openness,” but openness only to those aspects of the Academy’s history that were “consistent” with its original function as a house of the muses. This did not include Albert Speer and the East German guards.

One of the buildings that had flanked Pariser Platz on its southern side was the famed Hotel Adlon, Berlin’s grandest hostelry from its opening in 1907 to its sad end just after World War II, when drunken Red Army soldiers set fire to the parts of the structure that had survived Allied bombs. (The then proprietor, Louis Adlon, son of the founder, was deported to Russia and executed, apparently because the Soviets confused his title, “General-Director,” with a military rank.) After the ruins were carted away, few Berliners imagined that they would ever see another version of this grand edifice, but in 1995 the corner stone was laid for a new hotel of the same name on exactly the same place. This time, however, the builders were different: the Kempinski chain and a group of international investors. There was considerable irony here, for at the turn of the century old Kempinski, fearing competition with his own hotel, had tried his best to prevent the Adlon from being built.