In 1963, the ornate train hall of Manhattan’s Penn Station was torn down and replaced by an ugly arena. Today, this is widely recognised as an architectural crime. Sixty years later, in 2023, the Manhattan Community Board announced that they want to tear down Madison Square Garden to make room for a new old Penn Station. This process of rethinking took several decades. Now imagine if the MSG arena had opened in 1968 with a musical revue about how wonderful Penn Station had been.
Berliners’ feelings about the Humboldt Forum swing between repugnance and resignation.
This is what happened in Berlin. Humboldt Forum, the pseudo-reconstruction of the old Berlin Palace just across the Spree from Alexanderplatz, opened just three years ago. Since May, visitors have been able to see an exhibition about the building that was torn down to make room for it, titled Blown Away: The Palace of the Republic. The vibe: we’ve made a huge mistake.
Berliners’ feelings about the Humboldt Forum swing between repugnance and resignation. The half-Baroque, half-brutalist space is filled with Prussian symbols and looted colonial art. The Guardian has called it “a bizarre museum” built by “fundamentalist right-wingers”. As The Berliner’s Peter Matthews put it in a recent episode of the Dig Where You Stand podcast, “you build a palace and fill it with things you stole and people you killed – it’s the kind of museum Genghis Khan would build”.
So what was there before? The Palace of the Republic, which some people consider to be the most beloved building in our city’s history. Even today, tonnes of Palace of the Republic souvenirs are sold at the Humboldt Forum gift shop, as its director proudly announced at the opening of the exhibition.
An architectural race
The socialist modernist Palace of the Republic, with its bronze-tinted windows and white marble, opened on April 23, 1976 – just less than 1,000 days after ground was broken. Erich Honecker, the Communist leader of East Germany, had been in an architectural race against West Berlin, which was building the Star Trek-inspired International Congress Centrum (ICC) on the western edge of the city.
The East mobilised all its resources, including construction workers from across the country and even the Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army), in order to finish three years before the ICC. Honecker, who had recently pushed aside his predecessor as party boss, wanted to present himself as a reformer of the stodgy country, offering the people consumer goods, rock music and cool buildings.
Lead architect Heinz Graffunder had designed some of East Berlin’s most iconic buildings, including the Rathauspassagen apartment buildings on Alexanderplatz and the massive animal houses at Tierpark. The Palace of the Republic, however, was a new level. At a cost of 500 million Ostmark, this was the most expensive and luxurious building in the fledgling history of the German Democratic Republic.
In the 14 years the palace was open, political events took place on just 46 days.
It was built in the spirit of the Volkshäuser, or People’s Houses, erected by the German workers’ movement (Arbeiterbewegung) at the end of the 19th century: temple-like structures with enormous meeting halls, offices, and restaurants The palace opened with a gala for the construction workers – this was a self-described “Workers’ and Farmers’ State”, after all. There were 13 different restaurants with a total of 1,452 seats and fairly affordable prices. A discotheque called Jungendtreff had a dance floor with a hydraulic lift to move up and down – an international trend in clubs at the time. The palace’s eight-lane bowling alley was a first for East Germany – this wasn’t mere Kegeln, but real bowling.
Visitors entered the palace via a multi-story foyer with 9,873 ultramodern round light fixtures, which earned the building the nickname Erichs Lampenladen (“Erich’s lamp shop”), in reference to Honecker. There were red leather sofas and sixteen original paintings (a few of which are exhibited at Humboldt Forum today) arranged around a turquoise statue known as the Glass Flower.
Most of the building was consumed by the Great Hall with its 4,836 seats. This space is best remembered for the boring, scripted congresses of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Yet in the 14 years the palace was open, political events took place on just 46 days.
More often, the space was used for concerts: Carlos Santana, Harry Belafonte, Mercedes Sosa, and countless rock bands from East and West Germany all played there. The Great Hall hosted Christmas pageants for children, viewing parties for Olympic Games and all kinds of galas. The hexagonal tiered seating could be pulled up into the ceiling with massive chains, leaving a flat banquet hall. The entire room could be completely transformed in less than an hour.
On the opposite side of the building, a much smaller hall was home to the Volkskammer. The so-called People’s Chamber was the DDR’s 500-seat rubber-stamp parliament. East Germany put a lot of effort into simulating a parliamentary democracy. Besides the SED, there were five other parties and three mass organisations who voted on laws. This side of the building was decidedly less busy. Since everyone knew the SED actually ran everything, the parliament only gathered a few days per year.
