A Shrine to Power: Is Berlin Ready?
By ROGER COHEN
BERLIN, Feb. 15 - Anyone searching for what Christopher Isherwood called "the flash of that hysteria which flickers always in Berlin" need look no further than the new federal Chancellery, a colossal building now near completion that sits on the banks of the Spree like a marooned ocean liner.
More than 1,000 feet long, with a 120-foot-high central block whose Italianate alabaster tone does little to soften its form, this Chancellery has its own private river bridge and helicopter pad. It has been compared to the seat of a Roman emperor or the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's gargantuan House of the Republic.
"It is way too big, but the former Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted it that way," said Julian Nida-Rümelin, Germany's top cultural official and one of the people scheduled to move into the premises on April 2 along with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Blaming Mr. Kohl for the new Chancellery is almost de rigueur in Berlin these days.
But the building is not merely about the whim of one man, however overtaken by hubris at the end of his 16-year rule. With the reconstruction of a united Berlin now about half complete, the city is still enmeshed in debate over whether the capital should exercise dutiful restraint or is now free to give exuberant expression to German power, as this Chancellery might suggest.
"We need to restore a sense of balance," said Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, the head of the Prussian Cultural Foundation. "The Nazi years are like a wall of concrete that cuts off the rest of our history. Berlin should reflect all our history, good and bad."
But how? Tension is now rife over another huge project: the possible rebuilding of the Hohenzollern Palace, which was the seat of German emperors before being blown up by East German Communists in 1950.
A 17-member official committee has begun to review the question, and the government has indicated cautious support for the project. Berlin's mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, is an outright enthusiast.
"The rebuilding of the palace has nothing to do with politics," said Wilhelm Boddien, an entrepreneur who is one of its chief advocates. "There was no nationalism when it was built 300 years ago. The palace was always the nucleus of this city. We need it to give Berlin back its identity."
On an aesthetic level, there can be little doubt that rebuilding the kaiser's palace would restore a measure of harmony to Berlin's historic center. The cost would be the razing of "Erich's lamp store," as the bronze-glass "Palace of the Republic" of the former East German leader Erich Honecker is mockingly known.
By turns elegant and tawdry, solemn and kitschy, the center of town is still graced by the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the early 19th-century architect to the Prussian royal family. His buildings, without the palace, lack their natural focus.
But the fact is that - in Berlin perhaps more than any other city - all architecture is political. Dynamiting the kaiser's palace was a symbol of the triumph of Communism; rebuilding it, advocates say, would symbolize Communism's defeat.
As for any hint of monumentalism, it is quickly - and often glibly - equated with the plans of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, for the grandiose capital of the 1,000-year Reich.
"I took one look at the new Chancellery, and I wondered if it had been inspired by Speer," said Liselotte Schulz, a former East German official frustrated by what she sees as the West's triumphalism. "It just sends completely the wrong message."
Ms. Schulz was one of Mr. Honecker's project managers on the Palace of the Republic, built in 1976 as a kind of giant hall for gatherings and exhibitions. She leads a group opposed to the rebuilding on its site of the Hohenzollern Palace. She is representative of a swath of former East Germans who feel at least a measure of nostalgia for their former state.
"We have no connection to the kaiser, so I do not see what his palace would be for," she argued.
In some senses, all these ideological arguments over architecture are a luxury. Berlin, more than a decade after unification, is broke. Its debts exceed $30 billion and the city is paying over $5 million a day in interest alone.
There are many reasons for these financial problems. The postwar city was two towns, a capitalist enclave in a Communist sea, and a state capital of East Germany. So everything is duplicated or triplicated - hospitals, universities, opera houses, research centers. A united Berlin cannot afford these institutions, but closing anything is difficult.
The city is also desperately short of tax income. "Prewar Berlin was the economic and industrial center between Paris and Moscow," said Peter Kurth, the top city official for finance. "Sixty percent of all public companies were headquartered here. But they all left - Deutsche Bank, Siemens, AEG, Allianz - and now we have very little in the way of tax-paying companies."
None of the industrial giants will come back. So Berlin, whose reconstruction will involve spending more than $100 billion on infrastructure alone, is pinning its hopes for gradual financial recovery on the many media companies now moving here, on nascent Internet and biotechnology companies, and on a future as a capital of culture and tourism. But if the city is to draw people, what is to be its symbol?
Perhaps it is condemned to avoid symbols. "The role Paris plays in France is unthinkable for Berlin in Germany," said Mr. Nida-Rümelin, the top cultural official. "The competition between Munich and Berlin, or Frankfurt and Berlin, is very strong."
But Berlin's spirit is restlessly expansive. Even Axel Schultes, the architect of the $221 million Chancellery, is concerned that his building is too big, its size thrown into unflattering relief by the absence of planned projects around it. "Something so isolated cannot be inviting," he said.
A planned "forum" between the new Chancellery and the Reichstag - a large public square with coffee bars and places to sit - has not been built. Across the Spree, a wilderness awaits the completion of a vast central railway station.
Given these enduring voids, Mr. Schultes has tried to soften the blow. He took more than 25 feet off the central block - a structure that was meant to be as tall as the Reichstag. He has striven for what he calls "a feeling of translucency" in the stone; he has placed trees inside some columns. Inside the main building, the impression is one of light and airy space, especially in a private, bullet-proof apartment on the top floor built for the chancellor. Mr. Schröder, whose wife, Doris, stays in his home city of Hanover, is expected to live in this nest in the sky because a private villa meant for the chancellor has been abandoned thanks to the cost.
>From here, the chancellor will have a captivating view of the
maelstrom that is Berlin - the Reichstag with its cupola, the cranes
hoisting the station into being, the Brandenburg Gate draped in an
advertising banner as it undergoes refurbishment, the vast empty
space that will one day be a Holocaust Memorial.
>From the inside looking out, at least, the Chancellery is splendid.
But Mr. Schultes is concerned. "I am worried about the reaction of the public," he said. "And I cannot be angry about public opinion because the only public part of this project - the forum - was taken away. I am not happy either when I have a look."