Berlin Babylon

...Seat not only of the Kaiser's Reich, but of Hitler's and the Communists' too, Berlin grapples ceaselessly with its past...

...or the Bernauerstrasse monument to "The Victims of Communist Tyranny," where a high steel wall preserves a section of the Todesstreife, the Death Strip that divided East and West Berlin...

...But what exactly does it suggest...

...This method will frustrate those not well acquainted with the city's particular building controversies...

...So when the Wall came down, leaving a huge empty space smack in the center of a major city, an already unique situation took on extra significance...

...And what about the traditional Prussian eagle behind the speaker's podium in the legislative chamber in Bonn—in the context of Berlin, was it perhaps too aggressive looking, too predatory, too...

...Rand Richards Cooper ARCHITECTURAL ANGST 'Berlin Babylon' Two years ago, while renovation of Berlin's former Reichstag building was still underway, I asked a German diplomat why his government would entrust a British architect (Sir Norman Foster) with the redesign of its most significant national edifice...

...The capital's return was celebrated in 1995 with the spectacle of the still-unfinished Reichstag being wrapped in a gargantuan sheet by the artist Christo, like a mammoth birthday present—an action that symbolically unveiled the new republic even as it inoculated, through its own colossal irreverence, against the age-old German virus of national glory...

...To solve the Reichstag dome dilemma, Norman Foster ended up designing a mammoth cupola of clear glass—a structural trope for political transparency...

...When Christo's wrappers came off the Reichstag—now the new federal Bundestag—there remained the question of whether to restore the building's original dome, destroyed in WWII...

...Wideangle panoramas, aerial surveys, and time-lapse shots of construction capture the immensity of Bauplatz Berlin, from the crane-cluttered Lehrter Banhof, soon to be Europe's biggest train station, all the way to Potsdamer Platz...

...Berlin does this to you—or rather, to itself: Its metaphors take ominous and unwonted turns...

...Prussian...

...I don't know where to go or how to get out...

...Everyone is watching everyone...

...This is public art that seeks what Germans call an Auseinandersetzung with history: a coming-to-terms...

...Such are the contorted politics of Berlin architecture, when renovation can seem indistinguishable from revenge...

...and more than any particular dazzling new building, it is "the erasure and void of Berlin's Jewish life," to use Daniel Libeskind's words, that establishes it as the ultimate postmodern city—the new Berlin, a city rebuilt around an absence...

...Here Siegert's silence is eloquent, as if to acknowledge, amid the profusion of new buildings, of material and metaphor, the void at the center of it all...

...And what about the distinct vibration one feels underfoot, a shakiness at the legislative center...

...the city ties itself in knots, Kramer observed, "looking for Hitler in the de(Continued on page 18) Commonweal I 5 December 7, 2001 (Continued from page 15) tails...

...Should it be redesigned...

...After reunification, Sony, Daimler Benz, and other corporate giants bought up the real estate and created a hi-rise corporate, retail, and leisure fantasyland that has been condemned by many as a drastic capitulation to American urban style and values...

...One hallway gets smaller as you go, until finally you stand trapped and hunched...

...Once a busy commercial center—Europe's first stoplight was here—Potsdamer Platz was obliterated in WWII, then split in two by the Wall...

...Director Siegert joins this chorus of boos— we see Helmut Jahn at a ludicrous dedication ceremony for his mammoth Sony Center, with dancers lowering a huge wreath—and adds several more for Helmut Kohl and his commissioning of Axel Schultes' grandiose Chancellory on the Spree River...

...Yet another Auseinandersetzung with history...

...Lost," a man said on the tour I took...

...That's what we do in Berlin now," he said, dryly...

...Over there is the Eye of the Chancellor," they explain, pointing to a huge semicircular window in the nearby Chancellery...

...We let foreign architects do the important buildings, so if a building ends up exuding a sense of power, we won't catch flak for it...

...As with art, so with architecture...

...Gerhard Schroder can look out and watch the Bundestag...

...but Siegert doesn't fill in the fascinating battle over the fate of this particular building, the factions that have formed on every conceivable side: from those who want to tear down the eyesore and build a luxury hotel, to those who want to restore the eyesore as a testament to the horrors of Socialist aesthetics...

