Once he began working in earnest on the renovation, however, Foster discovered that having a parliamentary committee as his boss meant having to entertain a dozen different concepts regarding the work at hand. Like Wallot, the original builder, he had to change his design repeatedly and accept countless compromises. His original design called for the existing structure to be surrounded by an outer framework of steel columns supporting a flat glass canopy. Foster explained that this accommodated “the need for a new symbol, a symbol that corresponds to our age, a new image of an open future.” But some members of the Bundestag Building Commission objected that this design would make Germany’s parliamentary headquarters look like a gas station or an airplane hangar. Forced to drop the canopy, Foster proposed a glass cylinder instead, which he said would suggest a “lighthouse of democracy.” The SPD people liked this idea, but the CDU delegates on the commission insisted on a glass dome, which the original building had possessed. Originally, the conservatives wanted an exact replica of Wallot’s dome, while the FDP favored a modern rounded dome, and the Greens stood for no dome at all. Eventually the GDU conceded that a remake of Wallot’s dome would be too expensive and accepted a more modern version. Foster reluctantly complied and designed an inverted glass cup that suggested, according to different observers’ imaginations, a half-egg, a space station, a greenhouse, a pimple ripe for popping, or Kohl’s bald pate. Foster got his revenge by making the dome such a high-tech tour de force that it ended up costing much more than a Wallot-replica would have done. On the other hand, with its platform from which visitors could look down on the plenary hall below, the dome proved to be an effective symbol of political transparency. One could only hope that many Germans would visit their new house of democracy, since the overall price tag—DM 600 million, or $331 million—made it the most expensive public building in Berlin.
In order to reconfigure the Reichstag’s interior for its new occupants, Foster gutted the place, completely doing away with the renovations introduced in the 1960s. In laying bare the original walls workers uncovered yet another “ghost” of Berlin’s recent past: lots of graffiti left behind by the Russian soldiers who had occupied the building in 1945. “Glory to the Stalinist Falcons, Who Participated in the Storm on Berlin!” read one comment. “Death to the Germans!” read another. These were not the kind of decorations that most politicians would want in their parliament, and some conservatives urged that they be expunged. Foster, however, insisted that they be preserved, and in the end they were. As they go about their business, the parliamentary deputies will be confronted by constant reminders of the grim fate of the last German government to have ruled from Berlin.
The new Reichstag’s interior contains positive historical symbols as well. Over Foster’s objections, the deputies’ seats were covered in the same bright periwinkle fabric used in Bonn, on the grounds that “German democracy was born on those seats.” On the wall behind the speaker’s rostrum hangs a large plastic representation of the German eagle, a replica of the rather corpulent one that had watched over the old Bundestag in Bonn. Foster had proposed a more athletic animal, one that looked as if it might actually be able to fly, but the parliamentarians insisted on retaining their “fat hen.” No one should get the idea that the Berlin Republic was about to attack its neighbors.
Because the remodeled Reichstag was far too small to house the parliamentary offices and library, two new office blocks and a library were built in the immediate vicinity of the historic structure. The new buildings are connected to the old one by underground tunnels so that the delegates can go from one building to the other without ever having to face the elements, or, for that matter, the public. In the Berlin Republic, it seems, accessibility has its limits. The tunnels, along with a quick getaway route to the nearby Lehrter Bahnhof, will allow those delegates who have no use for Berlin to see as little as possible of their new home. With luck, they won’t even have to know they’re there.
Although still known popularly as the Reichstag, this is not the building’s official designation. Fearing that this term suggested unseemly ambitions, a Bundestag committee came up with a new name: Deutscher Bundestag—Plenarbereich Reichstagsgebäude (German Federal Assembly—Plenary Area, Imperial Diet Building). No one, of course, will actually use this jawbreaker, but, like the “fat hen,” it tells the world that the Berlin Republic’s heart is in the right place.
