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

by Brian Ladd

What was striking about Potsdamer Platz by the 1960s, then, was the contrast between the memories (or, if you needed them, the pictures) of bustle and the utter desolation that had replaced it. By the 1960s, East and West Berlin, each in its own way, must have been among the least lively cities of their size in the world; the demoralized population on both sides of the Wall missed the activity and the personalities that typified early-twentieth-century Berlin. Potsdamer Platz thus embodied a Berlin state of mind in the 1960s, as it had half a century before.

Potsdamer Platz had largely taken its familiar form by 1914. Perhaps the most significant postwar addition was the traffic signal tower erected in 1925 at the center of the intersection, Europe’s first traffic light.

the physical destruction of Potsdamer Platz began even before the war, as several nearby blocks were cleared in the first phase of Hitler’s plans for rebuilding Berlin. World War II then left most of the remaining buildings in ruins. After 1945, Potsdamer Platz marked the border between the Soviet and British sectors, where capitalism confronted Communism. Just after the war, a black market thrived here—itself a form of capitalist subversion, in Communist eyes—and during the 1950s the two sides waged a duel of signs. On the Western side, an electrical message sign beamed a running stream of news and information (the Communists called it propaganda) toward the East. The East responded with a sign advising wise Berliners to shop at its state-run “HO” stores.

When the Wall went up eight years later, the East Berlin side of the square became the death strip; all remaining buildings there were leveled.

On the Western side, most of the damaged buildings had already been demolished during the 1950s. Then, after the Wall went up, West Berlin turned its back on Potsdamer Platz. Beginning in the 1960s, the vacant area to its west was rebuilt with a widely dispersed array of buildings known as the Kulturforum, featuring the New National Gallery (designed by Mies van der Rohe) and two sprawling gold-roofed buildings by Hans Scharoun, Philharmonic Hall and the State Library. In building the Kulturforum, the West even rearranged the old streets to shift the focal point away from the dead end at Potsdamer Platz. Little remained at the square itself other than the souvenir stands that catered to busloads of tourists. Visitors came to gawk at the Wall and to buy postcards (or, for a time, see a billboard) showing contrasting pictures of Potsdamer Platz “then” and “now.” Tour books and tour guides told them that this had been the busiest intersection in Germany, or Europe, or the world, dubious claims repeated enough to acquire the ring of authority. Visitors marveled at the power of the Wall to turn a central place into a marginal one. Along the hundred miles of the Berlin Wall, nowhere was it more clearly revealed as a physical and symbolic barrier stemming the motion of modernity

On the old Potsdamer Platz, many buildings and businesses had developed in close proximity and had jostled for attention. No one has figured out how to plan that kind of unplanned liveliness, and many critics thought the Berlin government was not even trying. It moved quickly to sell large wedges of land bordering Potsdamer Platz to four major companies. The first, receiving the largest parcel, was Stuttgart-based Daimler-Benz, Germany’s largest corporation (best known for its Mercedes automobiles, but also an electronics and aerospace conglomerate). The city government jumped at the chance to secure a high-profile Daimler-Benz presence in central Berlin, selling it fifteen acres of land cheaply. Next came Sony, proposing to build its European headquarters just across the street. The other parcels went to the Hertie department store chain (the successor to Hermann Tietz, with its “Aryanized” name from the 1930s) and the multinational engineering company Asea Brown Boveri (ABB).

So much for diversity and street life, thought some critics, envisioning the area as a desolate zone of self-enclosed office towers. So much for planning, thought others: the decisions had been made before either planners or the public contributed their thoughts. What ensued was a messy set of negotiations between the city, trying to salvage something of Potsdamer Platz’s urban diversity, and the corporate landowners, now functioning as real estate developers. The inevitable result was a compromise between the ideal of the corporate tower and that of critical reconstruction, and between the corporations’ demand for eleven thousand parking spaces and the city’s goal of a lively street scene. Daimler-Benz chose the Italian architect Renzo Piano to create an overall design for its complex of buildings, which were parceled out to several architects building for various clients. Sony chose a design by the German-American Helmut Jahn; ABB, that of another Italian, Giorgio Grassi. As the city demanded, each plan proposed a mixture of uses for the land and buildings, including shopping and a few apartments as well as offices. The result, for many years, was an enormous construction site; how the new Potsdamer Platz functions will not be clear until well into the twenty-first century.

