An American In Berlin

Oy, I'm going to try and have the Ypres posts up this weekend. Not much time with the kids out of school now!

In meantime, saw this interesting story in the New York Times. The Americans have just opened a new embassy in Berlin, right beside the Brandenburg Gate. This was quite a contentious project, as the Germans are very particular over what gets placed in that square.

Some Germans find the new embassy rather ugly. After a spate of embassy bombings in Africa by Al Qaeda in the 90s, American embassy design has focused on security over aesthetics. Their embassy in Kenya, for example, used to have large glass windows around the outside; when it was bombed, huge numbers of people were killed and injured from shards of glass rather than from the explosion itself.

(Their embassy here in The Hague is representative of their attitude towards embassies today--from the outside it resembles a maximum-security prison.)

But the Germans also didn't want the embassy to look TOO nice. As you might remember from my trip to Berlin, the French embassy is also in the square but is basically a dull-looking box; the Germans don't want anything fancy to take the attention away from the Gate. I still find this insistence a bit silly on their part, but maybe it's just some historical German thing that I don't get.

Anyway. In the photo below, the new embassy is in the very center and the Gate is to the right.

When the new United States Embassy opens here on Friday it will mark the end not only of nearly four years of construction, but also of the final chapter in more than a decade of an often bitter process between the city and American diplomats, punctuated in the final stages by hard jabs from local architecture critics.

[...]

The embassy, the first designs for which were completed in 1996, seemed to attract criticism that reflected the prevailing mood in Germany over the years toward the United States, from a reassertion of sovereignty over its former occupier in the 1990s to a reaction against the post-9/11 bunker mentality. Even with the finishing touches this spring, the broadsides continued, this time coming from German architecture critics. “Fort Knox at the Brandenburg Gate,” the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May.

Visiting the embassy last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged the controversy, saying, “I know it was not easy to bring this embassy to this place, but it is absolutely fitting that the United States Embassy is here where it was before World War II, and this place, sitting right there, is also testament to the fact that nothing is impossible.” [Brian's note--that's a little dramatic, I think...]

As Ms. Rice noted, the new embassy is a return for the United States to its old home before World War II on the historic Pariser Platz, next to the Brandenburg Gate. It is a special moment for the entire city, as the final rebuilt space on the historic square.