September, 2005 - Nr. 9
Government releases feasibility study as last Palace "Mountain" exhibition closes
TWIG - A massive protest exhibition marked the last major event to be held in Berlin’s Palace of the Republic, which is set to be torn down in December. In a clash of cultural symbols that has divided Berliners for years, the boxy copper remnant of Germany’s communist past will be torn down to make way for a reconstructed Baroque Palace, the likes of which once stood on the same spot.
The exhibition, "Der Berg" "The Mountain," closed last week after thousands traversed its gigantic, 144-ft. steel and fibreglass construction built within the interior of the Palace of the Republic. Choosing the Round-about Path, the Pilgrim’s Path, the Mountain-Climber’s Path, or the Philosopher’s Path, visitors climbed the mountain to view its exhibitions, consisting of paintings, theatre pieces, video installations, comedy routines, architectural models, and sculptures.
The exhibition’s closure came on the heels of a government feasibility study, which estimated costs for the new Prussian castle, raised in the palace’s stead and known as the Berlin City Palace, to be between $650 and $950 million. Construction will begin in 2007.
Proponents of the Baroque Palace, a replica of the building destroyed by World War II bombing in 1945, insist that the new construction will be the architectural keystone to tie together the ensemble along Berlin’s famed Unter den Linden Boulevard.
"Here is one of the world’s most famous historic ensembles in the center of Berlin, with the university and the opera house and the cathedral," lobbyist Wilhelm von Boddien told the New York Times in an interview. The Palace of the Republic, Boddien says, disturbs the ensemble’s architectural continuity.
Millions in private donations have already been raised by donors eager to see the Berlin City Palace take up its old home on Unter den Linden Boulevard. Not just a reminder of the city’s royal past, the future palace will house a shopping center, a museum and a five-star hotel.
But the growing numbers of mostly young artists and citizens eager not to let an important slice of German history disappear are making ever more frequent pleas to the federal government to let the Palace of the Republic stand – as a ruin of the Communist Regime and what it stood for.
Hundreds of artists and architects have come out in support of the Palace of the Republic, many seeing it as "a distorted reflection of the dreams and hollow promises of the postwar Communist regime," the New York Times reported. Among them is Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who has called removing the Palace "kind of insanely ahistorical."
"I think that’s a painful part of it – that most historicism is realized at the expense of history," Koolhaas said in an interview.
Built in 1972, the building was closed for asbestos removal
in the early 1990’s and had been abandoned longer than it had been in use.
In August 2004, it began the location of choice for Berlin’s trendy party
planners, and has since hosted several major contemporary art exhibitions.
