By CARSON CHAN

Thomas Demand loathes to cede control. For that reason, to know his carefully formed cabal of collaborators is to gain partial access to a tightly structured imagination. Adam Caruso, 47, co-founder of London based architecture firm Caruso St John, and Udo Kittelmann, 51, the newly installed director to the state museums in Berlin, represent the two other forces of the current Demandian triumvirate. Together, these men are launching Nationalgalerie – Demand’s first solo presentation, of around 40 new and existing works, in a Berlin museum. Housed in the Mies-designed Neue Nationalgalerie until January 2010, the project presents tall and obvious challenges. Firstly, how do you exhibit photographs in a glass box without walls? Perhaps more fundamentally, what does it mean to make an exhibition called Nationalgalerie in the Nationalgalerie, on the 60th anniversary of the German Federal Republic, exactly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the nation’s capital? Broadly speaking, Caruso St John’s charge is my first question; Kittelmann’s is my second. Demand presides over both.

This summer, I met Caruso and Kittelmann at Demand’s studio – a sprawling space refurbished from a warehouse next to the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s contemporary art museum. That day, both men had an easy demeanor as we sat in conversation in the museum’s restaurant, Demand eventually joining the fray at the right temperature.

Caruso, who made the day trip from London without his partner, Peter St John, is effusive – his sentences tangle with tangents and asides, as if he’s narrating the marginalia of his thoughts. Kittelmann speaks with aplomb. He draws out his words like a cellist would with tones – giving music to his ideas on exhibition-making, history, and Berlin. The German press takes every opportunity to point out, sneeringly, his pedigree in ophthalmology rather than art history; but it is the art circle’s general excitement that greets the beginning of his tenure. Having proven himself to be both maverick and intellectual during his six years as the director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst, Nationalgalerie will no doubt point our eyes into the horizons he has set for Berlin’s museums.

UDO KITTELMANN: I’ve known Thomas for a while, and I’ve always admired the way he collaborates. Thomas is very strong-minded when it comes to his work – especially with whom he works with. This makes things quite easy. He is an artist a curator can trust. He has an instinct for who would work well together.

ADAM CARUSO: Peter [St John] and I met Thomas during our collaboration at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. The museum wanted him to exhibit in the basement, but he had absolutely no interest in being down there. At the first meeting he had already said that exhibiting in the Fondation Cartier, designed by Jean Nouvel, is like doing a test run for a show at the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) because both buildings are glass boxes. This was ten years ago.

UDO KITTELMANN: He never told me this!

ADAM CARUSO: Both buildings presented us with the problem of installing two-dimensional wall-based work in spaces that have no walls. This show at the Neue Nationalgalerie is really picking up that thread we started in France.

CARSON CHAN: I heard that neither you nor Thomas thought very highly of Nouvel’s building.

ADAM CARUSO: It is what it is. Thomas was interested in doing something strong in that space – the space has problems, but it was still possible to do some really nice things. Having worked with other artists, I found that Thomas has a comparatively “un-precious” way of working – in the sense that he is not overly worried about how the work is presented. The most important thing for him is that the experience of the show is powerful, and that the work is brought into a relationship with the architecture in a way that adds to the meaning of the show. Thomas is keen on the fact that the artist-architect relationship produces something new. This is the only way you can make exhibitions memorable.

UDO KITTELMANN: Yes. Thomas knows how to play ball, so to speak. He gives everyone a feeling of being involved in a very creative process. It’s always about creativity. Every idea is welcome and open to discussion.

CARSON CHAN: The way you’re describing Thomas’s method was the same way Taryn Simon described to me your way of working, Udo. She said you were “magically blind to restrictions,” and that you allowed her ideas boundless movement. Adam, in terms of boundaries and resistance, the Fondation Cartier presented the challenge of installing in an open glass space, and I was struck by how Caruso St John positioned the exhibition design as a form of very subtle resistance in the way your walls were oriented across the grain of the museum’s flooring. The Neue Nationalgalerie is a bold space. To what degree are you going to resist the Mies van der Rohe museum?

ADAM CARUSO: You know, you usually need architects to make an exhibition only when there is a problem. In a good art space with nice walls and good rooms, a curator can install the show; an artist can install the show. Almost every time we’ve made an exhibition design, either for Thomas or the Tate or the Hayward, it was because they had an idea for a show that they couldn’t execute themselves. It’s the same as when we are designing galleries. We’ve worked several times with Gagosian Gallery. Our role is to make something that mediates between the space given and the art. The point is to intensify the experience of the show; to make it as powerful as possible. There are lots of bad galleries that take away from the presence of the art.

