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

by Brian Ladd

Siedler, Fest, and Boddien all conceded that a rebuilt palace would lack authenticity, but they denied that the concept had any relevance. Siedler noted that Unter den Linden today is a row of counterfeit buildings, some (like the Opera House) damaged and rebuilt more than once. “The architectural history of Berlin, like that of Europe, is a history of counterfeits”—whether Goethe’s house in Frankfurt, the campanile in Venice, or the so-called crown prince’s palace on Unter den Linden, which was totally destroyed during the war and then rebuilt from scratch twenty years later by the East Germans. Boddien added that the same inauthenticity would also apply to the Palace of the Republic if it were stripped to its frame to remove the asbestos and then restored to its earlier appearance.

Most preservationists believe aesthetic arguments should not be decisive in determining a building’s historical value.

History has made the Brandenburg Gate a German monument. At first its official name was the “Gate of Peace”; it was not, after all, a Roman triumphal arch. But its identity changed in 1806, when Napoleon defeated Prussia and triumphantly entered its capital through the western gate. He showed his admiration for the quadriga by ordering that it be taken down and shipped to Paris to join his other confiscated art treasures. The emperor thus became known locally as the “horse thief of Berlin,” and the denuded gate became the symbol of Prussian and German resistance. In 1813 Schadow himself proposed to fill the quadriga’s place atop the gate with an enormous cast of the Iron Cross, the new military medal designed by Schinkel at the behest of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. Upon Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, however, a triumphant procession returned the quadriga to Berlin, the neighboring square was renamed Paris Square (Pariser Platz), and the “Gate of Peace” became a “Gate of Victory.” Schinkel designed new insignia for the goddess’s staff: a Prussian eagle and, within a wreath, the Iron Cross.

It became the traditional backdrop for military parades (following Napoleon’s example) and for the ceremonial reception of state guests. When the entire customs wall was torn down in the 1860s, the Brandenburg Gate remained; from then on, it was strictly a monument. After Germany was unified under Prussian leadership in 1871, the victorious troops returning from France were welcomed at the Brandenburg Gate. The Prussian monument had become firmly established as a German national symbol, the site of many more ceremonies before soldiers marched through it on their way back to France in 1914. The Nazis, too, embraced the old symbol of victory. The night Hitler was appointed chancellor, January 30, 1933, thousands of torch-bearing Nazi brownshirts marched through the gate. When the bombers came, the Nazis generally did a better job of evacuating art treasures than saving people. But they apparently did not dare risk morale by removing the goddess and her horses.

quadriga. By 1945, when Soviet soldiers planted their red flag atop the gate, it was badly damaged and only fragments of the quadriga remained. The East German leaders who inherited these ruins decided to keep the gate and adopt it as their own. The shattered quadriga’s fate was less certain. Artists and politicians entertained several proposals for a suitable new sculpture: a group of workers, children dancing around a globe, a mother with child, Picasso’s dove of peace. A Western newspaper, hearing of the last proposal in 1949, declared that if the dove of peace were to nest placidly at the entrance to the Communist world, the West would be obliged to raise a banner in front of the gate with the words Dante had affixed to the gates of Hell in his Inferno: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”23 Eventually, however, the East decided to restore the quadriga instead.

Unfortunately, the gate stood in the Soviet sector, the plaster casts were in the West, and during the 1950s the two regimes were busy denouncing each other as criminals and usurpers. After the failed uprising against the East German government on June 17, 1953, the West renamed the street that continued Unter den Linden west of the gate “the Street of 17 June.” But the two Berlins had only one Brandenburg Gate, and it provided a rare opportunity for cooperation. West Berlin agreed to recreate the statues while the East restored the gate. This joint venture did not, of course, proceed without incident. In 1958 the reconstructed quadriga was brought to the sectoral boundary, a few steps from the gate, and simply left there for the East Germans to claim. Before putting it up, the Easterners sawed the Prussian eagle off the top of the goddess’s staff and the Iron Cross out of the wreath. For the Western public, this was vandalism and deceit, but it should not really have been a surprise. In 1957 West Germany had legalized the display of the Iro...

the Wall had made crossing the Brandenburg Gate anything but a laughing matter. Because the western edge of the Mitte district coincided with the location of Friedrich Wilhelm I’s wall, the sectoral boundary followed the same course after 1945, and after 1961, so did a long stretch of the new wall. The Brandenburg Gate was thus once again part of a wall. Here was a historical continuity that no one wanted to acknowledge. This time it was not a gate; the crossing points lay elsewhere.

