Berlin: The return of German pride?

On a windswept square beside the river Spree, across the road from Berlin’s Museum Island, there is a brand new building which epitomises Germany’s shifting attitude to its imperial past. For 500 years this was the site of the Berliner Schloss, seat of Prussia’s royal family. After the second world war it was demolished, and now it’s being rebuilt from scratch.

The Berliner Schloss has always been a barometer of German history. It was the residence of Frederick the Great, that daft enlightened despot who put Prussia on the map. In 1914, Kaiser Bill addressed his loyal subjects from its balcony. In 1918, Karl Liebknecht stood on this balcony to proclaim his ‘Free Socialist-Republic’. That balcony has been preserved, cemented into an adjacent building. Of the original structure, nothing else remains.

The Nazis didn’t quite know what to do with this bombastic landmark. They festooned the exterior with swastikas but left the interior alone. It was bombed by the RAF, but when the war ended it was still standing. When Berlin was divided it fell within the Soviet sector, and in 1950 it was torn down by the victorious Communists in a fit of anti-imperialistic pique. They erected a brutalist eyesore in its place called the Palast der Republik. Built to house the parliament of the German ‘Democratic’ Republic, this modernist monstrosity was demolished in 2006 by the victorious Bundesrepublik. As Marx said, history repeats itself — first as tragedy, then as farce.

The skeletal shell you see here today is an awkward attempt to combine two conflicting concepts: imperial nostalgia and political correctness. The building has been financed by the German state to house the Humboldt Forum — an ethnological museum named after the explorer-Alexander von Humboldt and his brother Wilhelm, founder of Berlin’s eponymous university.