The New Old World (42 page)

In the nineties, the prospect of Berlin becoming once again the capital of a united Germany was widely expected to set off an anticipatory boom, as building contracts for ministries and corporate headquarters multiplied, real estate prices rose, employment grew and immigrants poured in. Ironically, however, Berlin has suffered a sharp economic decline since unity. Even after the formal decision to move from Bonn, resistance delayed the transfer of government by nearly a decade. Meanwhile, after Berlin became a ‘normal'
Land
with the end of the Cold War,
tax-payers in the West saw no reason to continue its privileges, and once subsidies were cut, industries left—while in the East, unification triggered a general industrial collapse, engulfing Berlin as much as anywhere else.

The results are stark. Since 1989 the population has fallen, with an exodus to the surrounding countryside; 200,000 industrial jobs have been destroyed; growth is currently negative; bankruptcies are twice the national average; and unemployment is running at nearly 20 per cent. A few international companies have set up their local HQs in Berlin, but virtually no major German corporation has made the move. Incredibly, with less than a year to go before the arrival of the whole paraphernalia of government in the city, housing prices have actually been dropping. Set beside the sleek affluence of Munich, Hamburg or Frankfurt, the future capital is going to remain a poor relation.

In this setting, what is likely to be the impact of the slow descent of federal political power, like some cumbersome dirigible, into the middle of the city? No issue has attracted more polemic in Berlin than the design of the new
Regierungsviertel
—the complex of governmental buildings that are bound to become insignia of the capital in the collective imaginary. Every month there are public debates on different aspects of the reconstruction of the city, held in the Council of State building where Honecker once presided over the DDR. To participate in one is a memorable experience: experts and pundits at loggerheads, audiences dividing passionately, and—unmatched for choleric lack of inhibition—the master builder of the city, urban planner Hans Stimmann, white-maned and red-brick in complexion, yelling at the top of his voice in a style few would associate with a municipal authority, let alone a German one.
⁹
But the stakes are high. For here not only the shape of the future but the place of the past, not only relations between the public and the private, but tensions between East and West, are at issue.

The original plans for a unified Berlin envisaged building a completely new government district in the centre, with a
contemporary architecture worthy of the élan of Schinkel, integrating the torn halves of the city. This vision was soon abandoned, ostensibly on grounds of cost. In reality, it was ditched out of a mixture of continuing resentment at the prospect of a move from Bonn in the Western
Länder
, indifference to the fate of the East of the city in West Berlin itself (which, with twice the population, calls the shots in local government), and rejection of any risk of magnificence in a German capital. The result has been two-fold. The new government ‘axis'—its line truncated where it would have extended to the East—is now restricted to the West.
¹⁰
Here the florid Wilhelmine shell of the Reichstag has been fitted out with an oversize transparent dome and high-tech interior by Foster—inverting the gesture of the narrow Baroque façade stripped onto the Khruschevian girth of the
Staatsratgebäude
across the border.

Official pieties would have it that the Reichstag has been restored in honour of its valiant defence of democratic values in the past. In reality, of course, it was here that German democracy tamely voted Hitler into power, electing him chancellor of its own parliamentary will. The real reason for the resuscitation of the building is that the ruin was a symbolic property of the West, rather than the East, in the Cold War. It would have been better to start afresh. Axel Schultes's new executive office, where Schröder will take up residence next year—a light, elegant structure—shows what might have been done. Between the two will lie lowslung parliamentary facilities, pleasing enough, but now purged of the open concourse where it was once envisaged citizens could mingle and contend within the arcades of power. To the north, just across the Spree, the graceful curve of the Lehrte railway station—which may prove the most beautiful of the new public buildings—will dominate. To the south, the commercial centre run up by Daimler-Benz and Sony on the site of the old Potsdamer Platz, frittering away the combined talents of Piano, Isozaki, Rogers, Jahn and Moneo, will no doubt end up as a blowzy shoppingmall—sealed off from its surroundings as if planted in a suburb—like every other a tomb of conviviality.

