The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd

Author:Brian Ladd [Ladd, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

37 Aviation ministry, circa 1936, looking south down Wilhelmstrasse (at left) from corner of Leipziger Strasse. Courtesy of Landesbildstelle.

Third Reich ministries and agencies left behind many other buildings. Their construction reflected both the growth of central government authority and the desire of leading Nazis to display their power in the most visible and permanent way. After the war, hard-pressed national and municipal authorities on both sides of the Wall understandably chose to see intact buildings as office space rather than as Nazi statements in stone. For example, the Third Reich’s first major building in Berlin was the new Reichsbank, built just southwest of the royal palace, a project first proposed by the Weimar Republic but altered to suit Hitler’s taste. In Marxist theory, the state bank symbolized the alliance of government and industry that brought Hitler to power. But here the East German authorities showed no fear of ghosts from the past. They removed the Nazi eagles and other sculptural decorations (as they did elsewhere) and used the huge building first for their finance ministry and then, from 1959 to 1989, as Communist Party headquarters.

A less prominent but more startling example of continuity can be found near Wilhelmstrasse. In 1933, Joseph Goebbels set up his new Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in an old palace opposite the chancellery. One of the Third Reich’s most effective bureaucratic infighters, he found powerful new applications for radio, film, and the printed press in service to the regime. In the following years, the propaganda ministry expanded its quarters by building substantial additions behind the palace. The palace itself did not survive the war, but several of the new wings did. These structures, facing courtyards and side streets, were also pressed into use by the German Democratic Republic—as the Government Press Office and Ministry for Media Policy.

A few other characteristic monuments of the Third Reich survive not because they remained useful, not because they were deemed worthy of preservation, but because it was too much trouble to demolish them. Above-ground bunkers are tolerated presences here and there in the city. Other silent witnesses to the war, prominently visible in this very flat city, are the artificial hills built from the rubble of thousands of destroyed buildings. Two of them, in East Berlin’s Friedrichshain and West Berlin’s Humboldthain Parks, partially cover massive flak towers that were the scourge of British and American bomber crews. It is widely known that West Berlin’s highest hill, “Devil’s Mountain,” is also made of rubble. Few know, however, that the American radar station there sat atop the never-completed building of the Berlin university’s military science faculty. Speer had planned to relocate the entire university to the western end of the east-west axis; after the war this single remnant of the project was buried physically as well as symbolically.

Places of Resistance, Places of Terror

The landscape of Berlin was never dominated by the Third Reich’s buildings and monuments, but the boots of marching Nazis and the applause of onlookers echoed nearly everywhere.

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