National Agenda : Blueprint for Berlin : As it prepares to transfer its seat of government, Germany takes the first steps in redesigning the capital.

In the mid-1700s, Frederick the Great dreamed of turning the provincial backwater of Berlin into a city more suitable for the capital of the new, powerful Prussia he ruled.

While he managed some change, his vision of building a cultural jewel--a latter-day Athens of the north--eventually faded, and he retreated to nearby Potsdam and his grand estate, Sans Souci.

The idea of transforming Berlin, however, lived on.

Indeed, no European capital was subjected to such a series of sweeping, grandiose--not to mention zany--plans for renewal as was Berlin.

The imperial Hohenzollerns, the Nazis and the Communists all tried to remake the city into a living statement of their grand ideal.

Now it’s democracy’s turn.

Although it will be at least another five years before the bulk of the 30,000 federal bureaucrats eventually decamp from the secure, sheltered confines of Bonn and move here, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl has said he plans to carry out some duties in Berlin next year.

Meanwhile, work on the city’s latest remake is already well under way.

Last month, leading federal and local officials selected a detailed plan drawn up by local architect Axel Schultes that will put the heart of central Europe’s biggest government on a grassy area along the Spree River northwest of the city’s main landmark, the Brandenburg Gate.

Here will rise a new chancellery, a new upper house of Parliament and several buildings for supporting administrative staff.

Nearby, the old Reichstag is expected to undergo a major face lift in preparation of its new role as the home of the federal republic’s lower house of Parliament. At least 10 other ministries will move into new or remodeled buildings, most within a mile of the new complex.

Cost estimates for the move gyrate wildly between $8 billion and $45 billion, depending on what is counted and who is doing the counting. Prestigious private projects--such as the revival of Potsdamer Platz, the city’s pre-World War II hub that languished for most of the Cold War as derelict land--will add several billion more dollars and help make Berlin the Continent’s biggest single construction site over much of the next decade.

And that’s not counting what more would come in the way of new sports facilities if the city wins its bid to stage the Olympic Games in the year 2000.

This Friday and Saturday, parliamentary leaders and architects will engage in a two-day colloquium in the Reichstag to debate the present design.

Many argue that spending so much is nothing short of madness at a time when money is short and the needs elsewhere grow steadily more acute--especially when the government is perfectly comfortable in Bonn.

But costs form only part of the controversy that swirls around Berlin, a city that for many Germans stands for all that the new Germany hopes to avoid.

For them, Berlin remains a city that is sinister and dangerous--the spawning ground of Prussian militarism and the Holocaust, an unruly, arrogant, irreverent metropolis whose turmoil helped kill Germany’s first republic and could well threaten the present one.

The spectacle of Germany’s most respected statesman, President Richard von Weizsaecker, being pelted with fruit and eggs as he tried to address a large rally in Berlin last November was merely one more bit of proof for those who hold this view. The city’s supporters argue otherwise.

To understand the problems brought by unification and a Europe divided into rich and poor, an all-German government must be in Berlin, they say. They add that, like it or not, Berlin was and is the capital of a united Germany. They say that Germans, especially those in government, must face their country’s history, not run from it.

Besides, Berlin has a creative energy, a concentration of the arts and a diversity of opinion impossible to find anywhere else in Germany. Indeed, in many ways, it is the very antithesis of the content, quiet, orderly nation that post-World War II Germany has become.

It is a melting pot in a country conspicuous for its strong provincial roots. It is a powerful centripetal force in a state that takes pride in its federated nature. It exudes a restlessness in a nation where so many revere the status quo.

“The history of this city has been one of change--struggle, power politics, evolution and revolution,” summed up Hans-Werner Kock, one of the city’s best-known media personalities. “I haven’t a rich enough imagination to think what will happen when this army of blue-suited, uninspiring bureaucrats arrives. We’ve got a great cardiac clinic here, but no one can transplant Bonn’s heart into Berlin.”

