Capital Dilemma:: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy

Since WWII, Germans have been ""grappling to find a design vocabulary that will turn its back on the monumentality typical of their history's most worrisome periods,"" writes Wise, while still building structures ""worthy of a cosmopolitan capital."" Like Brian Ladd in his excellent The Ghosts of Berlin, Wise details the symbolic power of the past. But Wise, who covered Central Europe for Reuters and the Washington Post, is primarily interested in--and most helpful when describing--how historical awareness shaped the planning of federal buildings. Wise starts by tracing how the need for housing and the desire to avoid Nazi ostentation left East and West with drearily anonymous modernist cities. After reunification, competitions yielded a variety of designs: a plan for a federal mall reminded some lawmakers of Albert Speer's planned North-South axis; others feared the monumentality of a proposed elliptical black granite presidential office and requested a ""more modest material like unglazed brick""; a plan for a Chancellery with, horribile dictu, columns made some even more nervous. ""`Classicism by virtue of having been requisitioned by Hitler,' "" said one parliamentarian, ""`is simply impossible to use again.'"" New buildings weren't the only problems, and Wise does a fine job of detailing attempts to shoehorn federal departments into existing Nazi buildings, as when the Finance Ministry was put into G ring's old Aviation Ministry. If sections on the old Hohenzollern Palace site, the former arsenal or various memorials seem to stretch the book's natural focus, it's still a concise and accessible study of a deeply complicated issue. (June)