Architecture and History in Germany

Historical reconstruction in Germany hasn’t always been as controversial as the rebuilding of Berlin’s City Palace, Dresden’s Church of Our Lady or Frankfurt’s Old Town Square. .

The Berlin City Palace – oh, no, not that again. There’s scarcely a single argument for or against rebuilding the Stadtschloss that hasn’t already been scrutinized from every side. This unreconstructed historical monument in Berlin’s empty centre forms the centrepiece of a local and national identity that has yet to be defined and, at the same time, the screen upon which the nation projects its attendant longings and apprehensions.

There’s been similar controversy over the Braunschweig Palace shopping mall, the “new old” Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) in Dresden and the development of the Römerberg, the Old Town Square in Frankfurt. But what’s often forgotten in all the hubbub is that reconstructions of many damaged and destroyed architectural monuments in Germany have triggered very little public debate – and within a few years of completion are hardly regarded as reconstructions any more.

Picture-postcard of the German Middle Ages

Take Rothenburg ob der Tauber for example. This half-timbered town often pictured in postcards was over 40 per cent destroyed only about a month before the end of the Second World War in Europe – then rebuilt in the same style right afterward. Nowadays, hardly any visitors notice that the east side of the medieval quarter, including the high school and oft-photographed town hall with its Renaissance façade and Gothic tower, is actually only 60 years old. In retrospect, the reconstructed buildings hardly look any less authentic than the rest; and taken together, they’re an inseparable part of a town planning strategy that for a good two hundred years now has sought to engrave Rothenburg in the collective consciousness as the architectural ideal of the German middle ages.

Or take Würzburg, where the Residenz, one of the most famous Baroque palaces in Europe, was by and large reduced to ruins, likewise in 1945. Only the central building with the frescos by Tiepolo survived relatively unscathed. From the outset, the plan was to build it back up again on the old model. Over the course of several decades, nearly all the buildings were reconstructed using parts of the interior décor that had been evacuated. The sumptuous hall of mirrors regained its former splendour in 1987, the restoration of the damaged frescos was completed in 2006. The reconstruction didn’t seem to detract from the historical value of the complex here either: as early as 1981, the Würzburg Residenz became the second site in Germany – after the Aachen cathedral – to be added to UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage list.

Controversy long since forgotten

Or Munich, for that matter: At the end of the war most of the old town lay in ruins, including the royal palace. Its reconstruction, which has yet to be completed, has brought some fundamental changes. The reconstruction plan omitted a number of its splendid halls dating back to the Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassicist periods. The famous Cuvilliés Theatre of 1751, for example, was re-erected about a hundred yards north of its original location; most of the theatregoers comfortably ensconced in the red plush seats of the gold-trimmed auditorium enjoying a traditional Bavarian play like Der Brandner Kaspar und das ewig’ Leben (“Brandner Kasparand Eternal Life”) believe they are sitting in an original Baroque edifice. The Neues Residenztheater, put up on the site of the old Cuvilliés Theatre and inaugurated in 1951, sports a classicist façade, but it’s fitted out with a contemporary interior and ultramodern stage equipment. The controversy that dogged its construction decades ago has long since been forgotten. In the collective remembrance of Munich’s residents, the entire complex forms part of the city’s uninterrupted architectural tradition.

In all three cases the architects of the reconstruction used elements that had withstood the devastation – for the most part, interior appointments – and yet made no bones about the loss of the originals. Many of the Rothenburg buildings, to wit, deliberately forego the use of historicizing elements, and in Munich, too, many of the façades were simplified, windows and doorways modernized, and the layout of the rooms rearranged. Nonetheless, only experts can detect the changes that have been made.

Monuments in their own right

So wherein lies the difference between the contentious projects in Berlin, Frankfurt and Braunschweig and the apparently hassle-free reconstruction of the buildings in Rothenburg, Würzburg and Munich? The timing definitely had something to do with it: in all three of the latter cases, reconstruction commenced right after the war. For another thing, it was not – as in Berlin – at the expense of other buildings that had been put up on site in the meantime. Furthermore, these were architectural monuments whose importance to the city was appreciated by various segments of the population. The question of whether the new buildings were “authentic” played a relatively minor role. At any rate, it is high time to concede that the now 60-year-old neo-historical buildings are architectural monuments in their own right.

The interpretive reconstruction of historical buildings will go down in the history of architecture as a stylistic feature of the late 20th century, practised against a backdrop of criticism of modernity and efforts to redefine regional identity and create cityscapes that would serve as commercial experience centres. In this context, the new old buildings are authentic through and through. The growing number of historical reconstructions do not relieve policymakers of their responsibility to foster constructive public debate, nor does it render the palace mock-ups in Braunschweig and Berlin any less problematic for our society. But it does place the widely-debated issue of historical authenticity in a somewhat softer light, in which the success or failure of a reconstruction must ultimately be assessed according to the criteria of successful use and an interpretive process involving wide strata of our society.