With the Wall’s presence, the poignancy of the gate as symbol became stronger than ever. On its Eastern side, Pariser Platz starkly illustrated the desolation brought by the Wall. Once among Berlin’s most elegant squares, a place of palaces, the French and U.S. embassies, the Academy of Arts, and the city’s premier hotel, the Adlon, it was now bare except for the gate and the Wall. Tourists were restricted to its far end, but distinguished guests and officially invited delegations were brought to the gate and asked to admire the work of the border guards. From the Western side, the gate was now entirely inaccessible, and could only be seen from a dead-end street in the middle of the Tiergarten.

it may have been the foreign media from the West that made the gate the preeminent symbol of the less telegenic Berlin Wall. During the days after November 9, 1989, the TV networks made the Brandenburg Gate the backdrop for their cameras. It was a fortunate coincidence that the semicircular barrier blocking the gate was the only section of the Wall wide and flat enough to stand (and dance) on (fig. 19). Since the Brandenburg Gate was not a functioning gate, however, the hordes of East Germans actually passed through the Wall elsewhere for several weeks. Finally, on December 22, 1989, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl led a phalanx of politicians in a ceremony reopening the Brandenburg Gate. Evidence later surfaced that Kohl had in fact pressured the East Germans to delay the opening for five weeks so that he could be present.27

For all the turbulence of Berlin’s history under the Hohenzollerns, they arguably presided over a degree of stability that has not been approached in the rest of the twentieth century. Many Berliners are understandably reluctant to frame their identity in terms of the troubled eras that followed: the weak Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the divided city. Hence the wish to reach back to the relatively placid era of monarchs. How can that nostalgia possibly be satisfied? Since hardly anyone actually wants a king, it is difficult to know just what to salvage from the royal past. The much-restored but never removed Brandenburg Gate, with its thrice-removed and twice-reconstructed quadriga, is as authentic a symbol as Berlin can offer. Other buildings, visible or remembered, embody too rich a variety of meanings to permit any consensus about the legacy of old Berlin, or about how to restore it.

Particularly worrying, even for most of the liberal, conservative, and religious parties that sat in the Reichstag, was the growing strength of the avowedly Marxist Social Democrats, who in the 1912 elections became the Reichstag’s largest single party.

the Reichstag was built over a ten-year period, 1884 to 1894.

Wallot despaired of the difficulty of his task: he had to create a symbol of Germany and of German parliamentarism, when there was no model for either and little consensus about what they meant.

Wallot’s design came near the end of an age that had sought in vain to agree on a historical style appropriate to the modern world. A few years later, architectural modernism would challenge all historical styles and demand a completely different approach to design. So the first German parliament building would be one of the last examples of its kind of monumental architecture.

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 Empire and of a parliament’s powerlessness to become master in its own house.”

DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE, “To the German People.” Although the idea for the inscription dates to 1892, it has only been there since 1916—since the middle of World War I. It is not entirely clear who proposed the inscription, or who blocked it, but the notion of “the German people” did imply a democratic understanding of the empire’s legitimacy, one by no means universally shared in a German Empire that was, legally speaking, a union of princes. The inability to agree on that or any other phrase meant that the stone surface remained blank until mobilization for total war gave a new and less controversial connotation to the role of “the German people.”

From its window on November 9, 1918, the moderate Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the German republic, in an attempt to preempt the radical Karl Liebknecht’s proclamation of a socialist republic from the royal palace on the same day.

On the night of February 27, 1933, it was seriously damaged by a fire that had been deliberately set. A Dutch anarchist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested and charged with arson. The police—now under the control of the Nazis, specifically of Hermann Göring—announced the discovery of a Communist plot against the government. Two days later an emergency decree suspended civil rights, and the government shut down the opposition press and political parties.

For the Red Army, fighting its way into the city in April 1945, the Reichstag building was the paramount symbol of Hitler and Nazi Germany, and the ultimate prize in the Battle of Berlin. By the time a Red Army soldier planted the Soviet flag atop the building, it had been badly damaged by shell fire and completely burned out (fig. 21). It is unlikely that the Soviets would have restored the building. However, it ended up just within the British sector of occupied Berlin; its fate thus passed into the hands of West Berlin and West Germany.