Two ghosts hovered over the new Potsdamer Platz: radical 1920s modernism and its 1930s successor, Nazism.

In 1920, Scheffler was one of several critics asked by a newspaper to respond to the question, “How will Potsdamer Platz look in twenty-five years?”—that is, in 1945. Scheffler submitted an imaginary debate that included this vision: The buildings on the square will be ravaged, robbed of their usable materials; they will be ruins. The broken pavement will be overgrown with grass and bushes. No streetcars will run, a car will be seen but rarely, and only a few people will creep about timidly. The square will swarm with rats and mice from the neglected Tiergarten. Once a day a train will arrive in the station, and a handful of travelers clutching thin valises will scurry into the city, followed by the threatening eyes of the rabble living in the ruins. At night no lights will shine.30 Scheffler, the prophet of flux, was playing with ideas. Modernism did not cause the destruction of Potsdamer Platz, but the early modernists could contemplate transfiguration and destruction with an equanimity not possible after 1945.

In rebuilding the Reichstag, Potsdamer Platz, and its old urban grid, Berlin has chosen to embrace an early phase of modernity that concluded in 1918, and to distance itself from more recent and disquieting assaults on tradition.

the site of the chancellery would have received more attention had it lain in West Berlin. East Germany’s own treatment of its Nazi legacy did not encourage open debate and denied the significance of individual personalities.

Berlin, for its part, was no Nazi stronghold. Although the party’s local Gauleiter, Joseph Goebbels, managed to create a core of support and a great deal of violence in the city, the majority of its voters supported the Communists and the Social Democrats. So when the Nazis came to power in 1933, many of them felt they had seized the capital from their enemies.

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 ...

the Reichstag. Hitler liked the building’s architecture even if he despised the institution, and he vetoed Speer’s proposal to demolish it.

The redesigned Königsplatz would be a vast square intended to hold a million people. The Führer’s Palace on its western side would face the Reichstag, augmented by a new addition. The northern end of the square would be dominated by an enormous hall capped by a dome 825 feet in diameter, rising to a height of 954 feet. This proposed building’s volume was sixteen times that of St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome. Its main purpose was to hold a crowd of more than 150,000 that would stand and hear Hitler speak.

The Great Hall’s counterpart at its southern end was the Great Arch, a Roman-style triumphal arch that differed from its model, Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, mainly in being two and a half times as high, with a width and depth greater than its height and a volume forty-nine times that of the Parisian arch. On its walls would be carved the names of the 1.8 million Germans who died in World War I.

By spoiling Speer’s plans, the war saved Berlin from one destruction while subjecting it to another. The pressing needs of war slowed and eventually stopped all work, although the demolition of buildings continued as late as 1942. By then many blocks had been cleared to make way for the north-south axis, and British bombers were supplementing the work of Speer’s crews. The journal of his office sardonically described the air raids as “valuable preparation for the goal of reorganization.”11 Visitors as well as Berliners usually blame wartime bombing for the utter desolation of the areas north of the Reichstag and west of Potsdamer Platz, but many buildings there were already gone when the bombers went to work.

All urban planning contains an authoritarian element; planning and architecture are always linked closely to power. The opportunity for the ruthless exercise of power made the Third Reich a dream come true for an ambitious architect like Speer as well as a megalomaniac dreamer like Hitler.

