Berlin: On the Reichstag and Brandenburg Tor

 Berlin: Reichstag and Brandenburg Tor

If all goes well, by no means a fait accompli, on Deutsche Bahn, it is eighty minutes by rail from Hamburg to Berlin.  The high-speed ICE train runs non-stop from Hamburg’s hauptbahnhof to Berlin-Spandau (a few travelers may get off there) and, then, to Berlin’s central station in Mitte (“mid-town”).  Between the two cities, the country is forested, colonnades of virginal white birches contrasting with tall, stiff-looking red pines.  Sometimes, the land clears for a moment on small patches of wet furrows – I am traveling in mid-November – all enclosed by the gloomy woods, The express train slows to glide through deserted stations in small cheerless-looking towns, lonely platforms under the eaves of wooden sheds though which you might glimpse a couple streets dead-ending at the grim railroad buildings, a brick church on the nub of a hill, perhaps, a grocery store flying little yellow and blue pennants to show that it is open, standing near some bicycles shackled to utility poles.  

After the woods and empty wet meadows, Berlin Hauptbahnhof is an explosion of color and light, swarming with people on the modern metal balconies and stairwells overlooking crowded parallel platforms, the whole spectacle lit by advertisements and illuminated curry wurst and pastry booths.  At this time of year, the beer and soft drink kiosks sell “Gluehwein” at 3.5 euros a mug.  

The escalator lifting us from the train platforms (“Gleise” or “tracks”) glides past a brightly lit display that reads: “Mitte Bahnhof – der Reichstag ist noch um die Ecke – that is, “Central Station – the Reichstag is just around the corner.”  This is true: emerging from the station, I can see the grim shell of the Reichstag building rising over a nondescript jumble of glass and concrete structures, the loop of a grey river flowing in the  abstract groove of a concrete trough in the foreground.  Distances are deceptive.  It’s hard to get a sense of the scale of the Reichstag building, a structure that is much larger (and, therefore, more remote) than one might, at first, expect.  

We walk for fifteen minutes, making a few false starts at first, but reaching the Leonardo Hotel without too much difficulty.  The air spurts a little cold rain and the streets are wet.  There’s an Irish pub across the street from the hotel located at Brecht Plaza.  The famous Berliner Ensemble occupies a highrise across a desolate patch of grass and shrubbery; some neon scribbled along the top of the building describes the show now on offer at the theater.  

At check-in, the clerk, an attractive young woman, insists that we are on “business’ and not pleasure.  But, of course, there’s no business purpose for this trip.  She asks three times with insinuation that we are traveling for business and, each time, we give the wrong answer.  This is puzzling until she explains the stakes: “There is no city tax if you are here for business,” she says.  On three rooms rented for the night, avoiding the tax saves us enough money for “a couple of beers” she says.

A little later, we walk to the Reichstag.  The stroll is along the concrete canal in which the Spree flows.  On one bank, the Reichstag looms over small adjacent buildings, reconstructed from the rubble and, apparently, administrative offices – the structures are handsome with vaguely renaissance exteriors spikes on their window-sills like knitting needles to repel pigeons.  (Across the river, big ultra-modern buildings house chambers for legislative functions – the buildings seem to be burst apart, disassembled into intersecting planes and boxes separated shadowy voids; the architecture is like the deconstructionist work of Peter Eisenman, geometric white facades slotted with oblong and square openings.  A few hundred yards away, an actual work by Eisenman fills a plaza – the 2006 monument to the murdered Jews of Europe, several acres covered with squashed stelae, stone boxes massed together to create a huge, impenetrable labyrinth that looks like something midway between a graveyard and construction site.)  In this neighborhood, the Reichstag looms over everything like a bad dream, a hulking mass of smoke-colored masonry with its glass dome exposed like a tumor over the vast, foreboding portico.  On the pediment over the great, war-scarred columns, the words “Dem Deutschen Volk” are inscribed – a curious grammatical construction; the “German People” are syntactically the object of some sentence, but what exactly is said in that sentence remains unclear.  (I think “Dem Deutschen Volk” expresses something like “this building is dedicated to the German people”,  however, with the prefatory phrase omitted.)  The building is like congealed smoke and ash.  The dome, made transparent by the English architect, Norman Foster, when the structure was restored, gives the huge edifice, something of the quality of a colossal and perverse gumball machine, emptied of its candy and standing in the corner of a car repair shop or decaying commercial arcade.  Construction makes a maze of trenches, earth movers, and trailer sheds in front of the building and its hard to get a reasonable vantage on the Reichstag.  Cell-phone pictures don’t really succeed and the wire fences and hoardings prevent you from getting close enough to the towering facade to inspect its aerial terraces where men bearing huge swords menace the sky.  

This is ground-zero for the lamentable history of Germany in the twentieth century, a place so haunted that the East Germans in the DDR left the ruin alone, preferring to use the tongues of its lawns for sunbathing in mild weather.  Inside the transparent dome (at first, I typed “doom”) some shadowy tourists hover in mid-air, ascending the spiral walkways to the vantage atop the glass rotunda.  (I have earlier noted that Foster’s goal, that is, creating a structure that exemplifies “transparency” is a failure both as an architectural conceit and symbol; I’ve been in the dome and, from the spiral ramp, you look down on the coffin lid of a sealed interior.  Whatever is going on in there is completely invisible. And, in Berlin, the air itself is congested, thick with memory and despair, and so the bulb of the dome isn’t exactly transparent in any weather.  When it’s hot the dome seems to be filled with steam; in the cold, the atmosphere is opaque, pressing closely against the glass that runs with rain and condensed mist.)

