Across Europe, the far right is on the rise. There was a time when experts assured us that it could never happen in Sweden, for instance, or Spain. But it has. Germany was also supposed to be an exception, given its Nazi past. But today, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) polls nationally at around 20 per cent. Not only that: similar parties elsewhere have assiduously pursued the strategy of what Marine Le Pen calls dédiabolisation – appealing to voters by making themselves look normal and, in the case of Le Pen, distancing herself from her father’s relativising of the Holocaust. By contrast, AfD has doubled down on historical revisionism. How, one wonders, is that not a political deal-breaker for citizens who in no way think of themselves as extremists.
Broader cultural shifts supply a plausible answer: in particular, a broader understanding of normality in everyday life. One measure of normality is what, inevitably, is always around us: the built environment. Something peculiar – without parallel elsewhere in Europe, with the exception of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary – has happened with public architecture in Germany. The country has witnessed the reconstructions of Prussian edifices that were destroyed during the 20th century: most prominent – and controversial – have been the Hohenzollern Palace right in the middle of Berlin, and Potsdam’s Garnisonkirche (literally, the Garrison Church).
Critics have asked why the state is spending taxpayers’ money on what plausibly can be read as symbols of Prussian militarism. But that’s not the only concern. The uncritical recreation of baroque buildings is also, intentionally or not, part of today’s culture wars: an intervention on the side of tradition and supposed normality; beautiful old-looking buildings, in contrast with challenging, or outright disturbing, modernist edifices. As the Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde has pointed out, the culture war is how citizens who claim to be opposed to extremism find their way to much harder far-right ideas.
The destruction of the Hohenzollern Palace, or Berlin Palace, had been ordered by the East German leader Walter Ulbricht in 1950; the Garnisonkirche was blown up in 1968. Both were badly damaged during the war, but, in principle, could have been saved. Instead, East Berlin built a multifunctional “Palace of the Republic” – the modernist box contained the East German Potemkin legislature, but also restaurants, a much-beloved bowling alley and entertainment venues, where Western stars such as Santana and Harry Belafonte performed. In Potsdam, the authorities erected yet another modernist box called Rechenzentrum – an institute for computing adorned by murals depicting space rockets and other marvels of a bright socialist future.
Soon after the Wall fell, West German conservatives argued for the reconstruction of the Hohenzollern Palace. They asserted that the building had been essential to the city’s identity – a particularly vociferous advocate coined the memorable, though historically questionable phrase that the palace was not in Berlin, but that Berlin had been the palace. In the same vein, the term Stadtschloss – suggesting that city and building were indissolubly connected – was popularised. In 1993, a trompe l’œil of the baroque facade, financed by a conservative entrepreneur from Hamburg, was erected and declared a popular success by the pro-palace lobby (while later surveys would show a majority of Berliners opposed the Stadtschloss).
In 2002 the Bundestag decided that a reconstruction of the Berlin Palace should go ahead; the “Palace of the Republic” was to be torn down, despite the fact that many East Germans had fond memories of it, and despite how comparable structures – even a Stalinist monstrosity such as the Palace of Culture in Warsaw – had become post-communist urban success stories. Suggestions to integrate parts of the building into the old-new Stadtschloss were rejected. The then German chancellor Gerhard Schröder justified the reconstruction by saying that one had to give the people something “for the soul”. At the high point of Third Way ideology, the idea of a public-private partnership – state money combining with private donations – also proved seductive.
The competition to design it was won by the relatively unknown Italian architect Franco Stella. He included a new, austere façade that faced the river Spree, reflecting the style razionalismo – a style closely associated with Italian fascism. Early plans had not included a cupola, but private sponsors pushed for its inclusion (the most generous donors would have their names and sometimes even portraits immortalised on the baroque facades).
Of course, every reconstruction has to contend with the question of what the reference point for the “original” building is supposed to be – which is why no rebuilding can be presented as beyond political and aesthetic contestation. The enormous cupola on the original palace was only added in the mid-19th century, a symbol of the Hohenzollern dynasty’s triumph over revolutionaries pushing for democracy in 1848. It included the inscription personally formulated by Frederick William IV, eager to reassert the divine right of kings, that all the world should bend the knee to Jesus. The cupola and a cross on the top, donors successfully insisted, had to be part of the palace in the 21st century.