There is something disturbing about the uncompleted Speer plan, something more than its scale and the name of its patron. It proposed to subordinate the bustling city to a higher purpose. The rail stations, for example, represent an element of practical city planning, but they also contribute to the plan’s essential theatricality. As the writer Elias Canetti has pointed out, Hitler’s sense of power depended on the attraction and subjection of crowds.12 Canetti sees the names of Hitler’s fellow World War I soldiers, carved on the Great Arch, as his first crowd, but new crowds would perpetually have to be fed into his boulevard, his square, and his hall. The rail stations would produce them somehow, but not in the same way that rail stations and other transportation nodes produce the crowds in any city center. Hitler’s Berlin would replace the chaotic bustle of shoppers and flaneurs with the regimented order of marching men and cheering hordes, something Speer partly recognized after serving a twenty-year sentence for war crimes. Upon his release from Spandau prison in 1966, he drove by the war-damaged ruins of the one building actually constructed for the north-south axis, the House of German Tourism near Potsdamer Platz. (It was demolished soon afterward to make way for Hans Scharoun’s new State Library.) “I saw in a few seconds what I had been blind to for years: our plan completely lacked a sense of proportion.”13 In planning for vast, manipulated crowds, Hitler and Spee...

The Third Reich’s architectural legacy in Berlin goes far beyond Hitler’s personal plans. A great number of buildings were put up for one reason or another between 1933 and 1945, and many of them still stand. National Socialist architecture did not take a single form: industrial buildings continued to display glass, steel, and concrete in typically modernist fashion, and suburban and small-town houses were built in rustic, half-timbered styles. But in Berlin the Third Reich built mostly government offices, and buildings that displayed the power and authority of the Nazi state had to meet a different standard. Their style is distinctive; a moderately experienced eye can usually pick them out from among others built under earlier or later regimes. Stone facades, generous proportions, massive window and door frames, rigid symmetry, starkly simplified columns and other classical details—together these elements give a jolt of recognition to the unsuspecting passerby in many obscure Berlin streets and courtyards.

Are these buildings disqualified for normal use? Or can they somehow be denazified? In the first postwar years these questions were rarely posed: an intact building was too precious to be subject to moral scruples, whereas it was easy to consign damaged Third Reich buildings to oblivion. (Except where extraterritorial rights intervened: the massive Spanish, Italian, and Japanese embassies south of the Tiergarten sat for decades in ruins and in limbo; the first two remain that way.)15 After a generation had passed, doubts and questions were raised here and there: Should a particular building’s history somehow be acknowledged, at least by a plaque if not by its entire function? Should a given ruin be saved to help keep alive memories of Nazi crimes? Usually the answer was no, but the questions lingered.

The complex, with its capacity for enormous crowds, was never intended for athletic use alone; after the games it would—and did—serve “national” uses, which meant military or quasimilitary activities. Thus, the events here during the closing months of World War II were arguably suited to its original purpose: hundreds of accused deserters were summarily shot in a ravine; and, as happened throughout Germany, very young and very old men gathered here for induction into the “Volkssturm,”

Another massive structure from the Third Reich has been even more thoroughly denazified. Tempelhof airport, originally established in 1923, was expanded during the mid-1930s in anticipation of an enormous increase in air traffic.

The airport was one of the largest Third Reich structures to survive the war, and the emphatic link between the Reich capital and air travel, as embodied in Tempelhof, was arguably a major Nazi contribution to city planning. But the growth of air transport was not unique to Nazis or dictators, so circumstances quickly weakened the link between Tempelhof and its creators. During the years of division, Tempelhof airport became associated with the U.S. military presence, since it served as the Americans’ airfield—exclusively so from 1975 to 1990, when Tegel airport handled all civil air traffic. More notably, Tempelhof was the most prominent site of the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49: the “raisin bombers” landing there brought West Berliners much of their food and fuel for eleven months. Since 1951 the approach to the terminal, now named Airlift Square, has been marked by a soaring monument commemorating the airlift. One further event in the history of the building reveals how completely it has become associated with German-American friendship.

Sagebiel’s other major building in Berlin, the former Reich Ministry of Aviation, has also survived intact, and postwar events redefined it as well. But its redefinition took a different course because it stood in East Berlin. Like Tempelhof, this early Third Reich project was linked to the expansion of air travel, but here the emphasis was entirely martial. Although Hermann Göring’s new ministry was responsible for both civil and military air travel, the impetus for the project—begun in 1935 and finished the next year—was clearly the establishment of a powerful air force.

