For Much Of The Twentieth Century Berlin was a battlefield. The violent suppression of the Spartacist uprising and the street fights of the early 1930s bracketed the Weimar Republic. The Soviet invasion of 1945 and the quelling of the revolt of 1953 followed. During the rest of the Cold War the major battles were no longer military but ideological. Architecture and urbanism served as ideal means for expressing the apparent superiority of one political system over another in areas such as the provision of housing, the maintenance of historical monuments, and the establishment of thriving civic institutions. Rather than resulting in a clear-cut victory, however, the fall of the Berlin Wall brought a new round of skirmishes. East and West Berliners, joined by those from around the world interested in architecture and urbanism or concerned about the identity of the newly reunited county, debated the best way of reconstructing the heart of the city and repairing the slash the wall had cut through it. The hope was that Europe’s largest construction site would create the paradigmatic urban architecture of its day, that Berlin of the 1990s would join the Paris of Napoleon III, the Isfahan of Shah Abbas, or the Rome of Sixtus V as one of the most significant chapters in the history of architecture and urban planning. In fact, the results were far more mixed. Contemporary Berlin is lively rather than beautiful.

The reams of newsprint, volumes of architecture magazines, years of meetings, and millions of Internet hits did bear significant fruit. First, they provided an effective forum in which Berliners, other Germans, and foreigners could discuss by proxy their concerns about the character of a reunited Germany. Second, they transformed contemporary architectural culture, not by providing the expected icons, although several of these did emerge, but by radically altering the terms of the discussion. When a revived neo-modernism eventually trumped postmodernism with both politicians and the public, the international architectural establishment was forced away from historical quotation and toward the abstract evocation of memory as the most effective way of responding to the palimpsest of Berlin’s many layered political and architectural past.