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Another structure on the Schloßplatz that was reprieved from impending demolition was the GDR State Council Building. Completed by the Communists in 1964, this building, as noted above, contained in its facade the Royal Palace balcony from which Karl Liebknecht had proclaimed a socialist republic on November 9, 1918. Pending the completion in 2000 of a new Federal Chancellery in the Spreebogen (about which more below), the State Council Building, it was decided, could be pressed into service as the chancellor’s Berlin office. It is ironic, but entirely typical of Berlin, that this hybrid house, historically linked to the emperors, Liebknecht, and Honecker, should also have been the temporary home of Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder.

One part of former East Berlin that saw relatively little reconstruction in the decade after unification was the Alexanderplatz. True, the GDR-era signs atop the square’s buildings were gone, the S-Bahn station was renovated, and the old Centrum department store was given a modest facelift by its new owner, the Kaufhof chain, but otherwise the area looked much as it had before the Wende. By day its shops catered largely to Ossis, by night it was overrun by bums and very aggressive rats. Nevertheless, Berlin’s new rulers had hopes and plans for this place too, which after all was one of the most famous in the city. “The Alexanderplatz was once the heart, the pulsating heart, of this city,” said Volker Hassemer, the senator for urban development. “A mystique surrounds this place, despite all that has been done to it.” The unfortunate changes that had been imposed on the square by the Communists, however, were so thoroughgoing that it would take a great deal of time, effort, and money to undo them. Unlike Potsdamer Platz, the “Alex” was not an empty lot; it was encircled by buildings that were still in use, and at its center stood Berlin’s tallest structure, the Television Tower. Hassemer envisaged a reconstructed square where Berliners “could again feel comfortable.” But which Berliners? The senator was all too aware of the problem: “We want to send a message that says we hope to turn a square in the east into the central-point of the city. But in the east this is interpreted as ‘Oh, so now they also want to steal our Alex, too.’” In 1999, ten years after the fall of the Wall, a sad sign hung in the Platz saying, “Wir waren das Volk (We were the people).”

As a first step toward an eventual reconstruction of the Alexanderplatz, a design competition was launched in April 1993. It was won by the Berlin architect Hans Kollhoff, who presented a plan that was anything but modest or backward-looking. His scheme, as originally formulated, called for a cluster of thirteen skyscrapers, the tallest of them 150 meters high. His model was Rockefeller Center, which he characterized as the “big-city architecture of the century.” It may seem odd that this design, which flew in the face of the city’s building regulations, could have been taken seriously by the judges, let alone have won first prize. The judges and municipal authorities, however, were prepared to take greater risks with the Alex because, as Stimmann himself admitted, “there was nothing left to reconstruct”; skyscrapers, in fact, would have the advantage of overwhelming, and thereby devaluing, the hated Television Tower. Moreover, according to Hassemer, a radically new square might reinforce Berlin’s claim to belong among the great cities of the new millennium. Yet one had to ask, as did the GDR-trained architect Bruno Flierl, whether attempting to replicate Manhattan in Berlin would help endow the German city with an architectural identity of its own.

In any event, such dreams would have to wait. Kollhoff’s plan called for the tearing down of much of the existing housing around the Alex, and when this became known, the Ossis protested en masse. Backpedaling, the Berlin Senate ordered that the demolition program be reduced and the number of skyscrapers be cut to four. Continuing arguments about the plan led to repeated postponements of actual construction. If a new Alexanderplatz actually materializes in the coming years, and if Kollhoff’s design lies at its core, at least one part of the new Berlin may indeed end up looking like Frankfurt—or, for that matter, like New York, Hong Kong, or Tokyo.

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