After the war its large size and intact state—in contrast to the rest of Wilhelmstrasse—made the building attractive to the new East German government. A dozen ministries were given office space there, and it was renamed the “House of Ministries,” which it remained until 1990. In it was held the ceremony in 1949 officially establishing the German Democratic Republic. A mural along the building’s north loggia commemorates this event. The building’s importance as a center of government also made it a center of attention during the East German uprising in 1953: striking workers marched to the House of Ministries to present their demands for economic and political reforms. Not surprisingly, the GDR chose to leave no trace of that day. On the uprising’s fortieth anniversary, therefore, the building’s new masters dedicated a commemorative plaque. The plaque was mounted on a pillar directly in front of the GDR’s mural. The building is thus marked by competing memorials of the GDR rather than any reference to its original use. Proposals for a plaque remembering the terror bombing planned here—of Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry—have come to nothing.

Third Reich ministries and agencies left behind many other buildings. Their construction reflected both the growth of central government authority and the desire of leading Nazis to display their power in the most visible and permanent way. After the war, hard-pressed national and municipal authorities on both sides of the Wall understandably chose to see intact buildings as office space rather than as Nazi statements in stone.

Other silent witnesses to the war, prominently visible in this very flat city, are the artificial hills built from the rubble of thousands of destroyed buildings. Two of them, in East Berlin’s Friedrichshain and West Berlin’s Humboldthain Parks, partially cover massive flak towers that were the scourge of British and American bomber crews. It is widely known that West Berlin’s highest hill, “Devil’s Mountain,” is also made of rubble.

By 1986, however, German leaders no longer saw commemoration of the Holocaust as just a Jewish matter. The city agreed to turn the villa into a Holocaust Memorial Center, which opened on the fiftieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference in 1992.

The exhibition established during the 1980s on the site of the Gestapo and SS headquarters is perhaps the most self-conscious attempt to uncover the historical legacy of a particular place in Berlin. The exhibition’s title, “The Topography of Terror,” reveals its organizers’ ambition: to link history (the Third Reich) and geography (Berlin and Europe). And there can be little doubt about the historical significance of the site in question. Unlike the Wannsee villa, its notoriety does not depend on a single day or event.

In May 1933, the new Nazi government chose the applied art school’s former building at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 as the headquarters of the newly established secret police agency, the Gestapo. (Despite its name—Gestapo is short for Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police—the location of its headquarters was always public knowledge.) The Gestapo was established under the authority of Hermann Göring, then prime minister of Prussia. But Heinrich Himmler, the “Reichsführer SS,” soon sought control of all German police forces, and in April 1934 Goring named him head of the Gestapo. Shortly thereafter he moved SS headquarters from Munich to the Hotel Prinz Albrecht, next door to Gestapo headquarters. The same year, the Prinz Albrecht palace just behind was leased to the SS’s Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD). The SD’s job was to keep tabs on the Nazi Party’s enemies. Its head, Reinhard Heydrich, was Himmler’s closest aide, and under the latter’s formal leadership he also ran the Gestapo from 1934 on. In 1939, in fact, the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the SD were formally united in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office), headed by Heydrich and officially headquartered at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8.

By the mid-1950s, the remains of all the SS buildings had been demolished. In the years that followed, the land was cleared of rubble and leveled, leaving no trace of the old buildings. Some of them could have been restored, but there was no will to do so. This site met the same fate as the rest of Wilhelmstrasse, across the border in East Berlin, where the chancellery and the old ministries had stood. Down Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, the less seriously damaged Ethnology Museum remained standing—and in use—until it too was demolished in the early 1960s. Between it and the vanished Gestapo headquarters, the gutted and gashed shell of the former applied art museum continued to stand alone, its future uncertain. Meanwhile, forward-looking plans for the new Berlin proposed practical new uses for the vacant site: in 1956, a helicopter landing pad; in 1957, a highway. But city planning once again yielded to world history—this time the Cold War. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse marked the border between the Soviet and American sectors; hence the Berlin Wall ran the length of the street after 1961. By then the feared name had disappeared from the map: in 1951 the East Berlin government (to whom the street itself belonged) renamed it Niederkirchnerstrasse after Käte Niederkirchner, a Communist resistance fighter killed in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. But after 1961, only border guards walked or drove down Niederkirchnerstrasse.