The Berlin Palace opened to the public in summer 2021. People were invited to marvel at the contents of the Berlin ethnological museum which was previously housed on the city’s outskirts. However, what had been intended to mitigate suspicions about reviving Prussian militarism and nationalism – showcasing Germany’s connections to the world – turned into a PR disaster: after all, many of the objects on display were looted by German colonisers with the help of the army.
That wasn’t the only problem. Critics of the palace, led by the prominent architecture theorist Philipp Oswalt, revealed that one major donor had moved in radical right circles, accused the Allies of “brainwashing” during the war, and had also publicly doubted the figure of six million Holocaust victims. As a result, his prominent portrait was removed from the palace facade. Since about €25m was contributed anonymously, one could not be sure who exactly had financed what and why – a situation that led to the demand, unfulfilled so far, for an independent commission tasked with examining names and flagging problematic contributors.
The story of the Potsdam church is even more troubling. It had been erected by Frederick William I of Prussia in 1735 (where he was later laid to rest, to be followed by his son Frederick the Great, though the latter would have preferred the much more amenable – and secular – environment of his rococo palace Sanssouci). Regiments going off to war received their blessings at the Garrison Church; preachers for the church were chosen and instructed by the court. After the First World War, a ceremony was held at the Garnisonkirche to oppose the founding of the first German Weimar Republic. General Erich Ludendorff, who became a Beer Hall putschist alongside Hitler in 1923, featured as the main speaker; he used the occasion to paint a vision of a military dictatorship replacing the republic.
The church, a symbol of unquestioning obedience, continued to serve as a meeting place for anti-democratic conservatives and right-wing paramilitaries throughout the 1920s. In March 1933, Hitler and Weimar’s last president, Paul von Hindenburg, shook hands at the church; what came to be known as the “Day of Potsdam” symbolised the readiness of the old Prussian elites to work with (and eventually for) the upstart from Austria. The location made perfect symbolic sense: throughout the troubled days of the republic, the “spirit of Potsdam” was being invoked in opposition to the “spirit of Weimar”.
Decades after the church was destroyed, Max Klaar, a lieutenant colonel in the West German army with a predilection for hard-right political positions, started pushing for its reconstruction. He began to collect funds to recreate the Garnisonkirche’s carillon. Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia financed one bell. More important for the project’s acceptance was that Richard von Weizsäcker – scion of the old Prussian elite and West German president at the time – donated to the recreation of the carillon. Little discussed were the details of its reconstruction: the bells were inscribed with dedications to the Wehrmacht.
After unification, Potsdam became a preferred residence of the wealthy. The city is also home to yet another reconstructed old Prussian palace, which today houses the parliament of the state of Brandenburg. Unlike the edifice in the centre of Berlin, the city of Potsdam invited artists to subvert any claims to authenticity (and unbroken historical traditions): one facade features the slogan “ceci n’est pas un château” (“this is not a castle”).
The idea of reconstructing the Garnisonkirche was pushed by figures who had already used the carillon to honour the military. But church building could not go ahead without the consent of Protestant officialdom. Representatives of the latter sought to use the church as an international centre of reconciliation; they also advocated placing a nail cross on top of the tower, and to create some symbolic fracture there as a visual argument that history could never be made whole again. But to no avail. For the passerby, the half-finished tower looks like a copy of the original. Only those willing to visit the exhibition inside will benefit from a few salutary history lessons. As with the Berlin Palace, there was no referendum on the reconstruction (when a popular consultation did take place in unified Germany – about the reconstruction of a church in Magdeburg – the majority of citizens voted no).
