ABSTRACT
Capital cities ‘reverberate with symbolic power’ (Sennett, 1990: 51). It is in the capital city of a country that the relationship between urban planning, architecture and evolving conceptions of national identity is likely to be most direct and most closely under political influence. Suggestions that the environs of Buckingham Palace should be opened up and turned into a public place or that statues of forgotten generals should be removed from Trafalgar Square witness to a desire of London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, to celebrate monarchy and past imperial glory less in the construction of national identity. A new monument to RAF Battle of Britain pilots on the Embankment in London will identify the nation with the spirit of ‘the Few’. In Washington, DC the decision to construct a Holocaust Museum and not a museum of African American history on the Washington Mall speaks loudly, for example, as to what is currently deemed acceptable in the United States’ construction of its national narrative of invoked identification, soon to be accompanied by a bonding September-11th memorial in New York. The African American project, which would have been an acknowledgement of America’s own historical crimes, was finally killed in 1994 by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina (Finkelstein, 2000: 72). Jerusalem, a city closely associated with the ‘collective soul’ of Jewish identity (Wiesel, 2001), is caught in a competing claim from Palestinians to make it their capital city. Here Israel can use the ‘moral capital’ derived from the Holocaust inter alia as legitimacy for its case (Novick, 1999: 156). In contrast to Jerusalem, Berlin stands in a different relationship to the Holocaust. It was the power seat of the perpetrators. This chapter, largely based on interview sources and the review of relevant literature, traces the manner in which Berlin, in the physical planning of the city, has dealt with the dilemma of how the Holocaust should be acknowledged in the texture of the new capital, how moral capital can be replenished, and how the parallel debate on what the Holocaust means for German identity has influenced this. Seldom can planners and architects, two closely allied professions in Germany, have been drawn into such an emotionally charged cultural cauldron where the city is the locus of such intense debate over the meaning of place. In general, while planners can propose in this context, politicians dispose.
