Berlin: Building a New Architecture of Democracy

Be it the Mall in Washington, the Kremlin in Moscow or the Forbidden City in Beijing, the architecture of capital cities has the power to awe, to alienate, to inspire and to intimidate. But possibly no nation is more attuned to the political manipulation of built imagery than Germany. The decision to move its government seat from Bonn to Berlin by the year 2000 has set off a remarkable debate about what kind of official architecture is appropriate for a country whose past has made patriotism suspect and whose expressions of national pride have, as a result, been consigned to the soccer field.

Germany historically has assigned architecture a pivotal role. Before its successive rule by Nazism and communism, the country gave birth to the Bauhaus movement, whose founders contended that their revolutionary designs could shape human destiny. Convulsive events such as the fall of the monarchy in 1918; Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and the defeat of his Third Reich in 1945 have all left their mark on German architecture and design.

When the dome of Germany’s imperial Parliament was completed more than a century ago, Kaiser Wilhelm II derided it as “the height of tastelessness.” The swashbuckling emperor saw the glass and steel cupola as a symbolic challenge to his autocratic power since it loomed slightly higher than that of the royal palace. Today, as another Reichstag dome rises on the Berlin skyline, the crowning feature of the future home of the federal legislature is drawing renewed scrutiny.

Shortly after the 1991 decision to move to Berlin, the Bundestag quietly and with little controversy voted to use the notorious Reichstag as its new base. The consensus proved short-lived. At a 1992 Bundestag colloquium to discuss overhauling the building, it was depicted as a bombastic, war-scarred fossil, the scene of Germany’s darkest hours, an unwelcome symbol of democracy’s failure to grow deep roots under either the monarchy or the succeeding Weimar Republic. Pressure from conservative parliamentarians to restore the cupola only inflamed censure of the Reichstag, for critics saw the grandiose pinnacle as an enlarged version of the spiked military helmet worn by the kaiser’s troops in World War I.

The building’s history often has been misconstrued. When the Red Army conquered Berlin in 1945, its soldiers signaled the German enemy’s defeat by unfurling the Soviet flag--not atop the Chancellery, from which Hitler controlled much of Europe, but over the battered Reichstag. For the Soviets, and many others who fought Nazism, the Reichstag had come to embody fascist terror ever since Hitler used a 1933 fire that engulfed the building as a pretext to impose emergency rule.

Advocates of reusing the Reichstag have tried to set the record straight, pointing out that Nazi atrocities were planned not there but at other Berlin sites. In fact, Hitler only once set foot inside the building as Germany’s chancellor.

The ultimate failure of parliamentarianism in Germany between the wars lends a poignancy to the Reichstag, which can perhaps best be viewed as embodying the country’s thwarted democratic hopes and the belated remorse felt by many who acquiesced in their suppression. “The arsonists of Feb. 27, 1933, should not have the last word,” argued former building minister Oscar Schneider, who pushed for a faithful restoration of the cupola and charged its opponents with distorting a symbol of democratic sovereignty into an architectural mark of Cain.

Comparing the Reichstag with the austere modernist Parliament building used in recent decades in Bonn is like weighing a penitent’s pup tent against a potentate’s palace. In 1949, West German politicians intentionally located the Bundestag inside a prime example of the Bauhaus architecture reviled by the Nazis, a former teachers’ college built of pure white planes. Turning this structure into a Parliament was a signal of contrition and, like the decision to site the capital in bucolic Bonn, a demonstrated desire for a new start.

In the wake of the 1995 wrapping of the Reichstag by the artist Christo, as a way of reconsecrating this sandstone hulk for a better future, British architect Sir Norman Foster has been called in to supply new symbolic meaning. The choice of Foster was itself a symbolic gesture. For it would be hard to imagine France, Britain or the United States hiring a foreign citizen to design a new national legislature. Foster, architect of skyscraping banks in Hong Kong and Frankfurt, has gutted the Reichstag to retrofit the place in his high-tech machine aesthetic. Translucent roofing, glass elevators and enlarged windows will flood as much light as possible into the heavy stone building, part of his effort to “make democracy visible.”

It is by far the single most expensive state architectural project in reunified Berlin, with a price tag of roughly $330 million. If nothing else, the building’s costly new dome will alleviate the outward solemnity of the original Reichstag, designed in a synthesis of Baroque and Renaissance elements by Paul Wallot. The German architectural journal Bauwelt has published a comic caricature showing Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s bald pate as a stand-in for the modern cupola, together with a commentary calling it a symbol by which Germans are seeking to declare a renewed greatness, a sense of being “somebody again.”

Foster himself never wanted the dome. Within the Bundestag, architectural ambitions and tastes broke along party lines. Intraparliamentary bickering ensued. Conservative members were prepared to accept the logical simplicity of Foster’s architecture for the interior. But outside they fought avidly for a grander, visible echo of the past. To counter objections from those who read any Reichstag dome as an authoritarian symbol, Foster is filling it with a pair of spiral viewing ramps. Scheduled to be open to visitors even when the Bundestag is in session, Foster now argues that the dome aims to place the public above the politicians answerable to it.

In the interior spaces, Foster is trying to recapture the majesty of the old Reichstag, severely toned down during a 1960s refurbishment. He has shifted the main entry back to the grand western portal, with its towering Corinthian columns. Visitors who, before reunification, came into the Reichstag as if sneaking in guiltily via the side door, now will mount Wallot’s central steps as if ascending an acropolis and enter on an axis to a soaring foyer.

Under Foster, the 1960s modifications have vanished almost entirely. In the process, the uncovering of interior walls revealed hundreds of graffiti messages left by the Red Army soldiers who helped conquer Nazism. Many of these Cyrillic scrawls will be preserved. This step is noteworthy, considering that it involves showcasing evidence of national defeat and humiliation while paying tribute to the vanished Soviet power that removed fascism’s yoke.

The far-reaching renovation of Germany’s most potent architectural relic is due to be completed in a little more than a year. On May 23, 1999, the Bundestag plans to inaugurate the redesigned premises by gathering there to elect a successor to President Roman Herzog. When it does so under the watchful eye of a citizenry given access to the dome above, German democracy, for better or worse, will find itself back on the stage set of its history’s zeniths and nadirs.