Of course, Helmut Kohl did not turn out to be the first chancellor to rule from Berlin since Adolf Hitler—that distinction fell to Gerhard Schröder. The new Chancellery and the complex of which it is a part also turned out differently than the original design specified. According to Schultes’s initial drawings, the Chancellery building was to feature large eyelike openings cut into its facade. Critics, including Mayor Diepgen, complained that these would bring back unwelcome memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi, whose “eyes” had been everywhere in the city. Schultes therefore reshaped the openings as half-ovals, rather like the half-moon glasses he favored. Another casualty was the “Civic Forum,” the large public courtyard that was meant to suggest openness and accessibility. In truth, the government feared having a large public space directly adjacent to the main center of power. Obsession with security had been present even in idyllic Bonn, where it had produced a sizable no-go zone around the Chancellery and the “Chancellor’s Bungalow.” The security issue was much greater in Berlin, with its well-known propensity for disruptive demonstrations. In yet another change, the Federal Strip, of which the Chancellery constitutes the western end, was significantly foreshortened in the east, thereby undercutting its capacity symbolically to link the eastern and western halves of the city. This change was mandated partly for financial reasons. As the complex was being constructed, Germany was desperate to meet the fiscal preconditions for participation in the European Union’s single currency plan. Among other requirements, countries wishing to join the Currency Union could not have a public deficit exceeding 3 percent of GDP. To avoid missing that target, expenditures on Berlin’s reconstruction, including the Federal Strip, had to be reduced. There was also a political angle to the change. Extending the Strip into the Friedrichstadt would have required demolishing some apartment blocks and displacing their residents, a move problematic in itself, but especially so given Speer’s extensive dislocation of Berliners during his own reconstruction of the city a half-century earlier. “The irony of Albert Speer’s legacy,” one commentator has written, “is that Berliners seem finally to believe in the power of architecture as much as he did.”
The Politics of Memory
In attempting to “reckon with the past” through architecture, it was one thing for the rebuilders of Berlin to acknowledge the problematical pedigrees of certain historical buildings by preserving some of their features, quite another to establish memorials whose sole purpose was to remind future generations of what had transpired during their nation’s darkest hour. Of course, all countries turn historically significant localities into shrines of national worship, where noble acts of triumph or sacrifice can be venerated. The challenge for Germany and Berlin was to give prominence to sites identified with crimes committed in the nation’s name. Various efforts to do this had been undertaken in West Berlin and, to a much lesser degree, in East Berlin after the war. Official memory took different forms and bore different messages in the two halves of the city. Berlin, after all, was divided not just along the Cold War fault line, but also in terms of the remembrance of things past. In addition to having to decide what to do with the diverse memory sites that they inherited from the divided city, the authorities of reunited Berlin faced the question of whether more memorials were needed. As the post-Wall memory debate progressed, it soon became apparent that there was little agreement about how the once and future capital should visually acknowledge its role in the national catastrophe. More fundamentally, some began to ask whether the worst dimensions of the German past could properly be commemorated by physical memorials at all.
Crimes are perhaps most potently acknowledged at the scenes where they were committed. In the broad sense, all of Berlin, and for that matter all of Germany, could be viewed as a crime scene, but the former Reich capital had hundreds of specific sites that had been instrumental to the Hitler regime’s criminality. In addition to the above-mentioned Nazi government buildings, many other structures related to the Third Reich survived the war relatively intact, and the vast majority of these bore no indication of their role in the terror. Only occasionally did one encounter the odd plaque or sign, such as the (hopelessly inadequate) one at the Wittenbergplatz
