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the opera houses, theatres, museums and libraries are just as much attractions to our city as its colourful neighbourhoods and the charming landscape of woods and lakes surrounding it.

      The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain which divided the whole of Europe have also made Berlin ‘an attractive location for business again … Important companies are setting up new offices in the city or intensifying their involvement here. Building is going on all over the city … The construction means hope for the future. A new city is growing, carefully merging with the old buildings which have been handed down to us.’¹² A visitor who last stood at the Wall in 1989 will find the centre virtually unrecognizable. Ironically, however, this is not the first time Berliners have passed over this same ground and marvelled at the construction sites.

      Only a hundred years ago Berliners were making the very same comments about the very same squares and intersections and boulevards. Georg Hermann, the Berlin writer who died in Auschwitz in 1943, remarked in 1896 that ‘only five, ten, twenty years ago nothing but windswept fields and willow trees stood … on these very sites which are now covered with asphalt and litter’; in 1914 Paul Scheerbart wrote of the shiny glass buildings rising from the sand, structures which were to create a ‘new milieu’ in Berlin and which would ‘bring us a new culture’; Maximilian Harden noted in 1901 that old Berlin was being completely ‘walled in’ and ‘bricked up’ in the rush to redevelop the city centre; and in his 1888 novel Wer ist der Stärkere? Conrad Alberti described the huge construction site near the Potsdamer Platz, marvelling at the number of cranes and workmen and piles of earth to be found there. Later, in the 1930s, Berliners watched and wondered as Albert Speer and Hitler ordered buildings and streets to be blown up to clear the way for the North – South Axis in their bid to create Germania, the capital of the Third Reich; after the war, Berliners watched again as many of the last vestiges of the historic city were removed during the post-war building boom. In 1961 the reconstruction was hindered by the sudden erection of the Wall, leaving what was the very heart of Berlin a desolate no man’s land. Today those areas are finally, in the new Berlin jargon, being ‘knitted together’ into the new capital of the ‘Berlin Republic’.¹³

      On a cold grey day in 1996 I stopped in at the Red Rathaus, Berlin’s old city hall, to see a display of the new architectural plans for the city. The dingy trappings of East German culture had been replaced by West German chrome-and-white displays. In the centre of the room stood a broad platform the size of two billiard tables covered with a gigantic relief map. A young man in designer jeans and designer glasses and a designer haircut was standing under the halogen lights gesticulating at a group of rather shy Berliners and explaining what their new city was going to look like. He pointed at the model with a long chrome stick: ‘The white represents Berlin as it is,’ he said; ‘the cream represents Berlin as it will be.’ Sure enough, great swathes of the map, from Rummelsburg to Marzahn and from Karow Nord to the Falkenberg Garden City, were daubed in cream-coloured paint. The man continued his lecture: there were already over 150 architects from eleven countries and over 250,000 other specialists and consultants and contractors working on the reconstruction of the city, an entirely new government quarter on the Spreebogen was being built to a design by the Berlin architect Axel Schultes; Günter Behnisch and Manfred Sabatke had designed a new Academy of Arts, Checkpoint Charlie was being turned into an American business centre, Alexanderplatz would soon be ringed in by a network of new highrise buildings – a ‘People’s Space’ – designed by Hans Kollhoff and Helga Timmermann, although the GDR ‘time clock’ would remain. And that was not all. The Potsdamer Platz, the Friedrichstrasse, the old Schloss, the Spittelmarkt, the Spreeinsel, the Spandau Wasserstadt, the Lindencorse, the Stock Exchange and a dozen other sites were to be transformed. Pariser Platz, the historical central entrance to Berlin, would once again house the American, British and French embassies; the Hotel Adlon was being rebuilt and was soon to reopen – had we seen the advertising hoardings around the building site listing all the famous people who had stayed there?¹⁴ So many memories were evoked by the names and places on the map – the site of the first Academy of Sciences where Leibniz had taught; the hotel in which Bismarck and Disraeli had cemented their friendship, the balcony from which the Kaiser had promised his troops that they would be ‘home by Christmas’ in 1914 and where Liebknecht had declared the ‘free Socialist Republic of Germany’ four years later. There were the many places still chillingly associated with the National Socialists, from Hitler’s bunker and the Reichsbank to the three train stations from which Jews were deported; there was Karlshorst, where Keitel surrendered to the Allies on 8 May 1945, later the Berlin headquarters of the NKVD; there was the long path where the Wall had snaked its oppressive way through the heart of the city; there were the airfields built during the Berlin blockade of 1949. But the young man made no mention of history; indeed, the buildings and squares and spaces were clearly to be treated as if they were quite new. The former Reichsbank was simply the ‘future seat of the Foreign Office’, Göring’s Reich Air Ministry had taken on a fresh identity as the seat of the ‘Federal Ministry of Finance’, the Neue Wache, which had served as everything from Berlin’s First World War memorial to the GDR’s shrine to the ‘Victims of Fascism’ had now become the ‘Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny’; the Bendlerblock, built in 1914 as the Reich Navy Office and seat of the General Staff, was now the ‘second domicile of the Federal Ministry of Defence’; the gigantic Stalinallee, where the 1953 Uprising had begun, was merely a street requiring ‘DM750 million’ worth of repairs. For the young man with the map – and for many others keen to promote the new capital – Berlin is a great tabula rasa, an architect’s dream. The chameleon city is busy reinventing itself for the third time this century.

