-Caveat Lector-
Rebuilt German Reichstag Is To Open
By ANNE THOMPSON
.c The Associated Press
BERLIN (AP) -- What hasn't happened to the Reichstag?
It was burned during the Nazi era, bombed by the Allies, and stormed by Red
Army soldiers who scrawled obscenities on the walls and planted the red
Soviet flag on the roof, marking the defeat of Hitler.
East Germany built the Berlin Wall just a few steps from its back door. And
after the Wall came down, the artist Christo wrapped the Reichstag in a
million square feet of silvery fabric, a celebration of the end of communism.
Now the old parliament has undergone yet another transformation.
After a $330 million renovation, the Reichstag debuts Monday as the reclaimed
seat of German lawmakers, a defining episode in the government's return this
year to the prewar capital of Berlin.
More than any other building in the city, the Reichstag (pronounced
RIKES-tahg) has symbolized every phase of Germany's turbulent, terrible
history over the past 80 years. So it only seems fitting that in his
restoration, celebrated British architect Sir Norman Foster has made the
Reichstag into a new symbol for the new capital, one of a Germany mindful of
the past but moving confidently into the future.
Foster preserved the Reichstag's original 19th-century facade, with its
Italian Renaissance-style columns and carvings, and the inscription over the
main entrance: ``To the German People.'' But he also gave the parliament a
new glass dome that bursts from the top of the old, ravaged building and
sparkles like a beacon on the city horizon.
Inside, almost everything is new: the central parliament chamber, the offices
and meeting rooms, the five new restaurants, the sleek furniture, the gray
decor accented with primary colors and pastels. All the modernness only
emphasizes the wartime scars the architect left behind.
Take the east wing, where Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has an office. Doors
along the hallway are bright blue, with shiny steel handles and hinges, but
sections of the white, stone walls are still gouged and jagged from bombings
and covered with Russian graffiti -- names and rude slogans dated ``1945.''
``A lot of events have passed over that building and left their imprint on
the fabric,'' says Foster, who took journalists on a preview tour last week.
``I think it has more integrity to reveal and accept the history, making it
tangibly visible for present and future generations.''
The architectural mix of old and new in large part embodies the professed
spirit of Schroeder's center-left government. His so-called Berlin Republic
stresses that enough time has passed for Germany to be powerful without being
threatening, that it can remember its crimes without being defined by guilt.
It's an attitude that comes partly from Schroeder himself. The chancellor,
55, is the first from a generation untroubled by memories of Hitler. But it
also comes from the government's return to Berlin, scene of Prussian
imperialism and Third Reich horrors. In the planning since 1991, one year
after Germany's reunification, the move this year sets a major milestone in
the success and confidence of German democracy.
Monday's ceremony opening the Reichstag is the first key event in the move
from Bonn, the provincial southwestern city where the capital was relegated
after World War II. Next comes the election of a new German president in May
and the new parliamentary session in September -- the first to start in the
restored building.
``I remember how from East Berlin, you could see the Reichstag so near and
yet so far,'' parliamentary President Wolfgang Thierse, an east German, told
German radio. ``Even then it represented a longing for unity, freedom and
democracy.''
German democracy actually comes full circle with the reopening of the
Reichstag, which was built in 1894 to house the first German parliament, an
attempt to install elements of democracy under Kaiser Wilhelm. Real democracy
took hold -- however briefly -- after World War I, when the empire was
abolished.
``This is a return to the building's original purpose,'' says historian Brian
Ladd, author of a book about Berlin architecture. ``Some may see this as an
attempt to pretend the intervening years never happened. But I think it shows
that German democracy has earned the right to confront its past and live with
it. And that includes the Third Reich.''
Hitler never governed -- never even spoke -- in the Reichstag, but the
building nonetheless represents the Nazis by association. All the grim
history raised concerns about whether Germany should return to Berlin, the
seat of power at its most terrifying.
But the transformed Reichstag is as light as its legacy is dark. Glass walls
around the central parliament and a viewing platform on the second floor mean
visitors can see and hear what's going on inside. The feel is one of
openness, of a transparent and accessible government.
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