In the East, on the other hand, there are no major new federal projects. The worst relics of the DDR, tinted fun-vault and
bulbous TV-tower, have been left in place at the end of a still inarticulate Unter den Linden. The private sector has developed the area around the Friedrichstrasse, with offices, shops and restaurants—Nouvel, Johnson, Rossi—that offer somewhat more life, though it is still quite thin. The principal contribution of the state is going to be the conspicuous refurbishment of two Nazi landmarks, Schacht's Reichsbank and Goering's Air Ministry, as the Foreign Office and Finance Ministry of the Berlin Republic. Any idea of new creations—well within the purse of the authorities—banished, Fischer and Lafontaine can now dispatch affairs where Hitler once inspected. Setting aside excuses of cost, which may have had some validity for keeping such buildings under the DDR but have lost any today, the official rationale for reoccupying these hideous structures is that it is even a sort of atonement to do so—since they may serve as a daily reminder of the enormities of the past, which it would be wrong to level. A widespread rhetoric—the same argument is used for preserving the direst eyesores left by the Second Reich or the DDR—insists that they are ‘historical documents' upon which the German people must learn to meditate.

The chance of a generously unitary political capital in Berlin has thus been refused, in favour of a reduced precinct in the West and the updating of sinister mausolea in the East. This bureaucratic option is defended on two grounds. Firstly, that any attempt to build an integrated government district might be seen as a dangerous hubris or arrogant over-statement by the German nation within Europe; and secondly, that Germans need constant remembrance of the darkness of their own past. Evident is an ideological will to fix civic memory on images stamped by guilt or nostalgia—the element of guilt mostly coming from the West, the element of nostalgia (for the Palace of the Republic, etc.) from the East. The result is a kind of an antiquarian masochism—a clinging to what is aesthetically ugly, often
because
it was also morally and politically ugly, in the name of truth to history.

Such mortification betrays a deep intellectual confusion. For public buildings are not documents, but monuments. A historical document is a text that can be studied, in an archive or library, when a researcher needs to consult it—otherwise it does not impose itself on anyone. An urban monument, by contrast, is an unavoidable daily sight imposed on all who pass by or use it. You cannot put a public building away in a file. Such structures must be judged in the first place on aesthetic grounds. The political
or ideological functions they may, or may not, have served can change over time, but are never decisive for political reality, which has its own arena and dynamic, built not out of bricks but social relations. Italian Fascism was capable in its day of pleasing or striking buildings, which have continued to be used, indeed enjoyed: no one has ever thought of blowing up the railway station in Florence. Nazi edifices like the Reichsbank or Luftwaffe HQ should have been demolished not so much because of their associations, but because they are brutal and forbidding as architecture.

The idea that Germans need such buildings as perpetual hair-shirts, to earn the trust of their neighbours, is not just a misconception. For Europeans do not on the whole fear the ghosts of Bismarck, Hitler or Honecker: neither Wilhelmine Imperialism, nor Nazism, nor Stalinism, are serious threats today. A constant preoccupation with them can easily become a screen for more pressing issues, as in Freudian terms an obsession with imaginary dangers typically functions as a displacement—that is, repression—of quite other, real problems. So it is that Europe has some reason for misgivings about a reunited Germany. But its rational fears relate to contemporary institutions: not the legacies of Ludendorff or Speer, but the overweening reach of the Bundesbank, as the most powerful institution in the country, over the lives and jobs of millions of Europeans—a hegemony now entrenched in the design and personnel of the European Central Bank. It is the fanatical cult of sound money, the insistence on arbitrary and anti-social criteria for convergence in the Treaty of Maastricht, the relentless pressure for a ‘Stability Pact' after it, which a self-critical German public should have been concerned about. But, with few exceptions—Helmut Schmidt the most eloquent—here national complacency has been virtually boundless. Hans Tietmeyer and Otmar Issing have exercised their enormous, continent-wide power from the most inconspicuous and modest of buildings in Frankfurt. What nicer symbol of German good conscience?

