On September 7, 1950, the government of East Germany detonated a set of dynamite charges beneath Berlin’s old imperial palace, the first of a series of controlled explosions that in the course of six months destroyed the building. The international reaction was swift and furious. This was “the greatest work of the North German Baroque,” which over the centuries had housed the electors of Brandenburg, the kings of Prussia, and finally the kaisers of Germany. While it had been badly damaged in World War II, it was essentially intact, parts of it still in use. The East Germans were unmoved. Once the ground was finally cleared, the site was given over to a vast rallying ground, East Germany’s answer to Moscow’s Red Square.
Now the palace is there again, or rather a plausible facsimile. But behind its stone shell is a thoroughly modern core, housing a trio of museums as well as exhibition galleries and event spaces. This building within a building was designed by the Italian architect Franco Stella, who won the commission in 2008. Confusingly, the resulting complex would have two names: the Baroque exterior is known as the Berliner Stadtschloss, or Berlin City Palace, while its modern core is called the Humboldt Forum in honor of those two brothers, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian polymaths who helped make Berlin a center of natural history and philosophy in the early nineteenth century.
The reborn palace was long in the making. In 1992, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a private association was founded to lobby for its reconstruction. A decade later, the German parliament endorsed the project and authorized funding, but only of the Humboldt Forum; the money to build the exterior would have to be raised privately.
Construction began in 2012 and was completed in 2020, a fateful year in which the world had more pressing matters to handle than the recreation of a Baroque façade in central Europe. And yet the rebirth of the old palace has ramifications that extend far beyond the practice of historic preservation, touching on the largest questions of German identity and historical memory. In the end, the grand opening of the building occurred digitally, in cyberspace, which is only fitting for a structure that is not quite real but a ghost of itself.
Like many of Europe’s great royal palaces, the Königliches Schloss was begun in the Middle Ages. The fifteenth-century Gothic core was given a Renaissance facelift and then completely rebuilt in Baroque form by Andreas Schlüter, the court sculptor, between 1698 and 1713. These were the years when Prussia, heretofore a duchy, became a kingdom, setting into motion its dramatic rise from a regional to a Continental capital. The palace of a king demanded considerably more swagger than the dated and rather prim Renaissance quarters. Schlüter found the new building’s form in Bernini’s unbuilt proposal for the Louvre, making his palace the culmination of a Rome–Paris–Berlin odyssey, which reminds us just how porous artistic boundaries were in that day.
One can see why the absent palace created such a visual void in the heart of Berlin.
The reborn royal palace defined the subsequent urban development of Berlin. It was the eastern terminus of a mile-long monumental allée, Unter den Linden, whose opposite end is marked by the Brandenburg Gate. Around the palace there arose an ensemble of classical buildings, each reflecting the stylistic taste of its era. To the west Schlüter built the Baroque Arsenal and carved its celebrated keystone sculptures of dying warriors (probably based on the heads of Turkish soldiers from the recent siege of Vienna). To the north, Karl Friedrich Schinkel added his superb neoclassical Altes Museum a century later; completing the ensemble to the east is the Berlin Cathedral, built in the late nineteenth century and an artifact of the Wilhelmine neo-Baroque at its most bombastic. Together these four buildings summed up the Prussian cosmology in architectural terms, gathering War, Art, and Faith together under the care of the Throne. One can see why the absent palace created such a visual void in the heart of Berlin.
Only minor alterations were made to the palace over the next two centuries, with the exception of the 230-foot cupola over the east portal. Based on a design by Schinkel and executed posthumously by his pupils, it adds a note of imperial splendor to what was not yet an imperial capital but soon would be.
That empire lasted but forty-seven years. Following the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918, Karl Liebknecht proclaimed Germany a “free socialist republic” from the window of the now untenanted palace. Over the next few decades it housed a museum and a variety of administrative offices, serving as a center of Berlin culture even after the Nazi seizure of power. It almost made it through World War II intact until the aerial bombing of February 3, 1945, when most of its roof was burned off along with its principal ceremonial rooms; the walls stood intact, although they sustained further damage in the final days of street fighting in Berlin at the end of the war.
Still, the palace could well have been preserved, had the newly constituted East German government, just founded in 1949, so desired. It may well be that post-war poverty played as much a role in the decision to demolish it as symbolic considerations did. Unlike West Germany, East Germany was not generously rebuilt by its former foes; once the ruins were cleared away, its cities were strangely open and empty, like a de Chirico painting, and broad plazas were laid out with lavish flower beds to conceal the fact that there were not sufficient resources to replace the missing buildings.