Much as New Yorkers or Parisians, Berliners consider themselves a breed apart, and other Germans tend to agree.

These differences were only accentuated by the city’s divided post-World War II existence in which easterners lived under the nose of a Soviet Communist dictatorship and westerners were left stranded on a surreal, free-market island 200 miles behind the Iron Curtain.

Arrogant , loud, pushy , insensitive are all words frequently used by provincial Germans to describe residents of the city.

“New York without humor,” quipped one American who knows the city well.

Berliners tend to confirm parts of this overall impression, albeit in more flattering terms. They see themselves as fast-moving, no-nonsense people who can be brutally direct and honest but are also a more generous, open bunch than other Germans. In Berlin, the pace is faster, the edge harder.

“Heart with lip,” is the oft-heard Berlin self-description.

Berlin’s unsettled nature is nothing new.

Constant migrations, new ideas and the whims of power have brought relentless change--a reality reflected in Berlin’s bewildering architectural smorgasbord.

The nearly complete absence of original medieval and Renaissance buildings in the city has less to do with Allied bombing than with the Berliner’s need to tinker.

In Berlin, even the old and revered are constantly changed.

For example, the unusual asymmetric steeple on the city’s oldest church, the 13th-Century Nikolai-Kirche in the heart of former Communist East Berlin, was scrapped in the last century along with the church’s original interior and replaced by distinctly mediocre designs. The Communists added their touch by turning the church into a museum.

The Nazis moved the 250-foot-high, 19th-Century Victory Column a mile southwest of its original location in the 1930s. The quadriga atop the Brandenburg Gate was carted off to Paris by Napoleon, retrieved a decade later by Prussian forces, shorn of its eagle and iron cross by the Communists and finally restored to its original state last year.

“The city has never had its peace,” said Werner Knopp, president of the Prussian Cultural Foundation, the custodian for the city’s bountiful art treasures.

Now Berlin is changing again.

As with their predecessors, its present redesigners are obsessed with image.

Unlike the uninhibited true believers of Berlin’s past, the byword for democracy’s architects is restraint . In a painful way, they seem to be searching for that narrowest of ground in the German national character: that which inspires confidence yet avoids arrogance.

“The (new government quarter design) doesn’t project itself as being more important than the surrounding area, yet it makes its own statement, it has its own profile,” said Berlin’s director of urban development, Volker Hassemer, as he explained why those involved in the decision had selected Schultes’ plan from more than 800 entries from 44 countries.

“Powerful yet modest,” echoed prominent architectural critic Bruno Flierl in a newspaper article praising the design.

Unfortunately for the German taxpayer, modesty doesn’t extend to all of those involved.

Heads of the foreign, interior and economics ministries reportedly all rejected suggestions that they move into existing office space. They want prestigious new buildings, although growing cost constraints could dampen these ambitions.

Still, Berlin’s history is certainly not tranquil, and some read these demands as delaying tactics by those who want to remain in quieter Bonn.

The turmoil following the collapse of the empire in 1918 was so great here that the fathers of Germany’s first republic fled to the provincial solitude of Weimar to frame their new constitution.

Little more than a decade later, endless street brawls and unrest in the city helped erode the foundations of that republic and the convictions of its parliamentarians. Weary, confused and longing for stability, they delivered Germany to the strong man--Adolf Hitler.

But the city’s energy has also been a magnet, attracting at some point in their lives the greats of German culture, including Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Beethoven and the artists of the Bauhaus movement.

In part, this energy stems from the city’s history as a melting pot.

In 1671, Prussia’s King Frederick Wilhelm I invited Jews expelled from Vienna to resettle in Berlin. At the time the Nazis came to power, roughly one-third of Germany’s Jews lived in the city. In succeeding decades, persecuted French Huguenots also found refuge here in large numbers.

