Wallot could not singlehandedly create a national style in a divided and changing nation. In his history of the building, Michael S. Cullen has observed how the Reichstag reflected both the architecture and the politics of its time: it was “a building that presented a different appearance on nearly every facade and yet another different one in the cupola. It was a building that could not decide what it wanted. Or rather, it was supposed to be an expression of imperial unity and at the same time a monument of parliamentarism, but it became merely an example of the deep division in the German
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