Exberliner issue 185, September 2019

COLUMN— Save Berlin
Beige, grey
or cosplay?
From the Humboldt Forum
to Potsdam’s Barberini – what
should we make of the historicist
revival in architecture?
Last year, Zum Umsteiger shut its doors
after 113 years. The legendary tavern
across from Yorckstraße station (photo
top) had survived the Nazis, World War II and
the Cold War, but a worse horror was still to
come: its new neighbours. The quaint building
is wedged between an oppressive apartment
complex and an intrusive parking garage entry.
Lonely Zum Umsteiger is an unwanted relic
screaming out for a bunch of coloured balloons
to carry it away.
With its high-pitched roof and faux-gothic
brickwork, Umsteiger is a throwback to an
architectural style known as historicism. For
thousands of years, designing a building meant
finding an existing model to copy – every bank
was a Roman temple, every apartment block a
Florentine palazzo. Historicism was a crutch
that helped even mediocre architects create
great buildings. However, since modernism
arrived a century ago and lifted the yoke of historical
styles, anything goes. Genius designers
produce an occasional work of brilliance, but
they’re just as likely to lay an
architectural egg. Despite our
ongoing construction boom,
try finding one recent building
with one-tenth the character of
sad little Umsteiger.
Maybe that’s why Germans
have embraced a new form of
historicism – modern buildings
dressed up like long-gone architectural
icons. Berlin’s Humboldt
Forum is a 21st-century museum
wrapped in an 18th-century palace
facade. Across the Spree, the
2003 Bertelsmann Foundation HQ is costumed
as the baroque Alte Kommandantur. In 2016,
Potsdam unveiled two shiny new buildings in
the guise of “baroque” palaces, one housing
the offices of Brandenburg’s parliament and
the other, the nearby Museum Barberini.
Frankfurt am Main has recreated a whole new
“historic” city centre. Opened last September,
the new Altstadt is packed with tourists who
love its selfie-friendly faux-olde facades. But
the historicalness is only skin deep – it’s a
kind of architectural cosplay.
Daniel Cati
Dan Borden on
architecture and
urban politics
Playing architectural politics
The narrative around Potsdam’s Garnisonkirche
has a familiar ring: after WWII,
its bomb-damaged remains were bulldozed,
and proponents say its current reconstruction
corrects that tragic mistake. However,
critics decry the spread of “Disneyfication”
and worry about “correcting” the past. Even
scarier, the church has links to right-wing
politics. The first calls to rebuild it came in
the 1990s from Max Klaar, a notorious Nazi
fan whose goal was to restore the place where
Adolf Hitler shook hands with
Field Marshal Hindenburg and
thus secured his position as
German chancellor. Similarly,
Frankfurt’s Altstadt was the
brainchild of Claus Wolfschlag,
another right-wing author who
links traditional buildings with
“true” German identity.
Did Klaar, Wolfschlag and
others really hope their resurrected
structures would drive
Germany’s politics to the right?
If so, they’re likely to be disappointed.
Buildings are remarkably ineffectual
devices of political coercion. For example,
no building better embodies Hitler’s politics
of intimidation than the Luftwaffe HQ near
Potsdamer Platz (1936). Still, it was converted
into East Germany’s House of Ministries with
the simple addition of a mosaic depicting
cheerful socialist workers. Currently serving
as Germany’s Finance Ministry, the hulking
building has yet to compel passers-by into
making a Nazi salute or breaking into a chorus
of The Internationale.
Designing a sexy future
In spite of its critics, the resurrection juggernaut
seems unstoppable. Is it time to jump on board
and seize control from the right-wing nut jobs?
After all, what’s more delusional, losing ourselves
in rosy nostalgia or looking forward to a “rosy”
future personified by soulless beige and grey
boxes? Once our Humboldt Forum is finished,
workers will cross the Spree and rebuild Karl
Friedrich Schinkel’s Bauakademie. Then what?
My candidate for reconstruction is Richard
Lucae’s 1872 Villa Joachim, which found its
higher calling in 1919 as Magnus Hirschfeld’s
Institute of Sexual Research (photo bottom).
Hirschfeld was an openly-gay man whose work
revolutionised ideas about sex and sexual
identity. Though destroyed by the Nazis and
WWII, the villa and Hirschfeld’s collection were
thoroughly documented by photos, making an
accurate reconstruction very doable. Returning
it to its rightful home near today’s Haus der
Kulturen der Welt would cement Berlin as the
true birthplace of modern sexual freedom. T
Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin
48
EXBERLINER 185