It is probably of great importance that the consensus in favor of preservation had emerged by 1989. It had been much easier to agree that history forbade any normal use of the land when the land was of little value anyway. The fall of the Wall delayed and complicated the planning for the site, but the basic decisions remained unchanged. After all—as several supporters of the “Topography of Terror” pointed out—the unification of Germany and the return of the capital to Berlin made it all the more certain that the world would be watching how the Germans come to terms with the darkest chapter of their history.

To return the land to its appearance as of 1945 would thus be a falsification of history. As the writer Günter Grass put it in a public discussion of the site: “A part of the history of these crimes is naturally the period of forty years and more during which memories were suppressed, because the manner of suppression helps to explain the causes of the crimes.”

Characteristic of a monument is the reduction of a complex development to a single aspect that the monument’s sponsors have identified as the most important. Such a monument is thus the result of a selection; it prevents the observer’s own confrontation with the complex historical event.

a monument can obscure an urban and historical context and replace a rational search for understanding with an emotionally gripping symbol.

The decision to build a central memorial to victims led, perhaps inevitably, to an unseemly squabble among the victims. Representatives of the Roma (Gypsies) argued that the extermination of their people must not be separated from that of the Jews. After an ugly debate in which each side invoked Nazi racial categories to characterize the Third Reich’s treatment of the two groups, the Roma were promised their own memorial, although city leaders disagreed about whether it should be nearby or at the suburban location of a former Gypsy prison camp. Roma leaders, in turn, declined to share their memorial with homosexuals or Communists, who, they argued, had not been persecuted for racial reasons. Soon skeptics began to raise the specter of a landscape of segregated victims’ memorials.

the Active Museum led the opposition, arguing that a central memorial to victims was fine in Washington or Jerusalem, but that the land of the perpetrators had more pressing tasks of remembrance. Germany could honor its victims at dozens of concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, both just outside Berlin and both sadly neglected. These were authentic places of victims, in other words, while the chancellery was an authentic place of perpetrators, where attention should be devoted to the causes of mass murder, not its effects.

How could an artist’s design give form to Germany’s need to remember the Holocaust? This was the skeptical question posed by those who saw Rosh’s proposal as a “nineteenth-century” monument. Its massive dimensions, its detachment from any authentic site, and its lack of subtlety and paradoxical vagueness of purpose seemed to preclude any connection to the lives of Berliners and other Germans. Commenting on an earlier project, Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm had feared that “reality disappears when art is put in its place.” Whenever that most painful of legacies, the extermination of the Jews, is at issue, he added, “suddenly our society displays an unbelievable trust in art.”

Advocates of these “countermonuments” feared that the effect, or even the purpose, of Rosh’s central memorial would be to separate the events of the Third Reich from the collective memory of the city.38 They saw it as a step backward, a large version of the all-too-harmless signs that have stood in two squares in Schoneberg since 1967. Each of these signs lists the names of ten (since 1995, twelve) concentration camps under the heading, “Places of terror that we must never forget.” The signs, though they probably still shock some passersby, have long been mocked for the apparently arbitrary placement that makes them easy to ignore. If it is built, the new memorial will of course be far more impressive—at least in size—and will dominate its surroundings more effectively. But it will also be more permanent, a final statement rather than an invitation to discussion or interaction. Berliners quickly scorned the project as a “wreath-dumping place” (Kranzabwurfstelle). As a protest, Stih and Schnock entered the competition with a proposal to devote the land to a bus stop from which visitors could catch rides to the authentic sites of concentration camps.

the desire to end the postwar era, overcome the burden of the past, end the mourning, and make Germany a normal nation.40

This step is often and more abstrusely labeled the “historicization” of the Third Reich. Some see it as desirable, others as inevitable, still others as something to be resisted at all costs. The historians and artists who have so creatively engaged history in the city—in the Bendlerblock, the Topography of Terror, and elsewhere—generally see their work as contributing to a confrontation with the Nazi past that is far from complete. They use the power of place to make that past vivid, comprehensible, and inextricable from the lives of today’s Berliners. In showing how thoroughly the Third Reich permeated the daily life of the city, their work implies that that era is far more than mere history. Rosh’s Holocaust memorial, standing apart from the visible remnants of Nazi Berlin, would offer a different message. Perhaps it should not be directly compared to these other, lesser memorials: it is larger, simpler, more palatable, and therefore likely to reach a far wider public. Most important, it eschews the relentlessly rational confrontation with the past in favor of a grand symbolic gesture.