      The amount of work already undertaken by the late 1990s would have astounded even the nineteenth-century commentators; the sheer number of cranes – which have been decorated, photographed and even synchronized to move up and down to music – is staggering. Berlin is presently a DM50 billion construction zone filled with piles of earth and iron girders and cement trucks and arc lights and populated with Polish and Irish labourers (locals are too expensive). By August 1997 30 million tons of gravel had been poured, 70 million cubic feet of water pumped out for foundations, road and rail tunnels, and 17,411 trees had been planted – even the river Spree had been temporarily redirected to allow for the work near the Reichstag. The budget signed on 30 June 1994 provided DM2.8 billion merely to move the parliament while an estimated DM20 billion has been earmarked for the improvement of the transportation and communications infrastructure. ‘Berlin, the City’ has become the greatest millennium project in Europe. Local kiosks, bookshops and tourist stands are stuffed with brightly coloured maps which extol the virtues of the ‘new Berlin’; one sells the ultimate guide to Pläne und Kräne (Plans and Cranes); another advertises Der Tagespiegel under a picture of a construction site with the caption: ‘Berlin ist kaum zu fassen’ (Berlin is difficult to get a grip on); a nearby billboard promotes one of the many construction-site tours, this one sponsored by Deutsche Bahn: ‘When a city gets a new suspension bridge then it is time to go on the Architektour. Berlin, bestir yourself. Don’t miss it.’¹⁵ The Reichstag, wrapped in silver foil in 1995 by Christo to the delight of Berliners, is getting a new dome designed by the British architect Sir Norman Foster, who enthuses: ‘If you look at what has happened in Berlin since unification, it is miraculous. It is faster and more precipitous than anyone’s wildest dreams.’¹⁶ The precocious architect of Berlin’s new Jewish Museum, Daniel Libeskind, believes the city will become the ‘exemplary spiritual capital of the twenty-first century, as it once was the apocalyptic symbol of the twentieth-century demise’.¹⁷ The architect of the Spreebogen, who was careful not to appear to be following Albert Speer’s plans for the same area, calls his design ‘very simple in its reserve … in keeping with the hardness of the city and its fate’. The Potsdamer Platz, once curiously touted as the ‘busiest intersection in Europe’, was by 1997 the centre of the largest private-sector construction project in German history: nineteen new buildings on seventeen prime acres, including headquarters for Daimler-Benz and Sony Europe, will provide 1.1 million square feet of floor space.¹⁸ A Sony representative calls his building ‘an important landmark’ which ‘represents how we see the future’; the Daimler-Benz spokesman Dr Klaus Mangold promises that his will capture the ‘dynamic, the fascination

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