United Berlin Divided Over Its ‘Eiffel Tower’ : Architecture: The proposed Max Reinhardt House, a controversial multipurpose structure of unusual design, is mired in a property restitution wrangle.

The iconoclastic New York architect Peter Eisenman is proposing a mammoth new glass landmark for the center of Berlin, but the project could be consigned to the encyclopedia of unbuilt architectural fantasies due to a controversy over its bizarre design and a property restitution wrangle involving a retired Los Angeles film producer.

Eisenman hopes the 34-story Max Reinhardt House will replace the Brandenburg Gate as the symbol of Germany’s once-and-future capital in the 21st Century. “Every city needs an Eiffel Tower,” he says, defending the much disputed building, which actually looks more like a deformed Arc de Triomphe--an apt, if highly discomfiting image for a unified Germany re-emerging from the divisions that followed World War II.

The building, which would house offices, a theater, an archive devoted to Reinhardt and a hotel, was designed for 60,000 square feet of prime real estate in former East Berlin, the site of the legendary Grosses Schauspielhaus that Jewish theater director Max Reinhardt managed before fleeing the Nazi takeover in 1933. Reinhardt’s son, Berlin-born film producer and author Gottfried Reinhardt, who lives in Los Angeles, is seeking restitution of the land, confiscated under the Third Reich and swiftly nationalized under the East German Communist regime that collapsed less than four years ago.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley has urged Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen to push for the project’s approval. “How better to . . . show Germany’s true colors than by putting up a monument to one of the eminent victims of barbarism?” Bradley wrote to Diepgen late last year.

Berlin and Los Angeles are officially linked as “Sister Cities,” Bradley noted in his letter to Diepgen, adding that he was also advocating for the project as mayor of the place where Max Reinhardt lived and worked for most of his years in exile.

The Max Reinhardt House would be part commercial venture and part home to a major new Berlin theater and archives devoted to the memory of Reinhardt, who transformed European stagecraft in the early part of this century and co-founded the Salzburg Festival. Reinhardt was involved with nearly a dozen European theaters and died in 1943 after staging “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the Hollywood Bowl. His son, Gottfried Reinhardt, fled Hitler’s Germany with his father and has worked as an MGM producer and as an assistant to director Ernst Lubitsch.

Since demolition of the Berlin Wall has allowed free access to the area of the city where his Austrian-born father spent most of his career, Gottfried Reinhardt also plans to exhume Max Reinhardt’s remains from Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., and move them to eastern Berlin’s Weissensee Jewish Cemetery. The transfer is planned for the autumn of this year, the 120th anniversary of the director’s birth and 50th anniversary of his death.

Realization of the architectural project appears likely to take much longer, if it happens at all. Backed by Frankfurt developer and art patron Dieter Bock, the scheme represents Eisenman’s first high-rise venture. He is a “deconstructivist” architect who first drew wide attention in 1989 with his radical design for the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The Wexner Center opened with its galleries empty of art, since museum officials felt that the unusual architecture sufficed as the building’s premiere exhibition. The brick, steel and glass structure features a massive grid-like form running through its disjointed spaces.

Eisenman has loosely based the Berlin building on the form of a Moebius strip, a contorted surface with only one side devised by German mathematician August Moebius. Clad in a kaleidoscopic blend of smoky and reflective gray glass, the outcome is a tortured work with a price tag estimated by the architect at $200 million. Eisenman, prone to seeking out esoteric rationale for his designs, once derived another project from the shape of a Boolean cube, a mathematical model used in artificial intelligence, and proposed a biological lab center that would take its form from the structure of DNA.

“The notion for me of architecture is a multifaceted, multilayered text, which never is simple, direct and monovalent,” Eisenman said in an interview.

Two major hurdles must be overcome for the project to go beyond a plexiglass model that was so complex to create that traditional craftsmen’s techniques were abandoned in favor of laser cutting from a computerized worksheet. First, the building would tower well above Berlin’s current 72-foot height restriction, although the limit seems likely to fall by the wayside in the face of intense pressure by real estate developers carving up unified Berlin.

The other obstacle is the dispute over site ownership. Max Reinhardt held 75% of stock in a company that had title to the Schauspielhaus and was outright owner of several other valuable plots in central Berlin. Gottfried Reinhardt says he is willing to forgo claims on this additional real estate, including Berlin’s Deutsches Theater and Kammerspiel, if the Schauspielhaus plot is returned.

But German law allows the government to pay financial compensation in lieu of restitution when priority for other investors is deemed justified to stimulate the economy. In this case, a Danish investment group has already been promised the plot for its own office complex that has a far more conventional design and adheres to existing height restrictions. In view of the preference shown thus far to the Danish group, Berlin city officials are skeptical whether the Eisenman project will ever be built. “I do not consider it likely,” said Dolf Straub, a spokesman for the Berlin Senate Agency for Urban Development.

Nonetheless, Gottfried Reinhardt is pressing his claim in Berlin’s Administrative Court. “The decision is callous,” he said, arguing that to fail to return the site would amount to a “third confiscation” of property first seized under Hitler and then by the Communist government that held it until 1989. “The whole thing is still open and I personally believe we will make progress,” said Michael Barz, a Frankfurt attorney representing Reinhardt and Bock.

Eisenman attributes the restitution dispute to a design concept he proudly acknowledges is disturbing. The leading German weekly Die Zeit recently blasted Eisenman as a “quick-witted destroyer of the city” because of the mammoth design, while the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commented that its “high architectural aspirations deserve respect amid so much mediocrity in Berlin.”

Although the architect said his identity as a “metaphysical Jew” leaves its traces in his work, he stops short of alleging that anti-Semitism is involved here. “This project’s problem is not that it’s got a Jewish architect and a Jewish subject. It’s the building itself. . . . There are so many things that are problems for the German psyche to deal with. If the building would go away, I think that Gottfried Reinhardt would have his site.”

Max Reinhardt’s son, meanwhile, remains committed to the Eisenman concept and recently wrote an appeal asking German President Richard von Weizsaecker to bring his moral influence to bear, so that “an overdue honor takes place and German bureaucrats will be prevented from sabotaging this, whether by short-sighted opportunism or subliminal enmity.”