For those of us that thought New York is the only city that keeps tearing things down to build them back up again, Berlin’s an excellent example. Berlin seems to have been a construction site for the last 200 years (if not more), having grown much more rapidly than other European capitals and essentially exploded with the unification of Germany in 1871. Added to that were several forced demolitions due to war, and others that were ideologically imposed both by the East/West partition and the re-unification. The Stadtschloss is the perfect example of both: The Prussian palace, which symbolized the imperial Germany of the Hohenzollerns, was completed in 1845, turned into a museum after the proclamation of a German Republic in 1918, severely damaged during World War II and eventually demolished by the Socialist government of the East in 1950, who saw it as a sad reminder of imperial excess, and probably of wartime devastation, too. It was replaced by a modernist Palast der Republik, which was in turn closed in 1990 after unification: the reason given at the time was contamination by asbestos! After the asbestos removal was completed in 2003, it was decided that the city could do without the oversized socialist monument, and demolition began with no specific plan of what to do with the site. Demolition still continues, but the plan now is to rebuild the original Stadtschloss, to restore the historical center of Berlin to its… historic state.
Ironically, the intend to do that by erasing about a hundred years of the city’s history…
1 Comment
August 17, 2008 at 2:46 pm
[...] now been demolished in order to rebuild the Prussian Palace which was at that site. (See a previous blog on the subject). The Marx and Engels monument is also worth visiting if you are into East German [...]