Michael Cullen lives in the dream Berlin apartment. High ceilings, worn oak parquet, a series of light-filled rooms linked by double doors like a paper chain. Every wall – every surface – is covered in books bristling with Post-it notes, their spines cracked and worn, or with framed prints and posters. Brooklyn-born Cullen, an architectural historian, author and former gallerist, is the OG Wahlberliner, having arrived in Berlin in 1964, just three years after the Wall went up.
“Berlin wasn’t very alive back then,” he says of the city he first encountered over 60 years ago. “Not compared to Munich anyway.”
It is early June when we meet, and every few minutes, Cullen’s phone buzzes: another text or call incoming. It was Cullen’s birthday in June – this year, he turned 86 – but the reason everyone wants to talk to him is another anniversary entirely. Thirty years ago, the iconic artistic duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the German capital building in hundreds of thousands of metres of shimmering cloth and rope.
Although it was only in situ for two weeks, some five million people came to see the wrapped Reichstag in the summer of 1995, filling the surrounding lawns day and night. It was a huge event at the time: a global art happening from a pair of superstar artists. But in the three decades since, Wrapped Reichstag has taken on a whole other life. Images of the wrapped building have come to define Berlin’s heady post-reunification era, a symbolic dollop of sealing wax marking the end of the 20th century. When obituary photos were needed to represent the artistic careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude (the era-defining art couple known for site-specific work would have celebrated their 90th birthdays this year), more often than not, Wrapped Reichstag was the work chosen. A cartoon of it even appeared in an episode of The Simpsons. And Michael Cullen was the guy who started it all.
For Christo’s Sake
Born in New York City to Jewish-Polish parents, Cullen points to two fateful choices made early in life. The first was learning to type at the age of 14; when he was later drafted into the US Army, he avoided being sent to Vietnam because he was too useful in the typing pool. “They didn’t even bother teaching me to shoot a gun,” he recalls. The second was opting to learn Russian in college. “I didn’t really think about it, but it was around the time of Sputnik.” Plus, a former teacher had loved Russian, “and he also loved opera and made gin in his bathtub”. Cullen took to the language, and upon graduating in 1962 was offered a stint at the broadcaster Radio Liberty in Munich.
It was just 17 years since the end of the war, and his parents could not fathom why a Jew would want to move to Germany. “My mother said she wouldn’t accompany me to the boat, and my father’s goodbye words were, ‘Don’t forget, the only good German is a dead German.’ But I said, ‘I can’t live that way.’ I take everybody one on one and I’ll do the same when I get there,” he says. “Of course, I met people here who would have been old enough to have played a role [in the war]. But the people I was with, they were okay.”
By the late 1960s, Cullen was settled at the very centre of Berlin’s cultural life, having opened a tiny art space called Galerie Mikro, first in Wedding and then in Charlottenburg. He hosted shows by Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi and David Hockney, and readings by Günter Grass and WH Auden. He roared around the city in a tiny red Isetta car. “Berlin was hopping because I was hopping. I came with no inhibitions and just said, I’ll do what I want to do. It was then that I realised that I wasn’t meant to be employed by anyone else. I’m my own man.” That singularity could be something of a drawback when it came to selling art. “I’m not a good salesman. If the art doesn’t sell itself, I’m doomed.”
In 1971, Cullen heard that a friend was going to film a Christo project in Colorado. He knew Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work from a piece that was the talk of the 1968 dokumenta 4 in Kassel (an inflatable the size of a four-storey building called ‘5,600 Cubicmeter Package’) and decided to send a postcard to the mega-famous artist via his friend. On the back of a typical tourist shot of the Reichstag – at that point a forlorn, disused building just nine metres from the Wall – he wrote, “I suggest you wrap the building on the other side.”
“Berlin was hopping because I was hopping.”
“For me, it was just, ‘Let’s see what happens,’” says Cullen now. He pads across the room to find a framed copy of the letter he received back from Jeanne-Claude, stating simply: “He is very interested.” “I had no idea it would turn out the way it would turn out,” Cullen says.
For the next 24 years, Cullen would work on getting the go-ahead for the pair to wrap the Reichstag. At Christo’s request, he scoured Berlin’s flea markets for old maps and photos, dispatching a thick folder of material to New York, where the artist created a flurry of sketches and plans. He sent one back for Cullen to sell, as payment for the hours of political lobbying. When Christo asked for more information on the Reichstag, Cullen plunged into research, zigzagging back and forth between archives in West Berlin and the DDR. “In the East, the files were full of dust and dirt and grime. The toilets were terrible and there was no place to have lunch. But once you get into these archives, everything disappears. You’re looking at things nobody’s looked at in a hundred years. It’s paradise.”
