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Most Germans assume that Allied bombs destroyed the royal castle, but in truth the first Communist masters of the DDR inherited it in eminently restorable shape and demolished it in 1950 out of anti-imperial spite. Think what one will of this scheme, it has the support of Germany's most powerful citizen, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and, it seems, of the Christian Democratic mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen. Many Germans want to re-create the imperial castle of the Hohenzollerns (the Prussian dynasty) right where it used to stand, between two arms of the river Spree at the other end of Unter den Linden. The Adlon replica revives a hotel that was so plush a place to stay when it opened, in 1907, that Kaiser Wilhelm stopped anyone from checking in until he had tried out its pomp for himself. The base camp for their comeback is a near copy of the once-renowned Adlon Hotel at its old site by the Brandenburg Gate. In any case, the traditionalists wish not so much to hold on to genuine history as to replicate it. But the classical-modernists are streets ahead of them, being able to build faster (an advantage that appeals to investors and developers).
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So traditionalists believe that they are back in the fray, particularly on a crucial mile of Unter den Linden heading east from the Brandenburg Gate. Isn't the current approach too rigorous? Where is the warmth? The character? The upshot is that the city government's longtime building director, a man of Prussian rigor who rejected frills, has been replaced by a warmer-hearted soul from Germany's far-western and far softer Rheinland, who says that she has in mind "a little fantasy, some poetry." The conservative Christian Democrats who head the reunified capital's coalition government have detected a welling up of discontent among Berlin's put-upon populace.
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The style that city planners chose was relentlessly classical-modern, which meant filling the void at Berlin's heart with flat stone-and-glass façades of restricted height (100 feet). Architectural traditionalists who favor cornices and a dose of old-time Prussian arrogance were laughed at when it came to planning a new Berlin after the Wall fell, in 1989. Those who hanker after an "old Berlin" have not exactly given up. The top names in international architecture - the superstars here are Americans, British, French, Italians - and the developers who employ them are, well, ruining the view. Even the shoddy Communist building style, which more than anything else revealed the soul of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), is slipping into anonymity, as modern construction sweeps through Berlin's old center in the eastern sector. Now the bombed sites and vacant lots that told of Hitler's madness and pocked central Berlin for half a century are as good as gone. There was something truly weird about the old East Berlin in particular, something so awful that the place possessed a certain appeal. The experience is not entirely welcome - though, heaven knows, it ought to be, given what did go on. Each day one finds oneself losing touch a little more with what went on before.
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This is a strange time in the life of Berlin - the hiatus between its redesignation as Germany's capital and 1999, when it will begin acting the part. One simply can't see where it was anymore, let alone make out the moral silhouette of this painful century. Heiner Müller, eulogized as Germany's best postwar playwright when he died, just over a year ago, had given himself a mission: "German history is my enemy," he used to say, "and I want to stare into the white of its eye." Berlin was Müller's home, and the city is covering its tracks so fast that it has resorted to painting a red line through its heart to show baffled visitors where the Wall used to run. The hard thing is to remain aware of what is being smoothed away.