The Berlin Palace then and now

SNot all locks are the same. If you enter “Schloss” and “Berlin” on the Internet, a website appears on which you can see four charming young people: Laura, René, Hasan and Marie. “We present you: Our ambassadors of the castle”, it says there, and then it is explained what the castle is for you: the place where you most like to spend your time, a place of identification. Storm, one thinks: they were those who begged after 1989 to tear down the Palace of the Republic and instead rebuild the Hohenzollern Palace, but wouldn’t the palace be, as critics put it, a meeting place for older Prussian fanatics? and staunch, the RDA? Chinese haters and tourists will be converted, but also, as the green politician Antje Vollmer liked to assert without any empirical basis, a place where “mainly young Berliners would meet”, the city’s art and music scene?

“As an ambassador for the castle, Laura is primarily interested in good food and fashion,” says the website; The castle’s ambassador, René, says there, is a martial artist and is interested in the castle’s Media Markt. Not by the dome, by the passage, the Humboldt Forum? At some point you realize that the palace the young “ambassadors” advertise so strongly about is just a very popular shopping center in the old west, dubbed “Das Schloss”, on Steglitzer Schlossstrasse, and not what you see on the street. Schlossplatz in Berlin. It has built.

There is probably no other construction project in which reunified Germany has warmed up and fought like it did in this one; Rarely has there been such a long and heated debate about what is going to be built in the center of the new capital, rarely have the different historical images of those who had to decide on the image of the new capital become so obvious after 1989 and about how and by whom its rooms are used – and what “the new Berlin” should represent.

The history of the Berlin Palace had already begun with a noisy dispute: the elector Friedrich II., A melancholic who was also called “Eisenzahn” and who ruled with his brother Friedrich the Fat until 1447, laid the first stone for the construction of the first palace in 1443 to leave what had led to protests in the city of then 8,000 inhabitants: the residents of Berlin-Cölln feared for their urban freedoms and sabotaged the construction by flooding the excavation near the Spree at night, a legendary action known as “Berlin’s outrage” went down in history. The castle was built anyway. At the beginning of the 18th century, Andreas Schlueter gave it a new baroque look, until 1918 it was the residence of the Hohenzollerns, damaged in the Second World War and in 1950 the government of the GDR blew it up not for technical reasons, but for ideological reasons : the new rulers saw it Above all, it was a remnant of the Prussian military state, whose legacy was to be visibly dissolved.

At the beginning of the seventies the modernist “Palace of the Republic” was built here. In 1992, the agricultural machinery salesman Wilhelm von Boddien, who came from Pomerania, founded the “Friends of the Berlin Palace”, of which he has also been managing director since his company went bankrupt. Boddien’s comrades in arms saw the Palast der Republik as an eyesore and wanted, as is often said, “to heal the empty center of Berlin” by rebuilding the palace. Critics of this plan argued that the story, with its twists and turns, should remain visible. And that the Palace of the Republic, abandoned by GDR politicians, now conquered and animated by artists, exhibition and theater makers, is a far better symbol for a successful reunification than the attempt to erase all traces of division from the urban landscape. and your victory. celebrate over the enemy system by making its structures disappear, just like this system once made the symbols of its opponents disappear, which included the castle. This cleansing of the streetscape of the legacy of GDR modernism, which many considered revanchist, not only led to the disappearance of buildings symbolic of a state of injustice, but also places where memories hung from many citizens of the GDR.