Both groups left their mark, adding levity to the stiff Prussian nature and sprinkling the language with French and Yiddish expressions that set a Berliner’s German apart from that spoken elsewhere.

Today, there are new outside influences with nearly 10% of Berlin’s 3.4 million residents made up of foreigners. Local radio stations recently reported heavy traffic congestion in one central district because of a special holiday: the start of Ramadan.

The Muslim influx is a legacy of the West German policy of the 1960s of importing foreign labor. As a result, western Berlin has the largest concentration of Turks outside Turkey. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, large numbers of Poles and other Eastern Europeans have come into the city, and one of the few certainties about Berlin’s future is that the size of these minorities will expand.

A recent European Community survey indicated that no less than 20 million residents of the former Soviet empire would move to Western Europe if given the chance. As Europe’s disadvantaged move westward, Berlin--barely 50 miles from the Polish border--is the first metropolis they will meet.

The influx is certain to add to Berlin’s already considerable energies and tensions.

“The word instability is too strong, but Berlin will not be a quiet capital,” Knopp said. “These immigration pressures, coming at a time the city is itself still developing, will only increase their impact.”

Added Michael Farr, whose recent book, “Berlin! Berlin!” is a rare and lively English-language cultural history of the city, echoed Knopp’s assessment. “It will be as mad a place as it was earlier this century, often absurd, almost dangerous,” he said.

Whatever Berlin’s mood, those planning the new capital want the government to feel it.

Chief city planner Hassemer talks of an open, integrated government quarter, in which the chancellery and parliamentary offices are set among stores, schools and theaters in an environment devoid of protective barriers.

While security specialists turn pale at such an idea, Hassemer is adamant.

“It’s going to be a government quarter right in the center of Berlin, without it being a ghetto,” he said. “Berliners didn’t tear down one wall to see another one go up.”

Hassemer stressed that public debate on the designs would be encouraged before conceptual planning is finished.

It wasn’t always so.

Indeed, Berliners are surrounded by architectural reminders foisted on them by autocrats with grand ideas and little flair.

The eccentric Kaiser Wilhelm II presided over a building program following German unification aimed at lifting Berlin to match the splendor of Rome, Paris and London. He fell well short. “The architecture, painting and sculpture of the Wilhelmine age was, like Wilhelm II, grand, pompous and empty,” Farr said.

Only World War II stopped the Nazis from condemning Berlin to an even worse architectural fate.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Nazi architect Albert Speer drew up plans--in close consultations with Hitler, who fancied himself an architect--to transform Berlin into “Germania,” a city filled with totalitarian statements, including an indoor Great Hall with a capacity of 180,000, a Fuehrer’s palace and parade ground for rallies of up to 1 million. When shown the plans worked out by his proud son, Speer’s father could only sputter, “You’ve gone completely crazy.”

Aside from Hermann Wilhelm Goering’s Air Ministry, the 1936 Olympics complex in the western part of the city and Tempelhof Airport, only sprinklings of Nazi-era buildings survive.

Today, designers of a new, democratic Berlin are hoping their work will help heal the scar across the city’s landscape: the divisions, both physical and psychological, that linger in a city that was divided by a wall that served as the front line of the Cold War for nearly 30 years.

Several federal ministries will be located in the formerly Communist east, and the new main government quarter will actually cross the old line of the wall.

In interviews for this article, both Hassemer and the city’s mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, stressed the need to rebuild the east quickly.

“We want to unite the city,” Diepgen said.

Hassemer said 80% of the city’s budget for new development is going into the east, including a massive redevelopment that would restore the Alexander Platz to its prewar role as a city hub.

However the city develops, one fact is clear: In the years ahead, Berlin’s magnetic draw will restore its role as one of central Europe’s most influential cities.

“People can hem and haw, but in the end, that’s inevitable,” Farr said. “Berlin will prove irresistible.”

Times researchers Petra Falkenberg and Christian Retzlaff in Berlin contributed to this article.