UDO KITTELMANN: I would disagree – or rather, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you need an architect to design an exhibition to make up for the shortcomings of the exhibition space. There is plenty of artwork that could work just fine in any space – in the worst spaces, even.

ADAM CARUSO: Well, it’s a combination between the exhibition space and the show. Beaubourg [Centre Pompidou, Paris], before it was renovated, housed excellent shows. Also, the Kunsthaus Bregenz only presented shows with a big potential for success in that building. Many shows could have died in there, but they worked really well – they seemed to be designed for that particular space.

CARSON CHAN: In that sense, wouldn’t a photography show, like Thomas’s, categorically not work at the Neue Nationalgalerie?

ADAM CARUSO: No. I would say that there are many compelling reasons why the combination of Thomas’s work and that building will be a powerful thing. I think the same was true at the Fondation Cartier. There, as with here, we have the problem of how to hang the photographs. Mies is one of my favorite architects. The Neue Nationalgalerie is very impressionable, and I was surprised at how much I liked it the first time I saw it. The scale, the way in which the incredible weight of the roof seems to be suspended, doesn’t come through in photographs. The building is very beautiful, yet most of the shows I’ve seen there have been very problematic.

UDO KITTELMANN: In this context, it’s nice to remember what this building was originally designed for: it was planned in the early 1950s as the headquarters of Bacardi Rum in Santiago de Cuba, and Mies never changed his plans for the current glass hall in Berlin. It’s still the original plan as the Bacardi headquarters.

ADAM CARUSO: It was one of those projects that he had to do – his big universal space project.

CARSON CHAN: Which is something Caruso St John is generally not into, right? You’ve mentioned several times in the past that you prefer the individual rather than the universal experience.

ADAM CARUSO: One exception is okay! Especially one by Mies!

CARSON CHAN: Well, one thing that I see in both of your practices is a deep interest in the relationship between the city and the lived place. There’s a city-centric, site-specificity to both of your work, which is sensitive to the particular history of the city you’re operating in. Udo, as a young curator in Düsseldorf, along with Beate Klingen, you made an exhibition and accompanying catalog about the Düsseldorf art scene. At around the same time, you interned with Galerie Remmert und Barth, dealers that specialized in Das Junge Rheinland artists, a Düsseldorf-based art movement. That is to say, even in your twenties, there seemed to be a very concerted effort to work with the artistic history and traditions of a city. When you made a small show at the Haus der Kunst in Munich recently for the city’s 850th anniversary, you put in quotes by Karl Valentin – the early 20th-century Munich film comedian – and listed him as co-curator. I’m interested in how you will address Berlin – which is not just another German city, but also the Federal Republic’s capital. The idea of doing a show about 60 years of Germany’s history with a Berlin artist who works with representations of history – and who has thus far been celebrated everywhere around the world except in Berlin – seems somehow fitting.
Likewise, Adam, I see a similar impulse in the way you have been writing about neo classical architecture as a style that is aware of architectural traditions that should be built upon, as opposed to finding innovation simply through the new. There is a concern for civic society, its conscious ness and its historical resonances. Caruso St John’s architecture understands design in a broader urban way: a building is never a thing in itself; it grows with the city, it ages. I’m curious to see how this shared connection with history between the two of you, and of course with Thomas, will enact itself in the exhibition.

ADAM CARUSO: The last decade or so of architecture has been filled with empty gestures in the name of invention that are not that inventive. Architects behaved too much like fashion designers—

UDO KITTELMANN: As did artists.

