United Germany’s Finance Ministry inherited an Altbau with an even more tainted pedigree than the Reichsbank: the former Nazi Aviation Ministry, which had mutated into the headquarters of the Soviet Military Administration for Germany (1945–49), then the House of Ministries of the GDR, and finally, after East Germany’s collapse, the Treuhand Anstalt. The various agencies that this building housed over the years shared commitments to power and control—impulses reflected in the complex itself, which commands the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Leipziger Strasse like a fortress. “All who approached here felt reduced in stature, whether they be ministerial officials or simple visitors,” wrote Günter Grass in his historical novel of Berlin, Ein Weites Feld (Too Far Afield). The quarters from which Göring ran the Nazi air campaign, Russian generals ruled their occupation zone, GDR ministers ran their country into the ground, and the Treuhand bureaucrats sold off what remained, was modified repeatedly over the years without altering the sinister aspect. The Soviets removed the Nazi ornamentation and remodeled the main reception hall in Stalinist-baroque. The SED commissioned a mural to commemorate the building’s status as the birthplace of the GDR. In 1992 the building was renamed “Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus” in honor of the Treuhand’s first Western director, who was murdered by a terrorist.
Four years later work began on transforming the building into the Finance Ministry. As the construction crews tore out wall sections and ceiling panels, they came across yellowed copies of the SS magazine, Das Schwarze Korps, and the GDR union periodical, Tribüne. They also found a small bronze chest containing a document commemorating the completion of the building’s structural frame “in the third year of freedom under the generous leadership of the Führer and Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler.” Despite extensive renovations, some interior details from the original building were carried over into the new structure. These include the number-plaques for the row upon row of office doors and the aluminum banisters that Göring had personally designed as an homage to his beloved aircraft. Understandably, however, the new occupants preferred to highlight another aspect of the building’s history: the presence there for a short time of the anti-Nazi resistance group, the Red Orchestra. During the renovation an exhibition on this group was installed in the lobby. In the interests of historical preservation, the occupants decided to retain the GDR-era mural glorifying the socialist state—which, however, they counterbalanced with a monument to the workers who had died in the uprising of 1953. Commenting in 1995 on the challenge that the designers faced in confronting this building’s tangled past, Wolfgang Keilholz, the architect in charge of the renovation, said that he and his employers were obliged “to respect the fact that guilt emanated from this building. The user who will now occupy this building must know that. And by occupying such a building one takes on an obligation, one that is greater than if one were just to tear down the building.”
United Germany’s Ministry of Labor also took on such an obligation, for this agency moved into what had once been Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Unlike Göring, the Nazi propaganda minister had not commissioned a totally new building; rather, in 1933 his ministry had occupied the former Ordenspalais and two smaller buildings on the Wilhelmplatz. The main building had been built in 1737 and extensively remodeled by Schinkel one hundred years later. Finding it “out of date and obsolete,” Goebbels ordered it redone in the “ocean-liner-style” he thought projected power and modernity. In 1937–38 the complex was expanded to include the former colonial ministry, while new wings extended Goebbels’s empire to the Mauerstrasse one block east. The historic core of the complex was wrecked in the war, but some of the Nazi-era additions survived to become the GDR’s Press Office and Ministry for Media Policy. Norbert Blum (GDU), who was labor minister at the time his agency was consigned to this building, was horrified by the choice. He signaled his displeasure by refusing to visit the structure as it was undergoing the necessary renovations.
