Post #3: Palast, Stadtschloss, & Urban Contest

In Fridolin Schley’s tale of the GDR palace, the author touches on the profound contest over ideology and urban space that resulted from the 1990 discovery of asbestos contamination in the Palast der Republik. He represents the Eastern argument through the fictionalization of the architect, Heinz Graffunder. Fabian recalls that his father “had never quite recovered from the asbestos—in both senses” (Schley, 180). His father’s sickness and declining health mirrored that of the palace’s poisoned form. As “The Heart of the Republic,” the imminent loss of the building viscerally sickened his father in a way that Fabian determined could not be coincidental. In a re-unified Berlin, former East Germans had to defend their heart from Westerners who sought, literally and figuratively, to tear it out.

The Palast der Republik closed for demolition

Schley’s account of the architect’s last days are rooted in the reality of Graffunder’s fight to treat the palace’s infection. Professor Graffunder, according to a cultural site on the GDR palace, did spend the time mobilizing “all his remaining energy for the preservation of the palace” (www.pdr.kultur-netz.de). He died in 1994, though the campaign to save the building continued despite Westerner’s calls for a reconstruction of the old Hohenzollern palace, the Stadtschloss. “In the following years,” writes Ladd, “[they] demanded that the ugly building be demolished to make way for a reconstructed palace, while many Easterners remembered many pleasant hours spent [there]” (Ladd, Guide, 22).

Ruins of the Palast der Republik with the Berliner Dom visible across the street

The political and psychological problem of what to do with Marx-Engels-Platz caused a rift in re-unified Berlin. As Ladd points out in Ghosts of Berlin, the shell of the GDR building was competing with the memory of the old baroque Hohenzollern palace in the hearts and minds of Berliners as well as in the physical space of the urban cityscape (59). He draws attention to the “rival nostalgias” of Berliners. One faction sought to return to a “civic wholeness” that—it was believed—the reconstruction of the Stadtschloss would provide. The second group longed to preserve the GDR palace in order to “hold on to certain memories and experiences of life in the Communist state.” The third group, who wanted a clean slate were—according to Ladd—driven by a nostalgia for 1920’s architecture and its ability to create a brave new world (59-60).

Billboard advertising the reconstruction of the Stadtschloss

Architectural model of the Stadtschloss reconstruction project

Berlin has established itself as a city of constant change: a place caught in a never-ending cycle of destruction and renewal. However, this cycle does not preclude the preservation of past and memory. Berlin is a city full of memorials and monuments to its history. The fact that the Berlin landscape has faced momentous change time and again leads to civil disagreement and prompts the historian’s debate. What is worth preserving and memorializing? When one past is recognized over the other, who is silenced? Ultimately, the debate over the historical significance of Marx-Engels-Platz has resulted in the decision to rebuild the Stadtschloss. Shunned by Hitler and the Prussian militarist royalty and demolished by the Communists, the Stadtschloss—and its relative ideological symbolic neutrality—is perhaps the best occupant, and least divisive option, for the space of re-unified Berlin.

The video is a brief history of an urban space. It visually represents the original Hohenzollern palace, the destruction of the GDR palace and the plans for the Stadtschloss reconstruction.