Center and Periphery in the New Berlin: Architecture, Public Art, and the Search for Identity

It has been a decade since the Berlin Wall was breached and two cities that had grown apart were suddenly given the chance to grow together. But, the euphoria of November 1989 did not last. Neither East nor West Berlin was a particularly optimistic place, and the attempt to infuse optimism in the form of a grand new city center defied too much history. Boosterism suits Berlin poorly. If the city is thriving (a much-disputed question), it may be doing so in spite of its most fervent promoters.

Anyone who knew the West Berlin of the 1980s should not be surprised at the gloom that prevails in many corners of the reunified city at the end of the millennium. During what turned out to be the last phase of the Cold War, West Berlin, even more than the rest of West Germany, was filled with defeatists. Despite the nearly universal distaste for the drab vision of communism that lurked just behind the Berlin Wall, most West Berlin intellectuals and students were repelled by the anti-communist rhetoric of a Ronald Reagan. Their reading of German history had led them to the conclusion that any call to arms was an incitement to evil deeds. This mood permitted the discomforts of post-Wall life to spoil the triumph of 1989. The writer Günter Grass, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, was the most prominent figure to declare that the memory of Auschwitz forbade German unification. As a more parochial matter, the end of the Wall did not make the quiet enclave of West Berlin a more pleasant place; on the contrary, it became more crowded and (many believed) less safe. Nor did most West Berliners really enjoy the constant presence of the poor and uncouth Easterners.

East Berliners nursed their own sour grapes. Within the German Democratic Republic, East Berlin had been an expensively subsidized showcase showing off new buildings as well as consumer products all too obviously lacking in the provinces. Therefore East Berliners bore the resentment of their fellow East Germans, while at the same time viewing their city through the eyes of Westerners (as seen on television), whose poor cousins they so clearly were. After 1989, Easterners' joy faded as they felt alien and unwelcome in the West and as the price of Western-style unification--unemployment and uncertainty--became apparent.

The promise of reconciliation was embodied in a newly rebuilt center that would knit together East and West, socially and economically as well as physically. That new center would make Berlin the city its promoters wished it to be, one that would revive the flair of the 1920s and also match the attractions of London, New York, or whichever world city one might point to. The new center was also the old center: it was roughly defined by the district of Mitte (Middle), the eighteenth-century city, which had ended up in the Soviet sector when the city was divided. Along the western border of Mitte (where the old city bordered the Tiergarten, the royal park) had stood the central section of the Berlin Wall, punctuated by the long-closed Brandenburg Gate. The Wall's removal left a void there.

In our time excitement is often associated with a dynamic real estate market, and certainly the public and private investment in Berlin construction, the latter drawn by generous tax incentives, has been staggering. The government's most visible contribution has been on the edge of the Tiergarten, in the area anchored by the old Reichstag building. After Christo was permitted to "wrap" the building in 1995--an extraordinary treatment for a parliament building--the job of renovating it for the federal parliament was (significantly but characteristically) put in the hands of a foreign architect, Sir Norman Foster. Rising on...