By Matthias Schulz
Encouraged by the success story of Dresden's Frauenkirche, other communities are longing for their own cherubs and columns. In a number of German cities, there is growing pressure to resurrect old palaces that were flattened by the bombs of World War II or fell victim to the wrecking balls of postwar ideology:
But the ornate projects are at the center of a bitter controversy. The proponents include such respected public figures as TV journalist Lea Rosh, talk show host Günther Jauch and politician Egon Bahr. But opponents of the movement see the whole thing as nothing but kitsch and fraud, and suspect that people who are stuck in the past are planning an architectural counterrevolution.
An animated group of curators of historical monuments came together recently for a conference at the Dessau Bauhaus. "How should we feel about the replicas and copies that are being forced upon us by the will of the people?" someone asked. The question quickly triggered an uproar. Some were in favor of the new "reconstructivism," while others called it a denial of history. The term "Auschwitz lie" (referring to Holocaust denial) was even mentioned.
There is no question that hysteria is never far away when people begin talking about the good old days in Germany. But Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, doesn't necessarily have to be lurking behind every column.
Meanwhile, Germany's cities are creating facts on the ground. The work is farthest along in downtown Braunschweig where the war-damaged palace of the Welfen dynasty stood until 1960. Then the city council had it torn down and buried the decorative façade in a nearby clay pit. Furious discussions on the destruction went on for years.
When an investor agreed to pay for the rebuilding of the palace a few years ago, he triggered a wave of public enthusiasm. Elderly residents remembered the buried rubble from the building, which was carefully incorporated into the late classical façade -- some of the columns weigh as much as three tons. The replica palace is due to open on May 6 of this year.
But there is just one hitch. The palace is little more than an ornate entrance to a huge, 30,000-square-meter shopping center behind it -- built by ECE, a multinational shopping mall developer. The replica palace is nothing but an "historical tapestry" thrown over this modern temple to commerce, say critics: brilliant in front but banal at the back.
But most critics have been silenced by the exquisite gravity and power of Braunschweig's 116-meter-wide, portal-crowned sandstone fortress. And expressions of displeasure are cancelled out by the fact that they are usually voiced from offices in ornate Art Deco mansions.
Nevertheless, the battle over the retro look continues to rage. "Ornament is a crime," Austrian architect Adolf Loos once declared, thereby launching modernity. Theodor W. Adorno added the concept of "authenticity," with which every hip homebuilder had to comply if he wished to avoid falling prey to kitsch.
Such dogmas continue to hold true today. Décor and wall decoration are ridiculed, not least because their detractors have a tendency to equate taste in architecture with fundamental beliefs. The current rebirth of a taste for historical buildings, claims Süddeutsche Zeitung, fits seamlessly into the "yearning for school uniforms and etiquette courses."
But levelheaded observers tend to interpret the trend as a sign of weakness in modern architecture. Its founding fathers, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, embarked on a crusade against bombast in the 1920s with their geometrical, utilitarian buildings. But beauty was all too often lost in the process.
What is more, what began as a radical departure from the canon of the past soon deteriorated into a "profitopolis" of its own. Nowadays every Aldi supermarket looks as though it had been put there by Mies van der Rohe himself.
What is happening now is a response to this homogenization -- a rollback to the past -- at least in some important locations. There is a rekindling of interest in the old design principles in architecture, which are derived from the temples of ancient Greece.
Do such mementoes of the past necessarily have to be kitsch? What exactly does "authenticity" mean in this context? When the campanile on St. Mark's Square in Venice collapsed in 1902, it was quickly rebuilt. Warsaw Castle and the monastery at Monte Cassino, where St. Benedict once founded western monasticism, are both copies.
Berlin's Förderverein rejects the charge that it is planning a "Disneyland." "We are not recasting cherubs in concrete here," insists Bottien. Instead, he says, the work on the Berlin Baroque palace is a tremendously laborious combination of high-tech and traditional craftsmanship.
Digging for treasure is another matter. The Förderverein is also involved in archeology. "We know that the Bunkerberg ( bunker hill) in Friedrichshain was filled with demolition rubble in the late fall of 1959," Bottien explains. "The ruins must be buried under a 15-centimeter layer of topsoil."
The trail that leads to an abandoned industrial site in northern Berlin is even more exciting. Old East German files reveal that Walter Ulbricht promised (because of the tremendous opposition to the demolition) to rebuild the palace on a different site when the general state of the economy improved. Experts took 5,000 detailed photographs of the ruins, and all sculptures were dismantled.
Investigators discovered that the decorative elements from the Stadtschloss's façade ended up at a state-owned underground engineering site in Berlin's Heinersdorf district, where hundreds of windowsills, architraves and carved ram's heads were meticulously arranged in huts. But the warehouses soon deteriorated and the East German government had the best pieces removed and stored in museum basements. The site was eventually bulldozed.
Jürgen Klimes, the former chief sculptor at the VEB Stuck und Naturstein (State Stucco and Natural Stone Enterprise) remembers seeing bulldozers pushing the remains of the magnificent Baroque stone palace into a hollow and covering them with dirt.
But where was the site? Last year the Förderverein had the tar surface layer torn open in several spots on the abandoned grounds. But the effort produced only one sculpture from Portal II. Next month the foundation plans to spend another €50,000 on the excavation. But will the archeologists hit pay dirt this time?
Wilhelm von Boddien is optimistic. "We have a new tip," he says, his eyes sparkling. "A woman from the allotments next door claims she saw exactly what happened back then."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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