Berlin полностью

They should have known better. The German officials overseeing the competition were, as ever, worried about the political impression these buildings would make. “What are we saying to the world here?” they asked. “That we want to try to conquer it again?” Although most of the politicians were prepared to tolerate more flair in Berlin than in Bonn, where the Chancellery resembled a provincial savings bank, they were determined that the Spreebogen complex should not be even remotely reminiscent of what Speer and Hitler had planned to do. Thus they wanted an overall design that was oriented east-west rather than north-south. They preferred to avoid the monumental neoclassicism typical of the public buildings in many democracies, since this style had also been favored by the Nazis. Instead of grandeur or majesty, they wanted buildings that projected modesty, openness, and accessibility. One of the foreign jury members, Karen Van Lengen, summed up this approach as follows: “They wanted to say, ‘We’re just this little country in Europe.’ They’re very sensitive about it because they know the world is watching.” The French architect, Claude Vasconi, echoing the complaints of his counterparts at Potsdamer Platz and Checkpoint Charlie, believed that German timidity was ruining the chance for a significant architectural statement in the future capital. “Symbolism in architecture need not be synonymous with the Third Reich,” he declared. “It’s not everyday that one has the chance to rebuild a capital.” Some of the foreign jury members became so fed up with what they regarded as Bonn’s pusillanimity that they began referring to the politicians as “Bonbons” and “rednecks of the Rhine.”

Of course, it was easy, and perhaps unfair, for foreign architects to chastise the Germans for hypersensitivity and overcautiousness in this matter. These critics did not have to live with historical memories of moral and political transgressions, which the rest of the world was more than happy to help the Germans keep alive. The reminders came in varying forms—reservations about German unification expressed by politicians like Thatcher and Mitterrand, the American “Holocaust” television series of the 1970s, books like Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, jokes about the Germans’ alleged inability to avoid periodically running off the rails. In this last category, one recalls the quip by the American comedian Jay Leno on the Tonight Show in 1990. “I’m sure that you have heard that Germany has been reunited. The only question now, I guess, is when it will go on tour again.” While it may indeed have been true, as the foreign architects contended, that in its public architecture Germany erred on the side of caution, the Germans would certainly have garnered much greater criticism had they accepted designs that looked as if they might have come from the sketchbook of Albert Speer.

As it turned out, the sharply divided jury in the Spreebogen competition could not agree on a single winning entry, so it awarded two first prizes to two very different designs. One of them, by a trio of young architects who had been trained in the former GDR, involved a rectangular colonnaded structure of great formality and severity. When pictures of it were made public, many critics complained that it was far too Speer-like to be acceptable. The other first-place design, by the Berlin-based architectural team of Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank, featured an east-west oriented Band des Bundes (Federal Strip), a linear ribbon of low-slung buildings broken up by a “Civic Forum” in the center. Reminiscent of the Mall in Washington, D.C., the strip extended from Moabit in the west to the Friedrichstadt in the east, crossing the Spree twice and thereby pulling together the two halves of the formerly divided city like a giant suture. This design won favor from Berlin’s leaders, who liked its political symbolism. Some federal officials, on the other hand, worried that the effect was too monumental; they wanted something closer to the self-effacing look in Bonn. Helmut Kohl was not among these critics. Believing that the architecture of the Berlin Republic should convey a stronger sense of Germany’s world importance (and believing too that he would be the first chancellor to rule from the new Chancellery), he eventually came down in favor of the Schultes design, which he hailed as “a successful combination of modesty and dignity.” Kohl’s intervention decided the matter, and on February 4, 1997, the chancellor personally presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for Schultes’s Federal Strip.