A different set of ghosts haunts the house that became united Germany’s Economics Ministry. Originally hoping to move into the Prussian Herrenhaus (which instead was given to the Bundesrat), this ministry was shunted to a large structure on the Invalidenstrasse just to the east of where the Wall had run. Built in “Frederican-Baroque” style in 1903–5, this building served as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Akademie für die Ausbildung von Militararzten (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for the Training of Military Physicians) before World War I. The poet Gottfried Benn received his training there. The Nazis had used the building as a courthouse, which was also its function during the early years of the GDR, when it was home to “Red Hilda” Benjamin, a relative of Walter Benjamin and East Germany’s most zealous political prosecutor. At the height of her influence in the late 1950s, the West German press likened her to the Nazi hanging judge Roland Freisler. In the late 1960s the building was transformed into a government hospital that catered mainly to foreign diplomats, who were cared for by specially selected nurses; work crews remodeling the building in the 1990s discovered an entire room full of condoms.
As noted above, the Ministry of Defense’s main office remains in Bonn, with a secondary office transferred to Berlin. The ministry’s home on the Spree is the storied “Bendlerblock” on the Landwehr Canal. Having been constructed in 1911–14 for the Reichsmarineamt, this stately gray building housed Admiral von Tirpitz, orchestrator of imperial Germany’s fateful naval race with Great Britain. After World War I it became the Reichswehr Ministry. Here, on February 3, 1933, Germany’s top generals received Hitler and learned of his plans to expand Germany’s “Lebensraum” (living space) to the east. The early campaigns of World War II were directed from this complex when it served as the headquarters of the Wehrmacht High Command. Also housed here were the offices of many of the military resisters against Hitler, including Count von Stauffenberg, who was executed in the Bendlerblock courtyard following the coup’s failure. With the exception of a memorial to the resisters and a small museum (about which more below), extensive renovations to the complex obliterated all traces of the past.
Because the challenges of living with the ghosts of Berlin were made necessary by the Bundestag’s decision to shift Germany’s seat of government to the Spree, it is perhaps fitting that this body inherited the former capital’s epitome of symbolically difficult buildings: the Reichstag. In actuality, some of that difficulty is undeserved, since neither the kaiser nor Hitler had had much to do with the place. Nonetheless, this war-scarred fossil was so laden with conflicting, mainly depressing, historical associations that many parliamentarians did not want to have anything to do with it. For them the site bore the uneradicable stink of grand pretensions and tragic failure. The building’s very name was a problem, since “Reichstag” translates as “Imperial Diet.” “We are not a German Reich but a Federation,” protested Renate Schmidt (SPD), “and we want to underscore that federalism.” In addition to its heavy symbolic baggage, the old building had the disadvantage of being architecturally inadequate for the demands of united Germany’s parliament. The postwar renovations, such as they were, had not brought the structure up-to-date in terms of creature comforts and technical requirements. Günther Behnisch, the architect who had designed Germany’s brand new and then promptly abandoned parliament building in Bonn, likened the Bundestag’s decision to take over the Reichstag to the federal president’s donning the kaiser’s moth-eaten uniform in the 1990s. If it was to be put back into service as united Germany’s parliament, the building would have to be extensively renovated and supplemented with additional structures.
