The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

by Brian Ladd

Hitler wanted to make Berlin into a new city. When it had been rebuilt according to his plans, in fact, it was to be renamed Germania. In the new city, Hitler wanted new buildings for himself and his regime. The idea that buildings represented traditions worth appropriating was foreign to him. He had no desire to emulate those leaders in Moscow or Prague who took over royal residences: “I am too proud to move into former palaces.”9 As we saw in chapter 2, he did in fact avoid the Prussian royal palace. Hitler also stayed away from the palace of the Reich president on Wilhelmstrasse, although he assumed the powers of the office after President Paul von Hindenburg died in 1934. “Why?” he explained in a speech dedicating the new chancellery. “That was once the house in which the Lord Chamberlain lived. And you know that the leader of the German nation does not live in the house once occupied by the Lord Chamberlain!”10 It was “so unworthy” that the Weimar Republic had put its president in what for Hitler amounted to a servant’s quarters. The republic’s symbolic modesty will still appeal to many supporters of liberal democracy, but not even a royal palace was good enough for Hitler. Beyond Unter den Linden, Hitler found little to like in Berlin. Architecture fascinated him, but only as an expression of monumentality. He found most of Berlin far too disorderly and mundane. His idea of good urban form was an amalgam of grand Parisian boulevards and prominently placed individual ...