Reconstructions aren’t necessarily malicious. Few think the postwar rebuilding of the baroque palace in Mannheim – Europe’s second-largest after Versailles and today home to a university, among other institutions – was a symptom of dangerous political trends. But context matters. Hard-right publications have unashamedly celebrated the Potsdam church and Berlin Palace, seeing the latter as a way of “healing” the Berlin city landscape and, much more controversially, as healing national history (while also, according to one far-right journalist, demonstrating a “will to the state”). As the architecture theorist Stephan Trüby has pointed out, not all proponents of reconstruction are on the hard right, but everyone who is on the hard right happens to be in favour of reconstruction.
Their validation of beautiful and supposedly “normal” buildings is part of a wider trend. The Dutch far-right politician (and self-styled aesthete) Thierry Baudet frequently rails against modernism. Tucker Carlson also felt it important to distinguish “pro-human” architecture – which the former Fox host claimed to have glimpsed on a visit to the “beautiful” public squares of Moscow – from the contemptible forms of “brutalism” and “postmodernism” that supposedly characterise the contemporary US. (Carlson’s actual examples all pointed to modernism, revealing a perhaps less-than-perfect understanding of the difference between modernism and postmodernism.) Donald Trump has condemned contemporary architecture on multiple occasions, even if some of his own office and casino buildings look pretty modern on the outside; it’s the inside that tries to be Versailles.
Criticising modernism does not automatically make one a dangerous reactionary. Rather, it is the frequent association of modernism with “cosmopolitanism” as well as “globalism” and the reduction of globalism to anti-Semitic stereotypes that is problematic. This modernism-globalism association has been advanced across different media, from books to Twitter accounts such as Architectural Revival with its motto “Beauty and Tradition Matters” (apparently grammar does not). The latter has enthusiastically endorsed Balázs Orbán, Viktor Orbán’s chief political strategist (and no relation).
Hard-right populists claim that they, and they alone, represent what they frequently call “the real people”, the “silent majority” or also just “normal people”. Real or normal people, so hard-right populists insinuate, are threatened by dangerous Others, be it nefarious elites who push “abnormal” things like “gender ideology” or by minorities, namely refugees and migrants with “abnormal” customs. One of the slogans of the AfD is simply “Deutschland, aber normal” (“Germany, but normal”). Restoring a traditional – normal – built environment, plus some associated Prussia design porn, becomes part of a broader project to render normal a national history which is anything but.
In response, an initiative named “Appropriating the Palace”, formed by Oswalt and a number of other architects, historians and writers, is running a competition for ideas on how to make the Berlin Palace less of a Disney version of Prussian history; winning designs will be presented in October. The Garrison Church was officially inaugurated in August when Germany’s president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, spoke, protesters outside chanted an old hard-left slogan: Wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten (“Who has betrayed us? Social Democrats!”). It is noticeable that prominent Social Democrats have been among the most vocal advocates of reconstruction.
The Garnisonkirche tower remains unfinished: the plan is to add copies of the original decorations. When the Garrison Church’s programme director and pastor Jan Kingreen was questioned over why symbols invoking militarism were necessary, he insisted it was because the money to pay for them had already been allocated. He also argued that the Reichstag – adorned by Norman Foster’s glass dome – was eventually accepted after reservations about it were voiced when it was built in the early 1990s. (Of course, the analogy is flawed: the Nazis detested the Reichstag. It is true that, when Hitler’s architect Albert Speer planned the new capital, Germania, he left it in place, but only to be dwarfed – in fact ridiculed – by the gigantic Nazi Volkshalle.)
Steinmeier, in his speech, emphasised that the church “challenges us”; he also argued that not having such a structure would make the task of preserving a critical memory more difficult. Yet the choice is not uncritical reconstruction or nothing at all. What matters are the context, the larger symbolic gestures that accompany the building (nail cross or not?), and plenty of subtler details that can serve to glorify or to question the past. In Potsdam, much will depend on whether the East German-built, modernist Rechenzentrum will be torn down.
The contrast between brand-new baroque and decaying modernist facade might not be pretty, but it provokes questions. That, in the end, might be the best that these reconstructions can hope to achieve: serious rethinking.
[See also: Robert Harris: “Great politicians are like novelists”]
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