By the 1970s, showy parade grounds were no longer quite the thing and the East German government was ever more acutely aware of its status with respect to prosperous West Germany. In an effort to portray itself as a technologically progressive country, East Germany built the East Berlin Television tower, which rises over twelve hundred feet into the air, making it visible throughout West Berlin. Completed in 1969, it was the tallest building in all of Germany, a title it still holds.
Proud of its translucence, they designed its lighting so that it would glow at night.
In this changed environment, Erich Honecker, the new premier of East Germany, decided in 1973 to build a modern congress building, a Palast der Republik that would take the place of the former royal palace. Sensitive to the charge that they had enclosed their people within an Iron Curtain, the East Germans constructed a building of maximum transparency, a steel-framed volume clad almost entirely in glass. Proud of its translucence, they designed its lighting so that it would glow at night, a symbol of progressive prosperity and modernity. In the process, they overlooked the scarcity of electric lighting in the German east, and the fact that such an wanton display of light at night would seem odd to the population. In short order East Germans were privately mocking the building as Erichs Lampenladen—Erich Honecker’s lamp store.
To recreate the royal palace, the Palast der Republik would have to fall. There was some resistance. After all, this was perhaps the chief architectural creation of East Germany (although one could make a good case for the Berlin Wall and the fortified border with West Germany) and therefore of some historical significance. The regime may well have been a totalitarian criminal enterprise, but did this mean that its artists and architects were therefore all criminals? Must every physical vestige of its existence be swept from the landscape, as with Carthage? But no true debate never occurred. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was discovered that the East German building was ridden with airborne asbestos particles. These could be removed, but it would require stripping the building down to its steel frame. Once this was done, by 2003, it made just as much sense to dismantle what was left of the complex as to rebuild it.
Another factor was at play. Once the Berlin Wall was taken apart in the summer of 1990, there was an international rush to exploit the newly available real estate. Most prestigious of all was Potsdamer Platz, a forlorn site abutting the eastern side of the former wall, which formed an urban dead zone. Just on the other side of that wall was the Kulturforum of West Berlin, with its National Gallery by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philharmonie and Library by Hans Scharoun, and other cultural institutions built to replace those that happened to fall in the Soviet occupation zone. With no wall separating the Kulturforum from Potsdamer Platz, its 150 acres became at one stroke the most lucrative parcel of real estate in all of Europe—provoking the same sort of mad frenzy that would occur if the mayor of New York opened up all of Central Park for commercial development.
And commercial development did transform Potsdamer Platz. Daimler-Benz, Sony, and other corporations built themselves opulent headquarters in the sleek high-tech mode that dominated the architectural world of the 1990s. After the initial euphoria came the postpartum depression; the spectacle architecture proved to be a hothouse plant, without staying power, and it began to take on the character of that most dispiriting of objects, the dying suburban mall. Daimler-Benz and Sony took their losses and sold up.
The failure of the Potsdamer Platz development could not help but cast a favorable light on the Berlin palace project. On one hand was a purely commercial development, created in a fury of competitive speculation and with no historical connections to the site; on the other hand was a development whose historical and cultural roots reach back to the city’s very beginning. Moreover, it offered maximum freedom to the architect, who had no there was no Prussian king or German kaiser to accommodate, and could arrange its interior spaces at will. And so as the luster of Potsdamer Platz faded, public enthusiasm for rebuilding the palace could only grow.
I quickly learned that there was an ironclad taboo on the building of historical pastiches.
In 1980, when I began studying architecture at the Technical University in Hannover, Germany, I quickly learned that there was an ironclad taboo on the building of historical pastiches. The preservationist had only one commandment, thou shalt not make facsimiles, and it was absolute. In America that idea was bolstered by the example of Colonial Williamsburg, which was restored—and in large part recreated—in the 1930s through the financial support of John D. Rockefeller Jr. Despite its continuing popularity, for the architectural establishment it became the definitive model of what not to do. What seemed at the time to be impeccably researched and well-documented recreations of vanished buildings soon came to look hopelessly speculative and freewheeling. The whole texture of American historic preservation in the second half of the twentieth century was conditioned by the experience of Williamsburg; henceforth, for many architects it became a firm law that any new construction must be made so that it is instantly identifiable as new and would never be confused by even the most casual visitor as genuine historic material.