ADAM CARUSO: When I was in school, contextualism was a weak and boring idea. It was about making sure the cornice line and the base line matched from building to building. But there’s a much deeper context that is social: it’s about all the social relationships that come into a project. Architects have learned a lot from contemporary art practices about strategies to engage with things that are really ugly on the surface – I think then you can really make a project that is not thin and facile – that has depth. Putting Max Beckmann lithographs in Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst, as Udo and Thomas did a few years ago, could have been terrible. But they saw it as an opportunity to make a German expressionist relevant in a contemporary setting. The connection between being a good curator and a good architect is this contextual engagement. If you’re engaged, then you have the opportunity to engage others.
When we started, Thomas gave us a file containing research on 70 or 80 percent of the shows that were in the Neue Nationalgalerie – which was research that Caruso St John would have done, but he did it already. There were photographs of shows that Mies designed too, and you can see the history of shows that worked, and shows that really didn’t. And a lot of shows didn’t. What clearly didn’t work was any kind of scenographic approach, because you can’t really deny the presence of the building. It’s just so strong. We were really interested in Mies anyways – pre-WWII Mies, when he was doing these exhibitions for the silk industry and for the Werkbund – so our first idea was to connect to the history of Mies’s exhibition-making. The show at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Mondrian show, was really impressive; hanging systems of different sizes. It created something between neutral space and specific room-like spaces. We always tried to push something that related to that. But when we started discussion with Thomas, he was concerned with the same point you addressed earlier, which was about how much our design should be something that is polite and going along with the building, and how much it should be challenging it.

UDO KITTELMANN: I think that’s the point. This is a kind of architecture that is always challenging. This is the message of the building. Mies is always challenging whatever people decide to use the building for. It’s a big question mark.

CARSON CHAN: Actually, what I found extremely confusing in the last several years at the Neue Nationalgalerie was the previous director’s unwillingness to take up this challenge. It was a refusal on Peter-Klaus Schuster’s part – he seemed either ambivalent about or ignorant of the museum’s challenges. Thomas’s show is your first major exhibition as the director of several museums in Berlin. How do you plan on using the show and the building to present your method and ideas?

UDO KITTELMANN: The building is intimately linked to Berlin’s history. It’s also a Mies building, one of his masterpieces; artists and curators are often frightened by this. It’s heavy to work in there; there is physical and historic pressure. People don’t feel free. First of all, I think that one must get rid of this notion, this weight. One has to take a naïve approach, forget that it’s Mies, and just see it as any other building. I had this thought when I curated Gregor Schneider’s exhibition in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Whenever you have strong, atmospheric architecture, it becomes problematic when you start dealing with its history. In a way, history is always there with out you having to deal with it. You can’t escape from history.

THOMAS DEMAND: When we did our research on all the shows at the Neue Nationalgalerie, I remember thinking about the Rem Koolhaas show, “CONTENT,” in 2003: he used the building like a sports stadium. He’s the biggest admirer of Mies, yet he just filled up the space, momentarily ignoring the pathos of the building, the history, the demand from a certain public to explain the world with each exhibition. One must get over this pretense; and by overloading the space, he did that. Though this recipe worked for an architect, I’m not sure it will work for an artist. Everything looks like art when you put it in there. There was Candida Hoefer; there was a piece of a model of a house he never built. He just filled it with stuff – he moved his studio into the museum.

ADAM CARUSO: It’s a valid approach, but it’s one that has to do with the modernist rupture. Koolhaas’s method was to stand in opposition to the building. This gesture was very clear at his show in the Neue Nationalgalerie compared to other museums where “CONTENT” was exhibited. The clarity of the building was contradicted by the mess of the show – but the show was a mess everywhere, wasn’t it? And Carson, regarding your comment on the general indifference towards programming at the Neue Nationalgalerie, I would say that this attitude can be found in many, many museums. From what I’ve observed in England, there are at least two methods. There is the David Sylvester method of making shows that are very sensitive to the space. Nicholas Serota, the current Tate director, works from this method; right from the beginning you’re thinking about how to choreograph the art in the space. On the other hand, for the past ten years or so, the shows have been much more of a “catalog.” It’s as if the shows were excuses to make catalogs, and you get curators that have almost no sensitivity to what the experience of the show will be, or to what the challenges of putting that show in that space are. In London, the Tate has raised the bar for exhibition making – we can’t simply do historical shows anymore. There has to be some experience that you take away from the show and the other institutions have really responded to that. The Hayward took a building and gave it a new potential, and all the shows benefit from this weird space. It’s a very provincial approach to do a show just to get people to see it – almost as if the director has accepted the gallery as a tragedy he has to live with. You see a lot of shows that are like that, don’t you?

