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“First we shape buildings, then the buildings shape us,” Winston Churchill once said of the Westminster parliament. As the Germans began to shape the structures that would house their government in Berlin, they were very mindful of the strong connections between architecture and politics. Governmental buildings everywhere carry representational and symbolic weight, but in the new Berlin this was doubly so, given old Berlin’s history. Coming “home to the Spree” meant launching Germany’s latest political drama on a stage still set with the props of several recent plays, most of them tragedies. Many people, Germans above all, worried that a return to Berlin would spur new delusions of grandeur.

When the German government made its decision to shift most of its functions to Berlin, it announced that it intended to build brand new quarters for the federal chancellor, the federal president, and for the ministries that would make the move. The buildings that had housed the Communist government in East Berlin were to be torn down. These decisions, however, soon fell victim to the economic realities of reunited Germany and to protest actions by an energetic conservation lobby in Berlin. Bowing to the protests, and hoping to cut costs, the government declared in February 1993 that, while the chancellor and president would still get new buildings, the ministries would move into existing structures, which would be renovated and expanded as necessary. Most of the existing buildings that were earmarked for ministerial service had been used by the Nazis or the Communists, and often by both. This obviously raised difficult issues of political symbolism. Klaus Töpfer, who as federal building minister from 1995 to 1998 oversaw much of the governmental construction in Berlin, was willing to confront this problem head-on. He declared that the buildings in which state-evil had been conducted should be retained as “sites of inescapable memory,” so that would-be political criminals of the future “could never again entrench themselves behind bureaucratic desks.” Nonetheless, in addition to hiring architects to renovate these haunted houses, the new occupants might have found it advisable to bring in an exorcist or two.

Certainly Klaus Kinkel, who served as foreign minister at the time when a new home in Berlin was selected for his agency, was in the market for some serious political detoxification. He found it “unworthy” that a high-profile institution like the Foreign Ministry should be resettled in the former Nazi Reichsbank, which, to make matters worse, had also housed the headquarters of the SED from 1959 to 1989. Before grudgingly accepting this decision, he had fought for a brand new building on the Schloßplatz. He wanted, he explained, an architectural setting that “did justice to the ministry’s special concerns of political image in representing the Federal Republic of Germany abroad. . . . Future-oriented quarters for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin therefore require a new building.”

The historical building that the Foreign Ministry inherited in Berlin is a long, curving, sandstone-sheathed behemoth that had taken the Nazis six years to build (1934–40). During the Third Reich the structure’s facade was decorated with a frieze of muscled figures designed by Josef Thorak. Here Hjalmar Schacht and his colleagues worked out the financial dimensions of Germany’s rearmament. The complex had survived the war relatively intact, and in 1950 the East German Finance Ministry had moved in after making some cosmetic changes and structural modifications. In 1959 the Central Committee of the SED, along with the Politbüro, took over the building, making it the power center of the GDR. Erich Honecker had an office on the second floor.

When united Germany’s foreign minister (not Klaus Kinkel after all, but Joschka Fischer) took occupancy of his new quarters in 1999, his office stood in the same general area as Honecker’s old suite. The plenary assembly room of the SED Central Committee became a conference room. “I think it’s not at all bad for the federal government constantly to be conscious of living and working against the backdrop of a difficult history,” said Fritjof von Nordenskjöld, the Foreign Ministry official overseeing the move to Berlin. However, Foreign Minister Fischer and his successors were not likely to be reminded very often of Schacht and Honecker, for extensive modifications and the addition of a whole new wing gave the complex a very different look and feel.