Читаем Berlin полностью

That symbolic gestures involving Germany’s monarchical past were capable of igniting widespread anxiety had become painfully evident in August 1991 when the body of Frederick the Great, who had once said that territorial expansion was “the first rule of government,” was reburied at Sanssouci in nearby Potsdam. This reinterment was the end of a long odyssey for Frederick, who died in 1786. In his will the king had stated that he wished to be buried “without pomp or ceremony” at Sanssouci, but instead he was interred with great pomp at the Garrison Church in Potsdam. There he stayed until World War II. To protect the royal relic from Allied bombs, Göring moved the coffin in 1943 to a Berlin cellar, and two years later, to protect it from the advancing Russians, Hitler ordered it removed to a salt mine in Thuringia. The Americans found Frederick and placed him in a church in Marburg. In 1953 the king’s Hohenzollern heirs moved him once again, this time to the family plot near Stuttgart. Finally, German unification prompted the family, some 205 years after Frederick’s death, to grant him his last wish by interring him next to his beloved dogs in the soil of Sanssouci. The king’s wish for simplicity, however, still eluded him. Helmut Kohl turned the reburial into a state occasion by insisting upon being present; the Bundeswehr sent an honor guard. The affair reminded some observers of the “Day of Potsdam” (March 21, 1933), when Hitler and Hindenburg bowed before Frederick’s grave at the Garrison Church, thereby claiming an alliance between the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich. Kohl of course had no intention of signaling a revival of Frederick’s expansionist ideals; rather, he simply wanted to “stand before our entire history.” Nonetheless, his inept and controversial gesture, like his effort six years before to promote reconciliation with one of Germany’s conquerors through a joint visit with President Ronald Reagan to the military cemetery at Bitburg, where Waffen-SS-men were buried, could not help but be misinterpreted.

Concerns about Germany’s national image, combined with the other objections to a Schloß reconstruction, might have killed this idea immediately had it not found some influential supporters on the local and national levels. Once again Helmut Kohl made his influence felt as a champion and protector of Germany’s national heritage. Believing (like Kaiser Wilhelm II) that Berlin needed a lot of historical ballast to keep it from floating off into a political cloud-cuckoo land, he offered his personal backing for the Schloß project. On the municipal front, Mayor Diepgen and the local CDU endorsed the scheme. One of Germany’s best known journalists, Joachim Fest, used his pulpit at the FAZ to argue that the old palace, far from being a forbidding bastion of authoritarianism, had been an approachable, even folksy place whose courtyard was open to ordinary citizens. Wolf Jobst Siedler, the influential publisher, likened a possible Schloß reconstruction to Warsaw’s restoration of its historic old city after World War II, and to Venice’s rebuilding of its trademark Campanile in the early twentieth century. In his view, Berlin needed a reconstituted Schloß to bring coherence back to its devastated center. He pointed out that Schinkel’s neoclassical Neues Museum had been designed to interact with the baroque facade of the old palace. The publisher could have countenanced a modern building that performed this function, but he had no faith that the modernists were capable of coming up with an appropriate design. Thus it was with “resignation” that he opted for a reconstruction of the old palace.