So it was in Germany, too, although for somewhat different reasons. The architects who rebuilt German cities in the 1950s were in a difficult position. Their cities had been ruined as a consequence of a war that had been unleashed on the world by Germany herself; it would be unseemly to reassert her identity with anything suggestive of brashness or triumph. The buildings of the immediate post-war period were built in what one of my German professors called a deliberate “sackcloth and ashes” style—gray, grim, and utilitarian—as an act of architectural penance. To recreate destroyed memorials from scratch was somehow perverse, as if one were trying to pretend that there had been no war.
There was much indignation, then, at least among my professors, when the city of Hannover decided to recreate the house of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the philosopher and mathematical prodigy. His home had been bombed into oblivion, but a few fragments survived, and these would be inserted into an entirely new building on an entirely new site. Here, to architectural elites, was something far worse than Williamsburg, which at least was built on the footprint of its lost buildings.
A taboo, once broken, is easier to break the second time, and so was the case with German preservation. In the past few decades, a replica of the royal residence in Hannover was built on its original site; the Butchers’ Guild Hall in Hildesheim was recreated in half-timber to house the city museum and a restaurant; and, worst of all for many, in Braunschweig, a modern shopping arcade was clad in a crude replica of the walls of the ducal residence. There are other examples.
But there has been one stumbling block to the Berlin palace, and that is its religious imagery.
It is hardly a surprise that the German public has looked favorably on the building of historical facsimiles. For most people, the intricacies of historic preservation are so much inside baseball. But there has been one stumbling block to the Berlin palace, and that is its religious imagery. The recreation of the building meant restoring the cross that crowns the cupola and the Christian inscription in gold letters that runs around its base. Critics have challenged these as an assertion of the divine right of kings, utterly irreconcilable with the secular humanist values of the Humboldt Forum below. Defenders of the project have pointed out, however, the difference between an assertion and a quotation; nobody, for example, would take the crown imagery throughout the palace as a call to overthrow German democracy and restore the monarchy. Proposals to offset the Christian elements with various kinds of artistic intervention have so far been unsuccessful, but I suspect the battle is not yet over.
Under the circumstances, I could hardly be expected to approve of the Berlin palace. We are all children of our time. And so when I traveled to Berlin this August to inspect the building, I found much to dislike. The masonry of the reconstructed façade is remarkably sterile in character and texture, with the peculiar lifelessness of machine-tooled work. In particular, I noticed that none of the projecting stone sills had a drip-course—that slight indentation on the underside that causes water to drip down before it reaches the wall. This is the sort of refinement that a stone mason can make effortlessly but which is evidently beyond the capacity of modern mechanical saws.
But then I entered the main courtyard, the Schlüter Court, and came face to face with the bifurcated nature of the building. On three sides, its Baroque facades have been reconstructed with their full classical regalia, while the fourth presents the same rhythm but in naked form, executed in reinforced concrete, the language of the Humboldt forum. Here was contemporary architecture for contemporary tenants, among them the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum of Asian Art.
This same contemporary architecture peeks out to the rear. If you walk around the entire building, you will reach the west wall, facing the Spree River, where the façade is suddenly peeled back to reveal the abstract trabeated construction of the modern building beneath. Here the mask slips, which is the architect’s way of winking at you and reminding you that this is a work of the early twenty-first century and not the early eighteenth. It is not so much a recreation of the palace as a workmanlike scale model of the original, placed on the original site, and with something of the gift that Robert Venturi gave to historic preservation, which is a saving leaven of self-aware irony.
In the end, Berlin’s Baroque facsimile was never intended to recreate a palace whose tenants are forever lost, but to serve a higher civic function, which is to heal the fabric of a wounded city. Without its sculptural mass serving as the focal element, its surrounding precinct had lost its formal coherence, as dissonant as a chord that misses its defining tone. Its recreations renews the civic plaza defined by the arsenal, cathedral, and Schinkel’s museum, restoring the missing fourth wall, as it were, of Berlin’s great roofless outdoor room.
The Berlin Palace may well be a facsimile and not the real thing; it is to Schlüter’s Baroque performance as well-made dentures are to teeth. And yet it is an unexpected delight to see it there once more among its companions, able to smile again.
