As the city of Berlin enters its twenty-sixth year as the capital of reunified Germany, it has much to teach us about the planning and politics of the “global city” (to use sociologist Saskia Sassen’s term) at the turn of the millennium. Berlin’s rebranding since the fall of the Wall displays a tension common to many image-conscious cities—that between history and futurity. On the one hand, such cities seek to anchor themselves in a past driven by the so-called “heritage industry,” aimed in particular at the global tourist market and intended to present the city’s architectural traditions as unique and irreproducible. On the other hand, the same cities are packed with technophiliac structures, rendered in glass and steel and reaching ever greater heights. Numerous scholarly treatments of the architecture of the “New Berlin” have examined the ways in which the city’s various reconstructions are political gambits meant to consolidate the image of the city and commodify the city’s history. Other analyses have shown how the compulsive newness of Berlin’s cityscape is a form of violent amnesia aimed at repressing Germany’s various painful histories. Yet no account has yet acknowledged that these tendencies are far from distinct. Instead, as I intend to show, the fascinations, fears, and pleasures that motivate both tendencies are the same, and are evidence of a set of urban anxieties that has grown in intensity over the past century.

My current book project, titled Allegories of the Avant-Garde: Architecture in Berlin after 1990, examines the ways in which Berlin’s post-reunification building boom invokes architectural forms and theories from the early 1900s to the late 1970s. I focus on Berlin’s rapid transformation after the fall of the Wall, concentrating particularly on the government district located at the former border between east and west. Ultimately, my research reveals the nostalgic romanticism underlying the apparently hyper-modern design of the German capital’s government buildings and its attempts to forge a cohesive political identity through architecture. Yet even more crucially, this project establishes that these two tendencies—nostalgia and newness—are driven by the same forces, and are ultimately a dialectic that is fundamental to the contemporary city’s endless regeneration of itself.
My manuscript comprises a number of case studies, each examining a significant building or urban plan built under the aegis of the Bundesrepublik since 1990. The first chapter examines the master plan of the Bundesregierung, reading it as an allegory of avant-garde plans for the area, from Bruno Taut’s 1920 scheme for “the dissolution of the city” to Rem Koolhaas and O. M. Ungers’ 1977 plan to make Berlin into “a green archipelago.” Chapter 2 focuses on Norman Foster’s design for the Reichstag, in which the futuristic glass-and-steel dome of the structure is undercut by the hundreds of Soviet graffiti in the historical shell of the building, expensively conserved to make the Reichstag into “a living museum of German history” (according to Foster). Chapter 3 looks at the past and future site of the Stadtschloss, home to the Hohenzollern dynasty before being demolished in 1953 to make way for the DDR’s modernist Palast der Republik; the Palast was subsequently demolished between 2006 and 2008 and is currently being replaced by a reconstruction of the baroque Stadtschloss, thus actively repressing a certain strain of utopianism in modern architecture. Chapter 4 discusses Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank’s design for the Chancellery, showing how the architects drew on a dialect of modernism common to American and European architects working in developing nations in the middle of the century. As all of these designs show—and as I will demonstrate in my conclusion—modern architecture is itself an incomplete project whose utopian social theories and technodeterministic optimism for the possibilities of mechanization are still being worked through, though on a newly global stage. Modern architecture’s unconscious pervades the contemporary, and I seek both to trouble and to clarify the relationship between the two.