CARSON CHAN: Yes, unfortunately. So Udo, as the new director of several Berlin museums, you’ve kind of inherited a double challenge. Not only are you working with extremely challenging museum spaces, but also a challenging, or challenged, antiquated administrative structure completely unlike the institutions you worked for in the past. Your predecessor, Schuster, has bred a cynicism in the museum exhibition- making culture in Berlin. The most successful shows in Schuster’s eyes were the MoMA show and the Metropolitan Museum show – exhibitions that essentially used the Neue Nationalgalerie as an ersatz storage space for whenever these American institutions needed a temporary home for their collections during renovations. How do you dispel this cynicism? How will you get people to understand that no, that is not what a successful exhibition is – that a museum is, at its root, a place for the public dissemination of cultural knowledge? In the institutions you have worked with previously, you have always begun by redefining the accepted order of the museum. How will you do that in these spaces?

UDO KITTELMANN: My beginning in Berlin will be the same. My general understanding of art institutions – whether it be a museum, opera house, theater, or whatever – is about how these institutions are responsible for producing impulses for creativity. Simply put, a museum should be a “creativity factory” – this is the only reason in my mind why they exist. These “factories” run on the ideas of their workers; they produce ideas that are transmitted into reality.

ADAM CARUSO: This is also how you build an audience. The Labour Party, in England, took more of an interest in culture than the previous administration. But the cost of that interest was that museums had to have a political role. The carrot was that the government paid, and the museums were free. But the museums had to report to the government on the number of people coming in. Plus, they had to be popular – you had to get people in, and this probably resulted in shows that were blatantly populist. What all the good institutions are now seeing is that you can be populist, but still provide good, tough exhibitions. To really keep an audience you have to first build an audience.

UDO KITTELMANN: Yes. Institutions must build their own audience!

ADAM CARUSO: You have to engage in new ways with audiences. And you’ll agree, Udo, that that’s the most exciting thing an exhibition can do.

UDO KITTELMANN: As you’ve mentioned, Carson, exhibitions in the past decade were too often seen as a product to sell. This is not our business – if we were to sell anything, it would be ideas; to give statements, to involve people in discussions. I want to irritate, to ask them to take part in my ideas. The product is the creativity we can inspire.

ADAM CARUSO: And because you’re responsible for all the staterun museums in Berlin, you have the opportunity to orchestrate a correspondence between museums by programming exhibitions on one subject in all of them at the same time. A few summers back, the Tate, the Barbican, and the Serpentine were all simultaneously showing photography. There starts to be a discussion with opposing views and you get some kind of organic festival – a conversation between institutions in the city.

THOMAS DEMAND: Udo has the chance to build this conversation because he has four museums—

UDO KITTELMANN: Six museums!

CARSON CHAN: What I found most interesting about your curating in the past is your willingness to make mistakes. To see mistakes as something rich, something generative of new ideas, almost the direct opposite of the cynical PR that I was talking about earlier.

UDO KITTELMANN: It’s not that I like making mistakes, but I’m eager to take risks! Sometimes they turn out to be mistakes. Sometimes I fail.

ADAM CARUSO: I think that most American institutions can’t afford to have an unpopular show because they’ll die.

THOMAS DEMAND: I think the eBay show you did, Udo, where you exhibited items bought on eBay with the Museum für Moderne Kunst’s permanent collection, was an institutional mistake – which doesn’t mean the show was a mistake. But it was a mistake to put it in an art institution to test the status of the art object. That was a willing risk you made, right? The mistake was throwing the issue back in the air – trying to redefine art. That kind of mistake is not the same kind as a failure in visitor numbers.

UDO KITTELMANN: I don’t know then if “mistake” is the right word – it’s more about confronting challenges, while most art museums are afraid to take risks. Those of us who work in museums must always remain critical of ourselves. This is how all new projects should begin.

CARSON CHAN: Adam, you’ve also written about how architects have lost a certain connoisseurship. If anything, the classic curator is an art connoisseur, and not a dilettante.

ADAM CARUSO: Connoisseurs are the opposite of dilettantes.

CARSON CHAN: I don’t mean dilettante as in “amateur” – because connoisseurs are not necessarily professionals either.

ADAM CARUSO: Real connoisseurs are erudite – they’re experts.

UDO KITTELMANN: I prefer amateurs!

ADAM CARUSO: Compared to “bad experts,” yes! I’m thinking of the word connoisseur in the 19th- or 18th-century sense, when people were slightly amateur, but they were so connected to their subject and were able to work with it in a poetic way. That is what architects have lost. They don’t know how to do an interior, they don’t know how to select furniture for a building. They think, “It’s a shape, and that’s enough.”