...Siegert's Berlin Babylon lists architects in the opening credits like movie stars— Renzo Piano, Helmut Jahn, Rem Koolhaas, and others who were the major players in the city's remaking...

...a Garden of Exile contains olive trees hidden in huge concrete planters with only the treetops visible, unreachably far overhead...

...Berlin Babylon closes with a view of a large and empty lot halfway between the Bundestag and Potsdamer Platz...

...Siegert refrains from narration, preferring to record Berlin's army of architects, developers, master planners, engineers, real estate moguls, and construction workers in their daily work talk...

...In what image would the New Berlin be recreated...

...Imagine Americans agonizing over whether building a porch with white columns celebrates slavery, and you get an idea of how tormented Berlin is by architecture...

...A zig-zag structure said to represent a shattered star of David, with slit windows cut like wounds in its zinc skin, the Jewish Museum poses an intentionally shocking contrast to the neoclassical Berlin Museum next door—through which visitors actually enter, down a tunnel burrowing ominously from within the older building...

...So, too, can citizens, peering down into the legislative chamber below...

...Many considered that too bombastic, an echo of the monstrous, domed Great Hall that Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, once hoped to build...

...those tourists "trudging endlessly along the ramp," writes architecture critic Martin Filler in a recent New York Review of Books essay, 'look like inmates in a nineteenth-century workhouse...

...Commonweal I 8 December 7,2001...

...The city contains some of the most somber and challenging commemorative art you'll see anywhere, like the memorial to the Nazi book burnings in Bebelplatz, a white room lined with empty shelves buried beneath the square, which you peer into through a plexiglass window underfoot...

...Indeed...

...It is a striking feature of the capital's Weltanschauung, this earnest faith in the capacity of architecture not merely to symbolize, but somehow to guarantee, good politics...

...an encounter...

...To a clanging symphony of construction equipment, director Siegert and his photographers, Ralf Dobrick and Thomas Plenert, swing us along on a Steadicam tour of Berlin, its dingy old apartments and gleaming new office complexes...

...The diplomat's remarks reveal the acute awareness of image that Germans took on after World War II—a hypersensitivity to world opinion that is as unlike brash American insouciance as, well, defeat is to victory...

...Berlin is a loud city by German standards, but one haunted by the unspeakable...

...I'd seen this same lot several times during the film, and wondered why, until at last I recognized it as the site of the stillunbuilt Holocaust memorial, which has prompted the mother of all agonized Berlin design battles...

...For instance, we get a glimpse of the muchmaligned East German Palast der Republik, now boarded up and riddled with graffiti...

...New Yorker writer Jane Kramer has written of Berlin's "architectural anguish," its struggle with the aesthetics of German power...

...Nowhere is as much attention paid to the hermeneutics of architecture as in Berlin—to the messages buildings send and the historical and ideological links they command...

...A harrowingly metaphorical building, the Jewish Museum exemplifies the preoccupation with symbolism in Berlin's new architecture...

...With those double staircases ingeniously engineered to keep traffic flowing up one and down the other, is the real message that there's only one possible direction to go in...

...Or that once you're started, there's no turning back...

...The Bundestag dome, fitted out with concentric spiral staircases, has quickly become the city's biggest tourist attraction, and the never-ending stream of solitary, circling climbers, seen from a passing bus or boat, is a memorable and highly suggestive image of New Berlin...

...Four hundred thousand people visited Libeskind's building before a single exhibit was installed— guides leading groups of Germans through the maze of tunnels and inquiring, What are you feeling now...

...Inside Libeskind's museum, asymmetrical corridors induce a surreal and claustrophobic sense of nightmare...

...German history, it concerns us all," sighs an architect in Berlin Babylon, Hubertus Siegert's documentary film of the decade-long rebuilding of Berlin...

...Partway through Berlin Babylon, Siegert gives us a five-second look—again, without comment—at the gleaming neo-Expressionist building that is arguably the most important of all Berlin's new architecture: the Jewish Museum, by Daniel Libeskind...

...Rooftop tour guides at the building toss off interpretive riffs on the theme of sunshine government...

...With reunification and the move of government back to Berlin from provincial, unthreatening Bonn, Germans have been anxious to quell worries about a newly exuberant nationalism...