Debate on the future of the Reich Chancellery Bunker: A place to debate the present

As a reminder: some bunker walls and rooms are still preserved after the GDR blew up a lot of things in the 1980s to build new residential buildings on Wilhelmstrasse. The active Berliner Unterwelten e. V. would like to use the location for a documentation center. The State Monuments Office and the State Monuments Council would immediately add it to the list of monuments, but this was prevented by Building Senator Gaebler and Senate Building Director Petra Kahlfeld. Instead, they want to allow a Hamburg investor to build an office and residential building.

Underworlds e. V. replied pragmatically that one could build over the remains of the bunker and use them as a memorial site. But the investor’s speculation on returns is based on ignoring the terrible history of the place and only marketing the building through top locations and luxury architecture.

More important than 64 luxury apartments

Numerous historically aware readers have assured me in letters since the debate began: You don’t need these special remains to remember the Nazi era. Instead, they demand better school teaching. Hardly anyone shared the senator’s fear of a place of pilgrimage: After all, right-wingers generally pay homage, see the AfD and their kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin, the supposedly powerful ones, and despise “losers” à la Trump. The bunker, however, is a place of absolute defeat.

The objection is also worth considering: Lively everyday life shows best that the Nazis and their Germans ultimately lost the war against humanity. And then: Memorials, according to the accusation, are mostly about yesterday and how it came about. But where is the debate about today?

An idea arose over the phone (thanks for the detailed conversation!): How would it be, at this point, the last place where Hitler’s Reich Chancellery can still be physically experienced, to found an institution of self-reflection and self-training for democrats in order to research: How do the agitators manage again and again to activate anti-education, nationalism and hatred against democracy, the rule of law and humanity, these foundations of our security, freedom and prosperity? How do we make our societies and ourselves resilient to the temptation of the “strong man” and the populist “it’s so easy”? Such a place would certainly not be easy. But perhaps more important for society than 64 luxury apartments.