ABSTRACT
The Gendarmenmarkt square, which was renamed Platz der Akademie in 1950 and since 1991 again bears its old name, was the heart of the Friedrichstadt and one of the best-known architectural ensembles in Berlin. Guidebooks frequently call it “the city’s most beautiful square.”1 Although this might be more telling about the aesthetic qualities of the city as a whole than those of the square, the Platz der Akademie is impressive. It boasts three monumental free-standing buildings: on the edges the Französische Kirche (French Church, begun in 1699) and the Deutsche Kirche (German Church, begun in 1701), in the middle the Schauspielhaus (Playhouse, begun in 1817 aĞer a design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel), which is now known as Konzerthaus (Concert House) and used for musical performances. The two churches are similar in their exterior design and are topped with widely visible golden statues, that of the French Church symbolizing the
Figure 7.2 Platz der Akademie (Gendarmenmarkt) in 1968. Most ruins from the Second World War have disappeared, new buildings were hardly constructed. In the middle the damaged German Church and behind the damaged French Church. The Playhouse in between has no roof (Photograph: Landesarchiv Berlin/Klaus Lehnartz)
“Triumphant Religion” and that of the German Church the “Triumphant Virtue.” Since 1871, a bronze statue of German national poet Friedrich Schiller, sculpted by Reinhold Begas, adorned the space in front of the Playhouse. The monument was removed in 1935, obviously because Sturmund-Drang rebel Friedrich Schiller, despite being the second most famous German poet aĞer Goethe, was not too popular among the Nazi rulers.2 The richly decorated residential buildings from the eighteenth century that once surrounded the square had already largely disappeared by the turn of the twentieth century, and the three public buildings on the square were destroyed or heavily damaged in the Second World War.3 Also most surrounding buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were destroyed, including the famous wine store and restaurant LuĴer und Wegner on the northwest corner of the square. Churches and Playhouse were heavily damaged during the Second World War (see Figure 7.2). As one of the few pre-war buildings the former Prussian State Bank from 1901 on Markgrafenstraße number 38 (architect Paul Kieschke) had survived the bombings. Since 1950 it housed the Academy of Sciences of the GDR and thus gave the square the name it would bear during the socialist era. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Gendarmenmarkt/Platz der Akademie was “firmly anchored in the people’s memory,” as Chief Architect Roland Korn put it, and its imminent rebuilding according to the old beauty-at least as far as the façades were concerned-was never doubted.4 In practice, however, the square was neglected for decades. Historian Laurenz Demps, who had taught at East Berlin’s Humboldt University during the times of the GDR, blamed the East German authorities’ “‘hatred’ for their own history” for the default to rebuild the square.5 According to Demps, Schinkel until the 1980s was reviled as a Fürstenknecht (henchman of the nobility) in East Germany and further discredited for being the favorite architect of Nazi planner Albert Speer.6 The eventual rebuilding of the square, according to Demps, was therefore accompanied by “continuous struggle” and took a “cunning roundabout way.”7
