Berlin’s edifice complex

Well before the new U.S. Embassy here officially opened in a soggy (outdoor and uncovered) Fourth of July celebration that featured hors d’oeuvres from McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, German critics had roundly savaged the building as an architectural disaster.

Last May, the daily Suddeutsche Zeitung called it “Ft. Knox at the Brandenburg Gate.” Der Tagesspiegel pronounced it a “triumph of banality.” Particularly offended by the embassy’s windows, the critic at the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung contended that they “look as if a bankrupt homeowner had bought them in a home-improvement store near Fargo in order to get his house ready for winter.” Die Welt, meanwhile, stated simply that “only the Chinese Embassy is uglier.”

I suppose that all is fair in love and criticism, but you’d be naive to think that the vehemence of this response was driven solely by an all-embracing love for architectural aesthetics. I’m not going to defend the building. To my untrained eye, it’s a bland, nondescript, mostly functional building whose designers -- Santa Monica-based Moore Ruble Yudell -- were lumbered by the dual burdens of heightened security risks and the fact that the site, sandwiched between the Holocaust Memorial and the iconic Brandenburg Gate (in front of which President Reagan gave his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech), is one of the most symbolically charged pieces of real estate in Europe.

Does the new, sandstone embassy carry the weight of this environment? Does it somehow speak “American” to Germany’s Nazi past, its years of division, its vibrant present and future? Not to my mind. It might be fine as a headquarters of a biotech firm in, say, suburban California, but it in no way resonates with the profound moral and historical symbolism of its surroundings. But is the structure some sort of crime against humanity, or at least against the people of Berlin? I don’t see it.

With some notable exceptions, architecture in Berlin -- even during the post-unification building boom -- has a reputation for sobriety, not wild imagination. “Building is a particularly charged endeavor here,” Kristien Ring, the director of the German Architecture Center, told me. “History must be referred to, used as a point of context, and then distanced.”

The best examples of this dynamic at work include British architect Norman Foster’s masterful redesign of the Reichstag, whose metal and glass dome filters light -- and symbolically, transparency -- down to the Parliament floor below.

But the new embassy’s failure to garner approval from critics and, from all accounts, the public at large as well isn’t only because of its failure to successfully translate the past into the present. It is also because it fails to live up to what many Germans expect from the United States.

“The new embassy is reminiscent of a fortress. It’s not welcoming,” said Michael Werz, a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “It looks as if America is on the defensive, a symbol that it can’t connect with the world anymore.”

And why should this matter so much to Berliners?

For one, the U.S. has played a heroic role in this city’s modern history (a group of American pilots from the 1948 Berlin Airlift were on hand for the embassy’s inauguration). And secondly, a defensive, inward-looking U.S. threatens to undermine the post-World War II balance in German-American relations.

“Before, it was clear: We needed the U.S. to protect us,” said Claus Christian Malzahn, political editor at Spiegel Online, whose offices are across the Pariser Platz from the new embassy. “But now it’s different. Our [foreign policy] neutrality is fading. We’ve intervened in Kosovo and Afghanistan. I think we are afraid of having to engage more. We’re afraid that we might become guilty for something.”

I met my old friend, Ute Weiland, the deputy director of a Deutsche Bank-sponsored nonprofit that supports “civil society.” She too had an opinion about the embassy. She saw the dust-up over its aesthetic and symbolism as a challenge to her own country.

“Germans expect special things from the U.S.,” she said. “The U.S. is the problem-solver of the world. The new embassy seems to symbolize that they won’t fulfill this role anymore. It suggests that we need to take more responsibility and a leadership role in the European Union -- not just be the cash machine of Europe. I think it makes us think that we need to take off our rose-colored glasses and realize that maybe we aren’t just the little brother to the U.S. anymore. And that burdens us.”

And us too, of course. Maybe the embassy is mostly an exercise in form following function in the age of terrorism. Maybe it projects our own demise as the world leader. Or maybe we’re just giving Ugly American a whole new meaning.