Building a major new hotel in mid-1990s Berlin was a great risk—Kempinski’s director admitted that Berlin needed another big hotel “like a hole in the head”—so it was imperative to make this project stand out from the competition. The developers chose to do this by giving the hotel the look of its grand predecessor, while incorporating all the latest technical innovations, such as bulletproof windows and “steel-plated rooms for the celebrities.” The architect, Rüdiger Patzschke, came up with a “tradition-oriented” design that so reeked of “period authenticity” that even Stimmann found it stifling. To critics who accused him of wallowing in the past, Patzschke replied: “We find the claim that contemporary architecture is the nonplus-ultra of design to be a narrow-minded misjudgment on the part of the representatives of the modern.”
The new Hotel Adlon opened in June 1997, fifty-two years after its predecessor’s destruction. The central foyer contains a fountain that had once graced the old building. The piano music featured in the main salon consists largely of teatime tunes from the 1920s. In another bow to the past, the Adlon boasts suites for visiting heads of state (along with adjoining space for their bodyguards) and a small balcony from which dignitaries can acknowledge the crowds below. The hotel’s literature does not point out that it was from just such a balcony in the old Adlon that Nazi dignitaries watched the SA parade through the Brandenburg Gate on January 30, 1933.
The Hotel Adlon had stood next to the British embassy from 1907 to 1945. Such will be the case again in the new millennium, since the British are scheduled to open a new embassy on the same site in the year 2000. Berlin’s government welcomed London’s decision to build on this historic place as another crucial step in the Pariser Platz’s phoenixlike rejuvenation. Like their neighbor, the Adlon, the British elected to employ a traditionalist and “restrained” design for their embassy.
France, whose stately embassy had graced the northern side of Pariser Platz, also made a commitment to return to its old site. However, when it came to the design of its new building, the French Foreign Ministry was not nearly so respectful of local standards as its British counterpart. The French had always been somewhat condescending toward Berlin, which tried so hard to be like Paris. Now, upon returning to the square named after their own capital, they were determined to remind the Germans that, though France might no longer be the Continent’s leading power, it still set the tone in the realm of grand public construction. Their architect, Christian de Portzamparc, planned a striking structure featuring two-story-high windows in the facade. Upon unveiling this plan, Foreign Minister Hervé de Charette was careful to distinguish the French project from Kleihues’s palaces and Patzschke’s Adlon: “The buildings [on the square] are all stiff and tasteless,” he said. “Our project will bring some French flair.”
The United States, the other great Western power to have occupied a niche on Pariser Platz, was expected to join its allies in returning to its former location. Washington, after all, had been Berlin’s most stalwart backer since the days of the airlift, and rebuilding on Pariser Platz would constitute an important gesture of support for the city. Yet America’s return to the historic square was not a foregone conclusion. Washington worried that there might be too many restrictions, and too little space, at its old site. America’s then ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke, declared ominously in 1996: “It is our hope that we will be able to build at Pariser Platz, but we haven’t made a final decision yet because we don’t have the final German specifications. If the Germans can accommodate us, we’ll end up there. But we are looking at alternative sites, and if we are faced with deal-breaking specifications, we’ll go another way.”
Holbrooke’s comments alarmed and horrified the Berliners. Rüdiger Patzschke, the Adlon architect, fumed: “Nowhere else can you achieve what you can achieve at Pariser Platz. Plenty of countries would love to have their embassies there. It just wouldn’t make sense for the Americans to go anywhere else. If they find the site too small or the rules too restrictive, they could put just their reception rooms and a few offices there. But to abandon the site altogether would not make sense.”