CARSON CHAN: It’s about the personal connection to one’s profession. Which is one thing that is quite nice about this group: you, Adam, and Udo and Thomas. Udo, Thomas is your best friend in Berlin, right?

UDO KITTELMANN: No! [laughs] He’s even more than a best friend – it’s something between hate and love.

CARSON CHAN: Actually, I think it’s great that Berlin’s museums will be curated from a very personal and intimate level. It is nice to experience an idiosyncratic curatorial voice.

THOMAS DEMAND: For the record, before Udo and I first worked together in Frankfurt, which was our first collaboration, we knew each other, but not more than a friendly hello/good bye. The up coming show at the Neue Nationalgalerie was planned not so much for the building, but rather as an idea that we’ve both been thinking about for a while.

UDO KITTELMANN: The funny thing is, it wasn’t until three or four months after we thought of the name of the show, “Nationalgalerie,” that we became aware of the fact that September 2009 is Germany’s 60th anniversary – we didn’t even think of that! For one, it was always about the work and how this work can relate to the Mies building and its history.

THOMAS DEMAND: When Udo called, he said, “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening next year. It’s the 60th anniversary of Germany as a federal republic. And what’s more, it’s also exactly twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the show is opening a week before the anniversary.” We didn’t need this alignment, but it’s wonderful because now we have the whole population of Berlin talking about the same issues, and already sensitized to the topic of nationality. At the moment, everyone’s talking about history, but later this year, people will be talking about politics and what politics are for. How is public opinion formed? How is it manipulated? We have a side program for the show that aims to connect the museum to the outside world. We’re trying not to reproduce a circular discussion about art for art. We’re working with a journalist on the future of money, we have a politician on the team … We’re not trying to educate, but we’re interested in making clear the connections we’re working with.

CARSON CHAN: That’s the role of the museum.

THOMAS DEMAND: That’s the point. We have the Neue Nationalgalerie sitting there, showcased in the middle of the city. It’s a wonderful platform that hasn’t been utilized to the best of its potential.

CARSON CHAN: If anything, the show can remind people why it’s called the “National” gallery.

THOMAS DEMAND: Well, that’s an old convention from the 19th century – the real question is what it can and could be now.

CARSON CHAN: It’s a good question for the museum. It’s also the 40th year of the building – it was completed in 1968. There’s this beautiful, meta-, circular situation here. Thomas’s work has always dealt with simulacra, or simulations of historical moments, and here we have a show about the 60 years of Germany, in the Neue Nationalgalerie, built in 1968, a time when West Germany was still trying to establish its national identity – not only are the decades lining up, but the concept and situation seem to refer to each other in an ideal way.

THOMAS DEMAND: Today, to call this museum the “National Gallery” is not ironic per se; but no one, especially not me, can pretend to know what that means. It’s obvious that it’s not what it’s called. Germany has several more prominent art museums. In a way, it’s an imposter national institution – but that in itself starts to question what is and what is not representative. I think this is what my work can bring to the discussion.

ADAM CARUSO: But it can’t possibly be representative.

THOMAS DEMAND: Of course not, but that’s the point.

UDO KITTELMANN: There is no longer this idea of a representational institution. In terms of the museums I’m responsible for, the Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery), which before was simply the Nationalgalerie, a name given in the 19th century to evoke the idea of a unified nation. After the Mies building was completed, they named it the “Neue” Nationalgalerie. And only 30 years later, when Berlin opened a contemporary art museum, or the Museum für Gegenwart (Museum of the Present), did they keep a building’s original name – the Hamburger Bahnhof, which refers to its former purpose as a train station. Already then there was no longer pretense about nationality – it’s just where you caught the train to Hamburg.

ADAM CARUSO: They couldn’t have called it the “New” New National Gallery …

UDO KITTELMANN: You can’t go beyond the new!

ADAM CARUSO: There was this idea of defining communal identity through art in the 19th century. The greatest parts in the National Gallery in London all contain early Italian Renaissance painting. It was an incredible attitude in the mid-19th century to think the best things in the National Gallery were Italian. There was a moment when English artistic identity was not based on English artistic production. When they called the Mies building the Neue Nationalgalerie, they weren’t thinking very much – it was almost like a reflex, wasn’t it?

UDO KITTELMANN: Don’t forget that they chose the building site to be Potsdamer Platz because it was right next to the Berlin Wall. It was a political statement so that the people from the East could see the “New” National Gallery, as the “Old” National Gallery was situated in East Berlin on the other side of the Wall.

