The figure who did the most to promote the idea of a palace reconstruction, Wilhelm von Boddien, came at his task with no such hesitation or regret. Interestingly, Boddien was not a local pillar of the community, not even a Berliner, but a Hamburg farm equipment magnate (“the John Deere of Germany”) who described himself as a history buff and “Prussia-fan.” Rather than simply talk up or write about a putative Schloß revival, he hit upon the idea of erecting a mock-up of the building’s facade in order to show the Berliners, and visitors to the city, what they had been missing all these years. In 1993, at his direction, a trompe l’oeil canvas curtain painted to replicate the old palace’s baroque facade went up next to the Palast der Republik, in whose gold-tinted windows the faux facade was gloriously reflected. The mock-up was itself a masterful piece of work, and it spoke much more eloquently for the Schloß than all the boosterish newspaper articles and speeches. As an additional promotional gambit, Boddien organized an exhibition on the Schloß that was housed in a temporary structure behind the facade. This exhibit allowed visitors to get a sense of how the palace had fit into the life of old Berlin, and how a reconstituted palace might serve the new Berlin. Boddien’s promotional material made clear that he and other friends of the palace did not envisage a complete reconstruction, replete with the old royal interior. This would have been pointless, not to mention prohibitively expensive. (Boddien and his backers promised to raise private financing for the project.) In place of the old palace’s warren of rooms, the new space might contain a hotel, library, ballrooms, and a conference center.
As comments in the exhibition guest book made clear, Boddien’s initiative generated a great deal of popular enthusiasm for a palace reconstruction. Of course, there was also plenty of hostile comment—arch comparisons of the mock-up to a Disneyesque piece of fakery, appropriate for a project that smacked of a royalist theme park. “The idea that the Germans should accept a building that was representative of the politics of royalist Prussia as a symbol of today’s Germany is richly presumptuous,” huffed one commentator. By the time the mock-up came down in 1994, however, polls suggested that the majority of Berliners favored rebuilding the old palace.
But of course Berlin was not rebuilt by polls. Even if Boddien and his friends could have raised all the money needed for their envisaged Schloß reconstruction (which was doubtful), the project still depended on the demolition of the Palast der Republik, and in 1995 the Berlin Senate reversed itself and decided to spare the GDR monstrosity, at least for the time being. The officials took this stance not only because of the protests against demolition, but because the city lacked the funds to tear down the Palast. This of course said a great deal about the realities of life in mid-1990s Berlin.
The fate of Berlin’s two palaces remained in limbo as the federal government prepared to move to the Spree at the end of the decade. The new chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, professed support for a reconstruction of the Hohenzollern Palace on the site of the Palast der Republik because, as he said, the royal building was “simply prettier” than its Communist replacement, and people “need something for the soul.” Michael Naumann, the new minister of culture, was also for a reconstruction, arguing that Berlin’s historic center sorely lacked an appropriate architectural emblem; the missing palace was like “a torn-out molar.” Neither Schröder nor Naumann, however, said anything about the public subsidies that would be necessary to supplement private funding for the project.
Left in limbo, too, was a proposal to erect a “Monument to German Unity” in the place where a huge equestrian statue of Wilhelm I had once stood, in front of the western facade of the Royal Palace. Wilhelm II had commissioned this statue in the 1890s as the “German National Monument,” but many Germans had seen it simply as a monument to Hohenzollern hubris. The problem with the new proposal was that no one had a clear idea of how to represent German unity in a monument. (This had also been the case in the Kaiserreich.) Moreover, citizens of the eastern states objected to a German-unity monument on the grounds that Germany wasn’t truly unified at all.
