Marcel Krueger on the divided—and divisive—experience of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum and reconstructed City Palace…
My favourite picture of the Stadtschloss, the Berlin City Palace was taken by Willy Römer on December 24th, 1918. It shows a large Christmas tree set up in the Berlin Lustgarten park surrounded by a large crowd, on what was a very sombre Christmas Eve. World War I had just ended with a German defeat, millions had been killed, the emperor abdicated and a German republic emerged. Many went to the Lustgarten to find comfort in a band performing carols that evening; in the background looms the dark, ominous hulk of the palace.
The German emperor, Wilhelm II, had last been spotted in the building the previous October, just before fleeing to an army headquarters in Spa, in occupied Belgium, and then into exile in the Netherlands. He was never to return. Shortly after Wilhelm and his family—the Hohenzollerns—had vacated the castle, Karl Liebknecht famously declared a socialist republic from one of its most prominent balconies; the palace was then used as a barracks for the revolutionary sailors of the People’s Naval Division, who came to Berlin to protect Liebknecht’s newly-elected government—which, of course, was not to materialise.
Indeed, Liebknecht’s pronouncement had been matched almost simultaneously by another one at the Reichstag by SPD leader Friedrich Ebert at the Reichstag, and on the day the above photo was taken, over 60 people had died at the palace following armed fights between the sailors and the troops of the social democrats. This grisly event foreshadowed the further bloodshed of the Spartacist Uprising that would emerge in the new year.
In Römer’s picture, the massive structure in the background seems empty. There’s no lights in the windows and its almost spectral presence feels symbolic of the end of its role as the home of the German empire. That role had begun over 500 years earlier, when it was built as a mediaeval fortress for the counts of Brandenburg, the forerunners of kings and emperors of Prussia. It was constantly expanded and renovated, most extensively by court architect Andreas Schlüter (1659–1714) during the reign of the first king of Prussia, Frederick I.
After 1918 it became a museum and housed a number of public and private institutions. By 1933 its facade was blackened by a century of Berlin smog and scarred by revolutionary shrapnel and machine gun fire. Partially destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II and the Battle of Berlin in 1945, it was finally demolished by GDR authorities in 1951, who replaced it first with a parade ground named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Marx-Engels-Platz) and then, in 1973, with the Palast der Republik—the modernist parliament building of the GDR. Yet whenever I make my way from