If Stones Could Speak: Berlin’s Architecture and Memory
In the center of the former East Berlin, the Schlüter courtyard of the Humboldt Forum museum is more crowded than usual, with the restaurant tables full, and multi-colored chairs added to give people a place to sit, relax, and listen.
This is the site where the former Prussian Royal Palace once stood, and later the Volkskammer legislature of the Soviet-allied German Democratic Republic.
But on this summer weekend, a large stage has been placed on the far end of the courtyard for an a cappella group called the JazzVocals. They sing a variety of hip-hip, folk, and jazz songs in a 20-minute performance, one of three that Saturday afternoon.
The JazzVocals along with 11 other choir groups participated in Diversity of Voices, that took place over two days, where singers walked through exhibits in the museum to gain inspiration from them, and performed on the spot. At the end of the event, all choirs joined in the courtyard, a total of about 200 singers, to sing as one large group for the finale.
“There were so many diverse choirs taking part,” said Rebecca Maschke, a one-year soprano with the JazzVocals. “There were Japanese voices, Polish voices, and we are like a pop-jazz choir. So, it was quite interesting to see all the different types of music.”
Bringing people together both creatively and socially is part of the Humboldt Forum’s mandate. Opened in 2020, it is a palace-turned-museum built on a site that has been deconstructed and reconstructed a number of times as Berlin adapted to its tumultuous history.
This new use of the former royal palace is one of many examples of how the city tears down and reconstructs architectural landmarks in an attempt to confront the past and take accountability for earlier eras — most recently Nazism and East German communism.
In the 1440s, Frederick II built the Royal Palace as a permanent seat for electors and to protect himself from citizen resistance movements. Over time, the palace was damaged, only to be expanded or rebuilt at a later time.
But in 1945, during World War II, the palace was bombed by the Allied forces and then in 1950 demolished by the East German government. After that, it wasn’t until 1973 that it was reconstructed as the Palast der Republik or Palace of the Republic, which included a legislature, restaurant and community space — complete with a bowling ally —at the heart of capital of the GDR. It was commonly known as the “People’s Palace.”
From 1990, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, the Palace of the Republic lay vacant for years due to the presence of asbestos in the building. In the summers of 1993 and 1994, a trompe-l’oeil mockup of two frontages of its façade went up on taupaulin, which invigorated a debate about whether to rebuild a replica of the palace.
And in 2003, the movement succeeded despite much opposition. The former East German parliament building was demolished then reconstructed as the Royal Palace, for use by the Humboldt Forum Museum which houses the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum of Asian Art.
Many Berliners felt the new museum would memorialize Germany as an empire and honor kings who had ruled during citizen resistance and revolution, sending the wrong message. And some architects simply felt it was not the right esthetic for the new Berlin.
It is also a project that cost 670 million Euros ($734 million). Maschke, of JazzVocals, has lived in Berlin for about 15 years and had seen both the empty fields that replaced the former East German parliament before its reconstruction. She has mixed feelings.
“It was a very expensive project so sometimes it’s a little bit conflicting as to whether the money should have been perhaps put into areas that need some attention,” she said.
The former Palace of the Republic also held meaning for East Berliners, as the seat of their parliament, and its loss compounded other losses at the end of the Cold War. Many eastern Germans remain bitter today that unification didn’t occur on equal terms and what used to be East Berlin is still struggling. Replacing their “People’s Palace” was not well received.
Matthias Reese who owns and operates the architecture firm, rw+, has worked as an architect in Berlin for over 30 years. He calls the current complex where the Palace stands a “failure,” saying it was superimposed before the city had a chance to organically integrate the site.
“It’s not so much the architecture, it’s the fact that they built it all at once and it had to be finished,” he said. “But you cannot answer [historical] questions by proposing things which are not really grounded, and have not been developed. This city needs time to develop, change, and to adapt. They didn’t want the city to have the time to do that and I think it’s a failure.”
Berlin’s rush to redevelop quickly and often erase leftovers from unsavory parts of its history started in the post-Wall 1990s with both Alexanderplatz and Potsdamer Platz, major city landmarks.
“It’s not fine-tuned to the needs of the city,” Reese said of today’s Potsdamer Platz. “This was more like an artificial act of real estate.”
Before the Berlin Wall, Potsdamer Platz was a traffic intersection and public square, with people constantly coming and going. After the Wall went up, the intersection that linked eastern and western Berlin became a no man’s land between East and West, part of the “death strip” where citizens could be shot by East German border guards for trying to cross the Iron Curtain. When the Berlin Wall opened in 1989, the once heavily-used area was empty.
Alexanderplatz, meanwhile, had become a major public square of East Berlin and was the site of protests that contributed to the opening of the Wall in the final days of the GDR.
After German reunification, there were major architecture competitions to redevelop both those areas of prime real estate. Much like the case with the Humboldt Forum, the rush to get them completed didn’t allow for organic development, say architecture critics.
Today, Alexanderplatz appears to be a mish-mash of chain stores for tourists with a few historically protected relics of Soviet architecture and monuments, such as the iconic television tower, a fountain and international clock, and a wraparound Soviet-era mural on the Haus des Lehrers (Teachers’ Building).
Potsdamer Platz is anchored by Sony and Daimler Benz headquarters, houses the German Cinemateque and hosts the annual Berlin International Film Festival. But it never re-emerged as a city hub.
“It’s alien to both sides now [East and West]. It’s sitting there and they moved the Film Festival to this area, which is very important to Berlin,” said architect Reese. “But it’s the only thing that happens there once a year. Otherwise nobody goes there, which is a bit sad.”
While the desire to reconstruct Humboldt Forum, as well as these other areas, has been well-meaning, the plans were flawed and rushed and didn’t allow Berlin to take accountability for what occurred in those areas, say critics.
The impulse to confront the Nazi and Communist past arises often through intense debates over architecture and monuments in the capital. In fact, Germans have a word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which translates to “coming to terms with the past.”
Dan Benjamin, director of the American Academy in Berlin, says Germans are ahead of Americans when it comes to processing the painful parts of their past. “The culture of apology and reparations is dramatically different. We have a running conversation about what America can learn from Germany in terms of reparation,” Benjamin said.
Ulf Heinsohn, director of the Jewish community center in Rostock, north of Berlin, agrees. “Obviously, there is a certain hesitation in the U.S. to deal with these issues and it surprises me,” he said. “There is a certain unease with going deeper into the subject.”
There are smaller monuments and reminders all over the city. Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, are bronze plaques found throughout Germany — and now other parts of Europe — that indicate where people lived when they were deported by the Nazis. A memorial at the Grunewald S-Bahn station commemorates 10,000 Jewish people who were deported to concentration camps from Platform 17.
A large section of the Berlin Wall, and its adjacent museum at Bernauer Strasse, also stands as a reminder of the divided Germany prior to 1990s reunification and how it divided, families, the country and East from West. At Checkpoint Charlie, the most well-known Cold War border crossing and military checkpoint, there is now a replica of the hut that used to stand there (the original is at the Allied Museum in the former American sector).
But there is nothing apologetic or introspective about the Humboldt Forum, which presides over Unter den Linden boulevard with the grandiosity and majesty intended by the kings who had once occupied it.
“I would have argued,” said Reese, “to leave the old, communist Palace of the Republic, and reuse it. Just make something else out of it. We wouldn’t need to rebuild the castle.”
Saida Morales is a second-year journalism student at San Francisco State University. She is reporting this summer from Berlin as part of the Berlin Beyond Borders editorial team.