Even the best efforts of the British, American, and Soviet armed forces had not sufficed to wipe Berlin off the map: most of its buildings still stood, reparable if not intact. The photographs and film footage we often see of postwar Berlin understandably focus on the scenes of most utter devastation—which were not hard to find. In a perverse way, those who proclaimed Berlin a total loss were guilty of wishful thinking. They included reformers who had long wished to sweep away the city of Mietskasernen—that is, to correct the errors of nineteenth-century urban development. That reformist impulse was powerfully reinforced by the widespread desire to suppress all possible links to the capital of the Third Reich, whether that desire was motivated by revulsion at the Nazis or by a sense of guilt. Although the ruins were real enough, “zero hour”—and thus a new beginning—was more of a hope than a fact.

Gaza too?

Just as important as the many salvageable buildings was the presence of the urban infrastructure, much of it invisible below ground. These sinews of the modern city—water, sewer, and gas lines, street paving and subway tunnels—were more than 90 percent intact. A fundamental reorganization of the city would have required rebuilding these systems at enormous cost. Quickly, then, Berlin after “zero hour” had to acknowledge its physical heritage.

with the practical uses of old buildings and streets came historical continuities and symbolic baggage.

By the late 1940s, then, planners worked for one side or the other, and plans for the entire city—which continued to emerge from West Berlin—took on an air of fantasy. It was clear, not for the first or the last time, that both the economic and physical development of the city depended on decisions about its political status.

In 1952, when the East German government sealed the border between East and West Germany, it further isolated West Berlin: the electrical grids were separated and the telephone lines were cut. The culmination of the schism came only in 1961 with the building of the Berlin Wall, which completely divided the city at ground level and left the public transit systems entirely separated.

Even then the two Berlins were not totally isolated from one another, but the extent of remaining contacts was very limited: postal service, a teletype connection between the police forces, telephone connections between the transit systems and the fire departments, Western subway lines that traveled under Eastern territory without stopping, a train system in the West operated by the East, Eastern water serving a few corners of West Berlin, and sewage flowing freely under the Wall wherever gravity so dictated. The result was a need for a few discreet technical discussions and an occasional skirmish over fees or sovereignty. The thaw in East-West relations around 1970 led to a resumption of telephone service, a few more opportunities for people to cross the Wall, and negotiations to share supplies of electricity, gas, and garbage.

West Berliners at first saw little of the economic growth transforming West Germany. Well into the 1950s, the standard of living was not greatly different on the two sides of town: most people were fairly poor, and they did what they could to profit, legally or otherwise, from the juxtaposition of two currencies and two economies. It is also important to remember that in the postwar years, even after the airlift, many Germans took seriously the GDR’s aspirations to be the “antifascist” German state, a place open not only to Communists but to all who wished to build a new Germany unlike the Third Reich. After the city government split, in fact, Scharoun and some of his associates at first continued to work for East Berlin. Neither they nor anyone else could have predicted the ways the Cold War would give new meanings to architectural forms.

Neither side ever fully acknowledged the division of the city; the official view in East and West was that Berlin was one city and the other side was responsible for its unfortunate partition. Planners maintained direct contact until 1956 and thereafter upheld a certain unspoken cooperation, trying to avoid projects that would negate their counterparts’ work, should the Wall disappear. In other words, both sides continued to some extent to plan as if Berlin were a single city—but as if that city were theirs. Each side’s desire to appropriate urban traditions belied its claim to be making a fresh start. Paradoxically, then, while each German regime granted the other the honor of being the Third Reich’s true successor, each nevertheless claimed the legacy of Berlin for itself.