The Brandenburg Tor is remarkably close to the Reichstag, just beyond a grey mall where a tangle of trees marks the edges of the Tierpark.  The walk between the Tor and the Reichstag takes less than ten minutes, a testimony as to how closely nested the old East and West Berlin were – the Reichstag was on the DDR side, within the old Soviet sector, and the Tor, of course, the symbol of West Berlin, although located on the exact line of the Wall.  The great gate with its austere fluted columns is the pedestal for a great bronze quadriga, a chariot drawn by enormous horses on which a towering goddess holds the reins.  The quadriga isn’t a mere ornament at the gate’s summit, but rather the raison d’etre for the structure, a huge sculpture that seems disproportionately large when viewed from beneath the Tor – the clump of metal horses, rearing and plunging, and the howitzer barrel of the goddess tower overhead, atop the gate like a vast bronze tarantula or some sort of bizarre, plumed hat.  Originally, the figure of the goddess was described as Eirene, that is, the Greek deity associated with peace, but during the Napoleonic wars, the wreath hovering over the colossus was re-cast as a warlike eagle on an imperial standard.  (The Nazis added an iron cross to the standard.)  The great gate with its vast doric columns rising without bases is flanked by smaller classical temples (“stoa” or, originally, port of entry custom houses) annexed to the towering walls of the structure, smaller buildings with dark oblong openings and sepulchral polished stone concealing their interiors.  

The Brandenburg Tor marks the end of the royal procession way from the palace a mile away to the Tierpark, a green sector once populated with wild boar and deer for the King’s hunting pleasure.  The mile-long lane is planted with stately linden trees (hence it’s name “Unter den Linden”) and, now, lined with expensive hotels and big marble embassy buildings.  The quadriga is so large, so disproportionate, as to seem a sort of eyesore and it can’t be oriented in any way that makes sense – if the bronze chariot with its tutelary goddess is supposed to protect the city, then, it should face out from the flat plinth atop the gate – but, instead, it faces toward the palace, not defensive, but rather, somehow, admonitory and, even, threatening. Everything about the structure seems paradoxical and, on the day that I visited, standing in the grey sleet, the inside surfaces of the gate where completely sheathed in long plywood boxes over which white plastic had been stretched as tight as a drum.  This rendered the gate curiously abstract, just a bland facade without openings of any kind (in fact, under the hoardings, there are six columns – the outer passageways once for use by commoners with the central arcade restricted to use by members of the royal court.)  Neither the columns nor the passages between them were visible and the quadriga, with its wind-blown drapery and agitated bronze horse-flesh, the goddess again bearing the halo of the wreath of peace, sits on the ledge above the broad triumphal way like a kind of over-sized and hideous knickknack.  People stood under the featureless wall of wood and plastic grumbling as they adjusted their cameras to make disappointing pictures.  

(Although I didn’t know it at the time, a “eco-terrorist group” as they are characterized in the German media, “The Last Generation”, used fire extinguishers to spray orange paint all over the columns supporting the flat-ledge of the gate.  This was on September 17, 2023.  The wall of wood and plastic sheathing covered repair measures underway when I visited in mid-November, about six weeks later.  “The Last Generation” have engaged in showy protests over what they regard as the destruction of the natural world by climate change.  They have obliterated paintings by Monet and glued themselves to canvases by Van Gogh – why exactly they vent their wrath on inoffensive works of art is unclear to me.  By contrast, however, I would note that anyone would be hard-pressed to characterize the mighty and aggressive Brandenburg Tor as inoffensive – rather, it symbolizes all sorts of things, many of them malign.)

One of the most expensive hotels in the world, the Adlon Kempinski, stands in the shadow of the great gate.  (There is an art museum as well right under the plinths of the triumphal arch – when I was in Berlin, a big show of works by Edith Clever were advertised, the actress and singer’s sorrowful face with high Slavic-looking cheeks looking down from a fifty foot tall banner.)  The entire width of the street in front of the hotel was occupied with black limousines and sinister-looking panel trucks.  Stanchions had been set up to exclude pedestrians from nearby sidewalks and the median between the lanes and phalanxes of motorcycle cops were gathered at all intersections.  A group of men in boxy business suits were loading teletypes and copying machines into one of the vans.  Obviously, some affair of state had been underway but, as one might expect, the nature of the diplomatic mission and its participants was obscure – whatever conclave had occurred resulting in this exodus from the alabaster corridors of the Adlon, was confidential and privileged  and worried-looking men with cell-phones to their ears stood among the parked limousines, a whole motorcade of dark Mercedes Benz vehicles, awaiting whatever it was that was about to happen.

The route from the Tor to our hotel led past the bland and understated ramparts of the American embassy, a place almost hidden from sight with a tiny name-plaque next to its security door.  Rows of cops were standing there as well and the sidewalk was blocked with more metal barricades so that we had to cross the street to get back to the Spree channel and its bridges and the Berliner Ensemble building at Brecht Plaza.  Rain fell in a desultory way, peppering the puddles at intersections.  In the distance, sirens hooted.