Such reminders were perhaps well in order on the day the Bundestag took possession of its new Berlin home, April 19, 1999. For the first time since World War II, German military forces were engaged in active combat, fighting alongside their NATO allies in the Balkans. At such a juncture, German leaders worried about the symbolism of moving back to a building closely associated with the outbreak of World War I. In his speech at the opening ceremony, Chancellor Schröder did not refer specifically to NATO’s war against Serbia, but he was careful to disassociate the new Germany from the German government that had gone to war in 1914. United Germany’s parliament might be meeting in the “Reichstag,” he noted, but to equate this name with “Reich” would be “as senseless as equating Berlin with Prussian glory and German centralism.” He added that it was the success of the “Bonn democracy” that had made “the Berlin Republic possible.” Not all the parliamentary delegates, however, were as sanguine as the chancellor about what it might mean simultaneously to launch a new era in Berlin while pursuing a new war in Europe. Ludger Volmer, a Green Party member and Germany’s deputy foreign minister, declared: “We are initiating our Berlin Republic in the midst of a European war, and I am one of the people responsible for a policy that leaves me no reason to be optimistic or happy.”
The Reichstag is situated in the southeastern corner of the so-called Spreebogen (Spree Arc), a 150-acre plot created by a broad bend in the Spree River. Albert Speer had cleared this area to build the centerpiece of Hitler’s envisaged “Germania”—a gargantuan Hall of the People that would hold 180,000 people and boast a dome sixteen times the size of Saint Peter’s in Rome. From that building, a projected grand avenue—the “North-South Axis”—would slice across the city, intersecting with the “East-West Axis” near the Brandenburg Gate. Fortunately, the Hall of the People was never built—only part of the foundation was laid—and the Spreebogen remained a debris-strewn wasteland. Nothing was done with the area during the period of Berlin’s division because it was earmarked as the site for a new administrative quarter once the German government returned to the Spree. As it turned out, of course, the returning government ended up taking over many of the old governmental buildings in Berlin-Mitte, leaving the Spreebogen reserved for the new complex that would house the Federal Chancellery and the necessary additional quarters for the Bundestag. (Originally, the Bundesrat was also scheduled to find a new home in the Spreebogen, but it did not decide to move to Berlin until 1996, and it therefore had to settle for the old Prussian Herrenhaus.) Because the Spreebogen complex involved the Berlin Republic’s most important new construction, federal officials were determined to get its political symbolism right.
In 1992 Bonn launched an “International Urban Design Idea Competition for the Spreebogen.” The term “international” was certainly apposite. A twenty-three-member jury made up of architects from seven countries, as well as of politicians from Bonn and Berlin, reviewed 835 submissions from forty-four nations. The entries, all submitted anonymously, came from as far afield as South Africa and Israel. As in the Pots-damer Platz reconstruction, the foreign competitors were excited at the prospect of doing something truly daring in the new Berlin. Entries from abroad featured futuristic skyscrapers, complexes of bunkers (not a good idea), and arrangements of oddly shaped megaliths. Many of the foreign architects, and a few of the German ones, had no inhibitions about projecting an aura of political power through their designs.