Asbestos got the best of it
Fourteen years after the opening, on September 19, 1990, the members of the People’s Chamber – who had been freely elected for the first time half a year earlier – voted to close their own official seat. When they learned that the palace’s steel skeleton had been sprayed with asbestos, the palace’s 1,700 employees declared they didn’t want to work in a space full of carcinogens.
The initial plan to alleviate the problem was to simply remove the asbestos and reopen. The president of the parliament, Dr Sabine Bergmann-Pohl, a member of the CDU and also one of East Germany’s leading pulmonologists, advised that the asbestos levels were safe for visitors – but the public never entered Erich’s lamp shop again.
Removing the poisonous substance, which took until 2003, required ripping out the interiors, leaving only steel beams surrounded by a glass facade. For two years, hundreds of thousands of people visited art shows inside the empty hulk of the building, which was temporarily known as the Volkspalast. A Norwegian artist installed enormous letters on the roof that could have referred to the building’s future: ZWEIFEL (“doubt”).
West Berlin’s ICC, in contrast, remains full of asbestos and has been listed for historical preservation.
A majority of Berliners wanted to see the Palace of the Republic reopened. Yet by 2002, wealthy Prussian nostalgists managed to convince the Bundestag to rebuild the Hohenzollerns’ Berlin Palace, which had stood on the same spot from 1443 until 1950. Allied bombing had destroyed it, and the ruins were blown up in 1950. A top booster of the Prussian palace, Ehrhardt Bödecker, has since been exposed as an antisemite and opponent of democracy, and his name was subsequently removed from the Humboldt Forum.
Demolition of the Palace of the Republic began in 2006, and by 2008, a green lawn stood in its place. Officially, this was due to asbestos contamination, even though the carcinogen was long gone. West Berlin’s ICC, in contrast, remains full of asbestos and has been listed for historical preservation. While technically closed awaiting renovation, in recent years ICC has been used for refugee housing, a vaccine centre and art shows.
Looking back 34 years later, Bergmann-Pohl is still unhappy about the palace’s demise. “But you have to make your peace with these things,” she sighed. A number of activists, however, refuse to make peace.
A new hope
Clemens Schöll was born in 1994, several years after the Palace of the Republic shut its doors forever. He is part of a group of activists who have been fighting to recreate a building that many never got to see from the inside. The Förderverein Palast der Republik e.V. (a deliberate reference to the Förderverein for the Berlin Palace) was founded in 2020 to rebuild the Palace of the Republic.
Instead of a variety of chic restaurants, the only option for eating is a café with the charm of an Autobahn rest stop.
After demolition began, the generation that had fought to preserve the people’s palace mostly accepted defeat. The founders of Palast.Jetzt are not octogenarians nostalgic for the DDR but rather young people born in the years around reunification, who love the building if not the country that created it. “The unbelievable process that led to the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace couldn’t go uncommented upon,” Schöll explains.
There is no public space in the city centre that serves Berliners, as Schöll argues. In fact, the Palace of the Republic was open every day from 10am to midnight, with its opulent lobby as a welcoming place to sit and relax. All the Humboldt Forum offers is a hard bench without a back – and only until 6pm. (This kind of so-called hostile architecture is standard for public buildings today, to prevent unhoused people from congregating.) Instead of a variety of chic restaurants, the only option for eating is a café with the charm of an Autobahn rest stop.
The Förderverein doesn’t want to tear down Humboldt Forum immediately. In the spirit of fairness, since the Palace of the Republic stood from 1976 to 2006, its replacement should also get 30 years. The association envisions demolition starting in 2050, followed by the reconstruction of the Palace of the Republic. The first step of their five-point plan is to place a bronze model of Graffunder’s design outside the Humboldt Forum, for which they are currently collecting donations.
The Humboldt Forum recently announced that it had 1.7 million visitors in 2023. The Palace of the Republic, in contrast, welcomed over five million people each year. Today, an orange line around the Humboldt Forum indicates where its superior predecessor once stood. This line is set to disappear again when the exhibition closes next year. Yet it seems that many Berliners cannot forget the grandeur of the people’s palace. If Palast.Jetzt is successful and reconstruction starts in 2050, we might get the Palace of the Republic back before Manhattan reopens Penn Station.
- ‘Blown Away: The Palace of the Republic’, through Feb 16, 2025, at the Humboldt Forum, Schloßpl. 1, Mitte, details.