A better relationship between aesthetics and politics would reverse these morbid terms. There should have been no inhibition in Berlin about erecting the finest—the most delicate or the most magnificent—buildings that any contemporary architect can design: the more, and the more integrated, the better. That would have been not just a contribution to a real annealing of the city, but a gift to European unity as well. When we go to Paris, or to Rome, or to Barcelona—cities built with a generous sense of
splendour—we do not think of them as exclusively French, or Italian, or Catalan possessions. They are sources of a common delight. It is in that confident spirit, for which sensuous beauty—not sheer utility, and still less self-flagellating memory—is the highest urban value, that the rest of Europe must hope Berlin can still in some measure be rebuilt.

As for ‘historical documents', for those who want them, there is a perfect solution. Lying underground—like an archive, where only the interested need go—are Hitler's bunker and the far larger subterranean lair built for his government, just south of Unter den Linden, which the Russians lacked the technology to destroy. Officially, the authorities have not yet admitted the existence of these potent remnants of the Third Reich. Why not restore these for reflective viewing? The question embarrasses the loyal functionaries of the
Denkmalschutz
, who off the record reply: it would be wrong to erase them and it would be wrong to restore them—it is best they remain hidden, abandoned to the natural processes of time. Overground, meanwhile, pedestrians can suffer the Air Ministry. Amid such confusions the one true resolution of the problems of historical memory, in their gravest sense, stands out: Daniel Libeskind's—all but literally—fulgurating museum of Jewish history, a zinc-clad masterpiece in which the past is represented with awesome power in its rightful place.

If the economic prospects of Berlin remain precarious, and its political function guarantees only that MPs and civil servants will reside there, what of its cultural role? In many ways, this is the decisive question for the future of the city, since not only does political life quicken if there is a real cultural tissue around it, but the level of economic activity is likely to depend critically on the specific weight of the communications industry in the capital. Everyone remembers the extraordinary cultural vitality of Berlin in Weimar days. Could something of that return? During the Cold War, both parts of the city maintained, heavily subsidized for reasons of prestige, complexes of great distinction in the worlds of theatre and music. DDR writers tended to be concentrated in East Berlin, with fewer counterparts across the Wall. An extensive bohemia—the ‘alternative scene': the term
Szene
is used much more freely and indiscriminately in German than English—flourished in the West, where there was exemption from national service, and by the end there was even a modest pendant to it in
the East. The end of the Cold War hit all this hard. The virtual collapse of the Berliner Ensemble suggests the general trend. Music survived much better than drama; Berlin offers perhaps still the best repertoire of any big European city. No doubt theatre will recover too. The nineties have been a strange time in limbo for Berlin, no longer the spoilt child of inter-bloc rivalry and not yet the capital of a reunited country. The real question, however, is whether the arrival of government will eventually attract those elements of a metropolitan culture the city lacked even at its heyday as the front-line of the Cold War.

In the Bonn Republic, Cologne and Düsseldorf became the centre of the art world; Munich got the film industry; television was based in Mainz and Cologne; the most influential newspaper and publishing houses were in Frankfurt; the leading weeklies came out of Hamburg; the two major media empires—Holtzbrinck and Bertelsmann—have their headquarters in Stuttgart and the miniscule company town of Gütersloh. In the Weimar period, by contrast, most of this range of activities was concentrated in Berlin, with the art galleries of Cassirer, the UEFA film studios in Babelsberg, the Ullstein and Mosse publishing empires.
¹¹
Today, there are signs that younger artists are coming back to the city, but the Rhenish grip on the art market remains unshaken. Modernization of the traditional complex in Babelsberg—technically in Potsdam—where DEFA made its name under the DDR, probably ensures that the cinema will become an important industry again. Nor is it difficult to imagine Berlin becoming once more the literary capital of the nation: already the German novelist most recently admired abroad, detective-story writer Bernhard Schlink, teaches constitutional law at the Free University; the most gifted literary critic of the younger generation, Michael Maar, has just moved to the city; the leading intellectual journal in the country,
Merkur
, has relocated to Berlin, even if its animating iconoclast and aesthetician, Karl-Heinz Bohrer, edits it—a nice European touch—long-distance from Paris.