Schroeder Unveils Chancellery as Symbol of Reunified Germany

Germans celebrated a political milestone Wednesday with the inauguration of a sprawling new chancellery criticized by some as too monumental but praised by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as a symbolic end to the east-west division that once defined this city.

In a sun-splashed ceremony in the chancellery’s courtyard, Schroeder described his new headquarters and weekday home as “a magnificent and impressive building.” It is part of a mile-long government complex spanning the Spree River and re-integrating areas of the capital once severed by the Berlin Wall.

The first German leader to govern from Berlin since the defeat of the Third Reich, Schroeder sought to tone down debate about the huge dimensions of the building, which is said to be three times the size of the White House and able to accommodate London’s 10 Downing St. in its entrance hall.

“We’re not moving into Sans Souci or Neuschwanstein,” the chancellor remarked, referring to two of Germany’s most grandiose imperial palaces. “We will not be ruling from here, we will be governing, and that is a completely different matter.”

If his new headquarters appear monumental, Schroeder said, they should be seen as marking Germans’ triumph over division and a final defeat of the attempt by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and architect Albert Speer to create a “bombastic runway of evil” through the city.

The chancellery is near the site Hitler selected for a new seat of power that was never built. But breaking with the late dictator’s vision, it is set back two blocks from the grand boulevard through the Tiergarten park that links such Berlin landmarks as the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column honoring the Franco-Prussian War.

The discussion over the size of the chancellery--a project defined long before Schroeder became Germany’s leader--is “both good and necessary,” he said, adding that his nation presents itself to the outside world “neither as above others nor beneath them.”

Schroeder has uttered a few reproachful asides about the $214-million structure that has 370 offices, 205,000 square feet of floor space and towers about 120 feet--as high as the Reichstag it faces but for the Parliament building’s newly added glass cupola.

In reference to his portly predecessor, Helmut Kohl, Schroeder has joked that the chancellery was designed for “someone of another dimension.” Critics and cartoonists have referred to the giant white cube that is the core of the structure as “the chancellor’s washing machine” and the “federal cathedral.”

Architect Axel Schultes has pointed out, however, that the amount of work space within the new chancellery is almost identical to that of the seemingly more modest structure in Bonn that it replaces.

The new building also gives an exaggerated impression of its proportions because it is the only completed construction in the designated government quarter, Schultes added. Once the Lehrter train station across the river is built in the next few years and three federal office buildings are finished, the chancellery will no longer dominate the skyline of what at the moment is a vast construction pit.

As originally designed by Schultes, the government quarter was to have included a people’s forum with art exhibitions and outdoor cafes to integrate the official structures into everyday public life. But Kohl vetoed the forum before he lost office in 1998, and the overall project had amassed such cost overruns by the time Schroeder took over that the new chancellor rejected the architect’s appeals to reconsider the populist link.

The official opening of the chancellery nearly two years after the government moved here allows Schroeder to consolidate the more than 500 employees of his office under one roof. Until this past week, when police-escorted convoys trucked 4,000 boxes of files into the new beech-paneled offices, Schroeder’s team was spread among half a dozen buildings. The chancellor was quartered in the old offices of late Communist-era East German leader Erich Honecker.

The inauguration was months overdue, but the chancellery remains a work in progress. Public rooms on the fourth and fifth floors still await floor coverings. The rear garden--which is enclosed by two parallel wings of offices, the main cubic structure and the Spree River--is a mud flat.

The grand courtyard at the official entrance is decorated with an Eduardo Chillida sculpture titled “Berlin” and tall, narrow columns of alabaster sandstone topped with deciduous trees. German columnists have likened the leaf-topped columns to white stalks of broccoli.

Schultes made light of the rough edges of his construction, appealing to the “pioneer spirit” of the chancellery workers for further patience with a move that has been nearly a decade in the making.

Shortly after Germany’s reunification in 1990, Parliament approved the idea of moving the capital here from Bonn. But painstaking negotiations ensued for years over the new facilities to be built in Berlin and the functions to be retained by Bonn to keep the old capital from becoming a ghost town.