Capital Reconstruction and Capital Accumulation in Berlin: A Reply to Peter Marcuse

In a recent issue of this journal, Peter Marcuse (1998) strongly criticizes the current reconstruction of Berlin as the new German capital. Marcuse joins a growing number of prominent intellectuals and politicians in speaking out against a massive Holocaust memorial proposed for the center of Berlin, expressing the impossibility of representing and explaining a monstrous historical period through an abstract design of sculpture and landscape architecture. Yet Marcuse does not simply question the architectural elements of proposed monuments, government buildings and high-profile commercial buildings. Instead, he raises a more fundamental objection: that this very preoccupation with symbolic architectural forms is obscuring a more important debate about the reconcentration of political and economic power in the German capital. Marcuse’s most provocative contention is to claim parallels between prewar and contemporary Berlin: that the current concentration of government and large corporations in Berlin has similarities to the preconditions that led to the abuse of this power in the 1930s. Marcuse remains the skeptic, not embracing a more popular rhetoric that the opening of the wall in 1989 has created Berlin’s first real opportunity to lead a stable, democratic nation. The current preoccupation in Berlin with architectural debates is not unexpected. Germans are self-conscious about how outsiders view their capital city, architecture and monuments. They realize that there is an enduring mistrust of Germany’s dealing with the past, a suspicion that its efforts to transform its history are in fact efforts to minimize or marginalize past German guilt. Unlike monuments in Washington or Jerusalem, there is a complex need in Berlin to ‘express shame as well as sorrow’ (Wise, 1998: 148), and to reconcile the representation of both victims and perpetrators. At the center of this debate is the current controversy surrounding the plan to erect a massive Holocaust memorial (Mahnmal) just south of the Brandenburg Gate, which has been front page news for many months and years in Berlin. This preoccupation with symbolism could suggest that the Germans, and especially Berliners, are particularly adept at understanding their political and historical identities through their architecture and monuments. However, Marcuse contends that this preoccupation might have the opposite effect. He argues that the current German fixation on aesthetics has obscured the troubling transformation of Berlin into a concentrated center of political and economic power. And for Marcuse, who emigrated from Berlin with his family at the age of four when Hitler came to power, this contemporary reconcentration of power in the German capital seems to be an especially unsettling reoccurrence.