In 1961, the Berlin Wall was built a few steps from the Reichstag’s rear entrance. The same year, however, its restoration began. Although its future use remained unclear, the interior was rebuilt with modem office space, meeting rooms, and an assembly chamber large enough for the Bundestag. Soviet objections blocked all proposals for the Bundestag or other West German government bodies to use the building. Beginning in 1971, it housed a permanent exhibition on German history. Tour guides informed foreign visitors, as they gazed out the window at the Wall, that this would be the meeting place of the German parliament when Germany was reunified.

When the Bundestag decided, in 1991, to return the seat of government to Berlin, it was choosing the Reichstag as its future home. The venerable building would have to be renovated, but there was little agreement about how to adapt it to either the practical or the symbolic needs of the Federal Republic’s parliament. The Bundestag’s leaders fell back upon the favorite German solution of an architectural competition, passing the buck to a handful of talented architects. They displayed plenty of talent, but that was no substitute for decisions about what the Bundestag wanted. The competition jury divided its first prize among three spectacular but obviously impracticable designs by Santiago Calatrava, Pi de Bruijn, and Sir Norman Foster. In 1993, the Bundestag gave the commission to Foster with the understanding that the building’s appearance would not be fundamentally altered. The final design long remained uncertain, particularly the form of a new cupola (the old one had been gone since its dilapidated ruins were removed in 1954).

Christo had formulated his project when the Reichstag graced a divided city and continent. Ironically, its approval came after the Wall had vanished.

The Reichstag could easily accommodate the enormous crowds, however, because it stood nearly alone. Beyond the Platz der Republik (the former Königsplatz) lay open space in every direction, a legacy of Hitler, the war, and the Wall.

when its suburbs were annexed to Berlin in 1920, it became a city of four million, third largest in the world after London and New York (fig. 23). By the later nineteenth century, Berlin’s status as capital was only secondarily and indirectly responsible for its growth. More than most national capitals, Berlin became a major industrial center. Men and women from the surrounding provinces and beyond poured into the city in search of work. At midcentury, the most striking growth was concentrated in its metalworking and machinery factories, such as Borsig, builder of railroad locomotives. A few decades later, the new electrical industry became dominated by such Berlin firms as AEG and Siemens.

Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, and Wilmersdorf became dominated by upscale apartments; beyond them lay exclusive villa suburbs such as Grunewald, Dahlem, and Zehlendorf, sprawling all the way to Potsdam.

Apart from a few historic sites, on the one hand, and some new suburbs, on the other, the visible Berlin of today is fundamentally a product of the industrial age.

West Berlin’s industries only limped through the decades during which the half-city was a subsidized political symbol and an economic absurdity. But East Berlin remained a major industrial center until 1990. Only the demise of the East German economy shut down the old factories along the upper Spree and jerked it over to the Western European norm of empty factories and unemployed proletarians. Despite war and urban renewal, the valley of the Spree across much of Berlin remains a landscape of old industrial structures. Among them are the innovative and influential factory buildings built for AEG by Peter Behrens between 1909 and 1914 (years during which his assistants included Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe).

Very few of the city’s older buildings predate 1850. Even the inner city was utterly transformed in the half-century before 1914, as old houses were replaced one by one with new and larger buildings.

before the destruction wrought by World War II, only scattered buildings gave a sense of the city that existed in Schinkel’s day.

the best way to get some sense of the preindustrial city is to take an excursion to nearby Potsdam, the garrison town and royal residence largely built up under Friedrich Wilhelm I and his son, Friedrich II. There was an older part of Potsdam, but that old center was virtually wiped out in the one major Allied bombing raid that struck the city in 1945. The substantial eighteenth-century town extensions to the north and west were mostly spared, and they have survived the ravages of several regimes largely intact. That is, here one still finds streets lined almost entirely with two-story houses from the 1700s, most of them exhibiting little variation in style from their neighbors (fig. 24). After four decades of East German control, most looked terribly dilapidated, which at least suggests that they had been little altered during those years. (Their fate under the Fede...

In the midcentury industrial boom it was left to an emerging private real estate market to respond to the enormous demand for housing. The Berlin tenement’s typical form evolved out of private builders’ attempts to profit from that demand. They developed new designs suited to traditional Berlin houses (including barracks), the emerging pattern of streets and blocks, and a minimal set of municipal regulations governing sanitation and fire protection. The city’s planners have often been blamed for encouraging the spread of Mietskasernen, but in fact they neither foresaw nor knew how to control the real estate boom that created modem Berlin. As many thousands of poor people sought dwellings, high housing densities were probably unavoidable.

