Ebertstraße on the eastern edge of Tiergarten Park links Potsdamer Platz with the Reichstag building. Most of it was incorporated in the border installations. For this reason a new road running parallel to it was built in 1962 and called Entlastungsstraße (relief road) to indicate its temporary nature and purpose. This path cut through the park will disappear once the tunnel running beneath Tiergarten Park has been completed. The new dome on top of the Reichstag building is now second only to the Brandenburg Gate as a symbol of the reunited city. The design with which Lord Norman Foster won the competition for the remodelling of the Reichstag in 1992 originally envisaged a oversized roof protruding from the Reichstag building onto the Platz der Republik (Square of the Republic) in front of it. The dome in its present form emerged only after Foster had revised his design several times. The Reichstag building was erected to plans by Paul Wallot and officially opened in 1894. On 9th November 1918, Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the republic from an open window in the Reichstag. The end of this Weimar Republic was signalled by the fire, which destroyed the Reichstag on the night of 27th February 1933. The dome, which was largely destroyed by the flames, was removed in 1954. In the 1960s, Paul Baumgarten produced a design for the small-scale conversion of this huge building, which at that time was virtually in no-man's land. The main unification celebrations were held in the Reichstag building in October 1990. Since 1999, the building has been the seat of the German Bundestag and a symbol of the new federal capital. The Federal Press Conference Building is located to the north of the Reichstag where the Wall once ran along the eastern bank of the River Spree. It was here in 1990 that artist Ben Wargin installed his "Parliament of Trees against War and Violence" in the form of Wall segments listing the year and respective number of people killed at the Berlin Wall. Parts of the installation are now incorporated in the Marie-Elisabeth Lueders House parliamentary building. Wargin's work is on display in a publicly accessible circular room right next to the flight of steps leading down to the River Spree. The positioning of the segments along the original Wall demarcation is deliberate and, severing the spatial structure of the architecture, symbolizes a living organism befallen by a foreign body.
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Images:
Landesarchiv Berlin (2)
Jörg Küster
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