Cullen eventually turned his research into a highly regarded history of the Reichstag, the first of its kind, which in turn led to a new life as an architectural historian. Over the next decades, he would write several more books, and work on the restoration of the Brandenburg Gate and other Berlin monuments – all the while pushing to get the Reichstag wrapped. Cullen set up meetings with each new president of the Bundestag (six in total), mined backchannels, called in favours. He would line up a fragile series of supporters in government, only to see them washed away as the tide of political favour turned and a new cohort came to power.
It’s hard in 2025, when cities would happily offer up a kidney in exchange for a piece of tourism-driving public art by the likes of Olafur Eliasson or Ai Weiwei, to conceive of the scale of the opposition to the Reichstag project. “It was so stupid. People said, ‘Christo, you can’t do that. The Nazis set fire to the building and now you’re doing something else to harm the building,’” Cullen recounts. “A very primitive knee-jerk reaction: man tut sowas nicht, one doesn’t do such things.”
“… for most people, it was this gloomy thing which had somehow set fire to itself.”
Those arguing for the project to go ahead also pointed to the building’s grim history. The arson attack in 1933, which many believe was carried out by the Nazis themselves, was used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties, and no government had sat there since. The architect tasked with reconstructing the Reichstag after the war, Paul Baumgarten, urged the president of the Bundestag at the time, Annemarie Renger, to give the artists the go-ahead. “He said, ‘Frau Renger, that’s the greatest thing that could happen to this building,” Cullen says. “Because you have to know something – when the Reichstag was finished in 1971, nobody wanted it anymore … for most people, it was this gloomy thing which had somehow set fire to itself.”
It was a project and a friendship that was to shape the entirety of Cullen’s life, at times a scaffold, at times a signpost, and at times a source of sorrow. “With him, it was easy,” Cullen says of Christo. “With her, it was a little more difficult. Christo loved me as a friend and he never shouted at me, never screamed. She would. She could be mean.” Still, he credits the pair jointly for what would unfold. “I loved her and hated her at the same time, but on balance, nothing would have happened without her. I am who I am because of her and Christo, not just because of Christo.”
Lawn of a new day
By 1994, times had changed. Berlin was once again the seat of government of a reunified Germany. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s fame had increased tenfold. In February, Cullen’s decades of lobbying paid off, and the question of whether to allow the project came before the Bundestag. In the run-up to the vote, Cullen joined the artists on a VW bus which they drove around the country, talking to over 300 of the 600-odd members of parliament. The vote passed by a narrow margin, despite the vehement opposition of the chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl. In the end, what probably swung the result in their favour was the fact that the $15 million cost of the project was footed not by the taxpayer but by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Television footage of the Bundestag on the day of the vote shows Cullen sitting two seats down from Christo.
When the results come through, the artist visibly relaxes and smiles – a curiously muted response, given the 24-year campaign to get it over the line. “We were pretty confident going in,” Cullen says with a smile. “It was difficult, but we got it done.”
With that, the clock was ticking: architect Norman Foster signed up to start restoring the building in late 1995. All around Germany, factories got to work, weaving 100,000 square metres of cloth and more then 15 kilometres of blue rope. A report in Der Spiegel at the time describes how one factory boss got so fed up with his employees grumbling about the “pure nonsense” of the project that he put up signs saying, “Let’s give Christo this freedom. He’s not hurting anyone.”
Finally, on June 24, 1995, some 90 professional climbers from the former DDR abseiled down the outside of the 47-metre-high Reichstag, unfurling silver cloth as they went. “It was incredible,” says Cullen, still awestruck 30 years on. “The lawn in front of the Reichstag was filled around the clock, because the light kept changing. There were people there all the time, eating and drinking, making love, getting engaged, getting dis-engaged. People bongo-drumming and saxophoning and dancing. It was a huge, huge party.”
The two weeks during which the Reichstag remained wrapped were seen by many as the true reunification party of Berlin, and a signal to the wider world that Germany’s capital was no longer just a sombre memorial city. “Berlin became a popular, friendly, humorous place,” says Cullen. “[Former German President Richard von] Weizsäcker came to see it, and we talked and he said, ‘It’s like a war is over, but nobody’s making speeches.’”
“Let’s give Christo this freedom. He’s not hurting anyone.”
Yet for all the work’s symbolic power and the meaning so many people drew from it – and despite the fact that he himself grew up in communist Bulgaria – Christo always refused to assign any particular significance to his choice of the Reichstag. “Never!” barks Cullen, still amused today. “I said to him once, ‘Christo, one of the first famous works of yours in Europe was when you blocked a street in Paris with oil barrels a year after the Wall was built. You called it Rideau de Fer [“Iron curtain”] and you’re telling me you’re not political?’ He just grinned at me and let me talk.”
Ultimately, why does Cullen think that was? “He was very interested in his art and he didn’t want anything political to get in the way of it. There are mysteries of Christo’s life which are still mysteries, but that’s okay. I adore mysteries.”