From the 1860s to 1914, the typical apartment building was five stories high, with a facade fifty to a hundred feet wide, decorated in whichever ornate historicist style was in fashion at the time of construction. Behind the massive front facade lay a narrow courtyard, enclosed—often on all four sides—by additional wings of the building. The largest buildings had wings on each side of the courtyard, which were connected in back by a transverse wing parallel to the street facade. On smaller lots, one side or the rear of the courtyard might face the walls of neighboring buildings, but each building’s courtyards were accessible only through archways connected to its own street entrance (fig. 25). On particularly deep lots, there might be a second or even a third courtyard behind the first one. (The handful of buildings with five or six courtyards became famous, but were not typical.) Most apartments thus faced courtyards rather than the wide streets. Apart from the few streets of medieval provenance, Berlin was a city of wide streets and deep blocks. In contrast to a medieval city like Paris or a row-house city like London, the poor usually did not live on narrow lanes and alleys. Instead, they lived on courtyards. This kind of building was a distinct Berlin type, although it influenced tenement designs in other cities. Because of the depth of Berlin blocks and the large size of building parcels, the tenements were enormous. A single building typically had a hundred or more r...

before the 1870s, running water was not available everywhere, and cesspools and open gutters offered the only drainage. Typhoid, tuberculosis, and (until the 1870s) cholera were often rampant, and in the minds of better-off outsiders those proletarian diseases were associated with other pathogens harder to trace: sexual misbehavior and socialist agitation.

Few apartments had bathrooms before the turn of the century, and the idea that a toilet in each apartment was not a luxury became accepted only slowly. Well into the twentieth century, the actual conditions in these overcrowded dwellings were clearly unhealthful, although improved water and sewer systems had already made an enormous difference even before 1900. After World War II, in a time of reduced population and greater prosperity, housing densities declined and the same buildings gradually acquired a new reputation.

Where buildings were intact, both East and West Berlin encouraged removal of the stucco facade ornamentation as an aesthetic measure; thousands of old buildings now have the same flat plaster exteriors as their postwar neighbors. Another postwar reform in some districts of East and West Berlin was the removal of all back buildings to eliminate the courtyards and create a large open space in the interior of the block.

The 1970s marked a change in thinking. The Mietskaserne was rediscovered—that is, intellectuals and opinion makers embraced it. As West Berlin’s alternative scene grew, students, artists, and nonconformists of many stripes discovered the unrenovated tenements. For them, a toilet down the hall and the absence of a bath merely meant a degree of inconvenience in return for an otherwise unaffordable large apartment, which could be renovated step by step. For rebels against the nuclear family and the traditional home, the large, high-ceilinged rooms continued to offer the flexibility of arrangement their builders had intended. The Mietskaserne presented an alternative to the modem apartment, designed for efficient use of space with small rooms carefully tailored for cooking, eating, or sleeping. As the old buildings attracted residents and small businesses, relatively intact tenement neighborhoods became Berlin’s liveliest areas. Planners and urban critics began to praise the old buildings as incubators of neighborhood identity and attractive urbanity. They became charming rather than dilapidated.

The official goal in the 1990s became the “critical reconstruction” of the inner city. This program began in Friedrichstadt, the old commercial center, whose eighteenth-century grid of wide streets and rectangular blocks established the pattern later extended to the nineteenth-century districts. Much of that grid has been obliterated by megaprojects on both sides of the Wall (the southern Friedrichstadt belonged to West Berlin). Berlin’s planners in the 1990s have partly restored the grid as a first step toward restoration of Berlin’s traditional urban form.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Friedrichstadt gradually changed from middle-class residential neighborhood to bustling commercial quarter. Entrepreneurs tore down the modest old houses and replaced them with ornate, five-story buildings. These new structures had the same dimensions as the new apartment buildings elsewhere in the city, but here they housed mainly offices and shops. The northern Friedrichstadt became the banking center of Germany; the southern part was the newspaper district; fashionable stores settled in between, along Leipziger Strasse. Like the new apartment houses, these buildings were usually built as tall as was permitted. The maximum height depended on the street width but could never exceed seventy-two feet. This is the height limit applied to the cornices of new buildings in the “critically reconstructed” Friedrichstadt.

Critical reconstruction reaches back beyond world wars, dictatorships, and modem urban experiments and finds a Berlin identity in the decades before 1914.

Much of what is famous about Berlin modernity began before World War I, but the demise of the monarchy stamped the new cultural forces with an indelible mark of revolution. In 1918, Berlin saw both the “revolution” of Dada and the revolution of soldiers, sailors, and socialists that toppled the monarchy, each in its own way both farcical and deeply earnest. In the years that followed, few traditions, institutions, or allegiances could be taken for granted; experimentation and contentiousness became the norm.

