ABSTRACT
Weizsäcker uttered these words in May 1945 soon after German capitulation. Even though the National Socialist era had barely ended, Weizsäcker could already articulate the salient issues with which future generations would have to grapple: how to remember the past, how to share responsibility, and how to use memory to shape the future. Implicit in Weizsäcker’s words is the admonition that the past, no matter how unpleasant, is part of German collective and individual identity. Indeed the intermingling of these very concerns, the past, memory, and identity, accounts for transparency ideology’s emergence and duration after the war. In spite of the profound philosophical and esthetic orientations of Norman Foster, Günter Behnisch, and Hans Schwippert, transparency ideology was crucial to each project for the Bundestag, and ultimately helped make the architecture acceptable to a wide West German audience that included politicians, journalists, and lay people. There is no simple explanation for transparency’s appeal to such a broad cross-section of constituencies in Germany but the coincidence of four factors related to the past, memory, and identity, might help. Briefly stated, these were: the association of sight with control in Western thinking, the workings of collective memory on the German psyche, the need for a way to represent democracy in
state architecture, and the need for a means with which to identify with the newly established democratic form of government.