CARSON CHAN: Is the real job to rename the building? To rebrand it? Or does that mean that, by definition, anything that happens in it is historical?

UDO KITTELMANN: You can’t change history!

CARSON CHAN: No, but you can make it.

UDO KITTELMANN: It would be stupid to change the names of the museums – the “New” and the “Old.” They are part of history.

THOMAS DEMAND: It’s already part of our show. The Neue Nationalgalerie is no longer a description, but we’re playing with the discrepancy between what people think it should be and what it actually is. It would be just a waste of money and ideas to make the effort to call it a different name.

UDO KITTELMANN: Call it Neverland.

ADAM CARUSO: Tate Britain was the National Gallery of British Art when it opened. It has a potential that Tate Modern doesn’t have – which, in the end, is really like any other museum of modern and contemporary art. Tate Britain, because of its history, has the potential to have a real edge, and you have that historical edge in Berlin, don’t you? You can go from the 18th century to the present, and everything is in one collection. Simply presenting chronology is not good enough anymore. Boundaries are blurring, national boundaries are blurring …

CARSON CHAN: Which is why I’ve always thought the name Tate Britain was kind of funny. It almost presupposes the founding of a Tate China or a Tate America.

UDO KITTELMANN: Well, look at the British Museum.

ADAM CARUSO: That’s the imperial one.

UDO KITTELMANN: Yeah – the younger generation always asks why it’s called the British Museum when there is so little British art inside. Shouldn’t they call it the Mummy Museum? I think it’s quite important to keep these old names because they confront us with history.

CARSON CHAN: This is a point that I’ve been grappling with, especially with regards to Berlin or contemporary German culture in general. I’m talking about a kind of cultural amnesia in terms of history. In 2006, when the government launched its “Germany, Land of Ideas” campaign, there was a sculpture on Bebelplatz that had all these names on it – Hegel, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Marx – this big silver thing that looked like a stack of books. (Bebelplatz was, of course, where Joseph Goebbels’s book burning ceremony took place in 1933.) If there were any German export that has had an immense worldwide resonance, I’d say it would be its intellectual and philosophical traditions. At the remaining ruins of the Palast der Republik, literally a stone’s throw away from this monument to German intellectualism, the idea of historical authenticity, which stems from Hegel, is completely ignored. It seems that Germans are blind to the most honored aspect of their philosophical history and tradition. The people who gave the world a way to understand history are also the people who are now rebuilding a fake royal palace. They’re reconstructing the 19th-century Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace), in order to eradicate traces of its 20th-century Communist history.

ADAM CARUSO: But Thomas, do you think there is amnesia here?

THOMAS DEMAND: No, not really. I think it’s a generational thing. I’m reading a book about Stalin, about when he finally took over Moscow and built the famous “Seven Sisters” towers and destroyed a bunch of the modernist and constructivist architecture. The thing was, all the subway stations and big houses were still built with the original modernist plans. They had either killed the architects or sent them to Siberia, but they had to finish the buildings that they begun to build. There is always a lag between current ideology and its expression in built form. We can’t forget that it takes a long time to build buildings. The ball starts rolling, then the money comes, and then the Bundestag does something. So in the end, the Schloss will be fi nished when the mental state of this country is somewhere else entirely. This is the legacy of an old revisionist idea that the East has to be extorted. It’s an attitude that has no respect for Communist history because half of the people that promote the reconstruction of the Schloss hated the East and are happy to be rid of it. For people like you or me, it doesn’t really mean anything; we’re not attached to these ideologies. The question is, why take down the building, which is actually a thing on its own, even if it stands for an ideology you don’t like? Instead of building a new building that no one can relate to, with a façade that is completely stupid because it’s a symbol of imperialistic times, which no German can actually be proud of, and then fill it with stuff that was acquired with colonial power. We’re doing exactly what the British Museum is being beaten for. No one in charge has any conception of these issues. It will be finished and it will have completely fallen out of time.

UDO KITTELMANN: I wouldn’t be surprised if, when the Schloss is finally rebuilt, the best thing they could sell in the souvenir shop would be a postcard showing the Schloss before and after, looking the same. It’s never fully amnesia regarding history. We will remember the Palast der Republik, for sure. The more we understand about why political and historical decisions were made, the more we will miss the Palast – and the generation years from now may well rebuild it!