When department stores appeared in Berlin at the turn of the century, they became the greatest urban monuments to the brave new world of conspicuous consumption. Most of them, including the largest ones, were owned by Jews. The crown jewel of the main shopping street was Wertheim, at the corner of Leipziger Strasse and Leipziger Platz, begun in 1896 by the architect Alfred Messel and expanded several times in the following years. With its glass-roofed atrium, ten thousand light bulbs, and eighty-three elevators, it drew daily crowds of wealthy shoppers and less wealthy gawkers

Tiergarten commercial district in the west boasted a worthy competitor, the Hermann Tietz chain’s Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe, the “Department Store of the West”) on Wittenbergplatz. Unlike its eastern rival, KaDeWe was rebuilt after World War II. It carries on a tradition of tasteful indulgence that hardly anyone now associates with Jews.

In general, Berlin’s 170,000 Jews in the 1920s (4 percent of the city’s population, but a third of all Jews in Germany) were thoroughly assimilated to German culture and had established themselves in the middle classes. From their ranks came Jewish shopkeepers, business magnates, doctors, and artists. Others, however—a quarter of Berlin’s Jews by 1925—were “Ostjuden,” Yiddish-speaking recent immigrants from Poland, Hungary, or Russia.

While most of the assimilated Jews lived in western Berlin, the Ostjuden settled in the narrow streets behind Alexanderplatz, the area known as the Scheuenenviertel, “Shed Quarter,” because animals had been housed there in the eighteenth century. By the turn of the century, as Ostjuden were first arriving in large numbers, the Scheunenviertel was already Berlin’s most notorious slum, and its removal became the goal of Berlin’s only major slum clearance project before World War II.

The Scheunenviertel is yet another Berlin ghost. The heart of it was leveled in 1906–8, but as the Ostjuden gathered in neighboring streets, the name of the quarter followed them. Additional clearance dragged on into the 1930s, when the Nazis openly linked the neighborhood’s seedy reputation with its Jewish population. The Nazis despised the neighborhood doubly: the Communist Party, the leading vote-getter in the neighborhood, moved its headquarters here in 1926. That building, which the party named the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, still stands, but of the old slum few traces remain. Since 1989, however, the Scheunenviertel ha...

Since the Scheunenviertel, as originally known, is long gone, the resonant name is now broadly applied to the relatively intact nineteenth-century streets to the west. Here visitors can find the remnants of Berlin’s first Jewish cemetery (in use from 1672 to 1827), names and symbols carved into stone facades that recall the Jewish boys’ school on Grosse Hamburger Strasse and two rabbinical schools (liberal and Orthodox) on Tucholskystrasse, and, most notably, the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, completed in 1866 as a proud monument to Jews’ civil equality and religious freedom in Germany. This grand building escaped from Kristallnacht in 1938 with only minor damage, but it was bombed out during the war and stood for decades as a ruin near the center of East Berlin. A plaque erected in 1966 explained that the facade would remain standing as a memorial; in 1988, the East German government authorized the restoration of the building’s golden dome and front section (but not the three-thousand-seat sanctuary) for the use of its Jewish community, a task completed several years after reunification. Here and in a few other locales, the reunified city’s small and inconspicuous Jewish community (most of whom are recent arrivals from Eastern Europe) is reviving its ties to the neighborhood.

When Nazi Germany drove out or murdered most Berlin Jews, it shattered the city’s confident modernity. The unbearable memory of the Holocaust, and of Berlin’s vanished Jews, casts its shadow across the golden 1920s too. The fate of the Jews reinforces an image of the 1920s as a time when Berliners threw off the shackles of tradition, with exhilarating but ultimately disastrous results.

elevated rail lines constructed in the 1870s and 1880s (now known as the S-Bahn):

At the turn of the century came the first subway lines (U-Bahn),

For Germans, the incessant movement of Berlin was the real and visible embodiment of the hypermodern urbanity they associated with the United States—thus it was an “American city,” or a “German Chicago.” The cosmopolitan restlessness also seemed somehow Jewish. A favorite word of the time was “Tempo”; when the Jewish-owned Ullstein press syndicate launched a racy tabloid newspaper of that name in 1928, it immediately acquired the nickname “die jüdische Hast”—“Jewish haste,” a colloquial German phrase that recalls the linkage of Jews, commerce, and perpetual motion.