By Niklas Maak

For the founders of the Berlin Republic, Berlin is not a city. Instead, it’s an oversized apartment to be decorated according personal taste. Pariser Platz is already complete: The bureaus have been put into place, all of them the same height, though none of them fits too well with the others; nevertheless, from a distance, the total effect is quite orderly: a German living room. All that disturbs the eye now is the furniture left over from the seventies by the relatives from the east. So the old brown moldy sofa on the Platz der Republik has got to go and the ornamental Hohenzollern farmer’s chest is in: Because the new leaders of the new city like it that way.

The conflict, and it had to be a political one, swirling around the reconstruction of the Schlossplatz over the question of just what a good Platz is: This argument has devolved into a bland discussion of taste and the camorra of preservationists, tractor dealers and new middlers rotting together in the castle clubs behaves as if it were their personal right to stuff the city full of lousy set designs for ancient buildings.

The one true unique quality of the old Schloss, though, was the visible dissection of the centuries-old layers of which it was made: a core from the 15th century, a twisted, weathered facade from the Renaissance facing the water, followed later by the east building with its famous Andreas Schlüter Hof, then Eosander von Göthe’s brutal west building. The aura of the pieced-together. All these forms could be roughly built again, but not their details, their effect – and nothing is sadder than a dream arrested in plaster.

The blasting of the Palast der Republik and the reconstruction of the old Schloss: This is the new destruction carried out in the hopes of making up for the first destruction. Sweet revenge for the Palast der Republik is to take shape in the good old Schloss, the whipped cream torte of the Berlin Republic. The cold, modern, dirty German past is to be wiped away from the face of the city, and wherever it peeks out from, with the steel corners of the east-modern, from the Nazis’ holes, it will be polished and built over with reconstructed, comfortable history. Berlin is to become a theme park: “Happy Prussialand.” The reconstruction is the real destruction: it destroys history where it hopes to rebuild it.