Preface

Summary

ON 19 APRIL 1999 THE PARLIAMENT of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was convened as an all-German body for the first time in fifty eight years at the Reichstag in central Berlin during a ceremony marking the transfer of the newly reunited country's capital from the west German city of Bonn. The ceremony also commemorated the completion of renovations to an edifice which, in 1894, had been inaugurated as the parliamentary seat of the first unified German state created in 1870–71, and which had witnessed key moments in the drama of German history as it had unfolded during the Wilhelmine period, the First World War, the Weimar Republic, and the twelve years of the Nazi dictatorship. In June and July 1995 the “wrapping of the Reichstag” by Bulgarian artist Christo had attracted millions of spectators even as no one was entirely sure whether this signaled the assembly's reincarnation or was intended as ironic comment on its ambivalent history. In 1999, nine years after unification, however, it was apparent that in this building the Berlin Republic — the term that many commentators had already begun applying to united Germany from the mid-1990s onwards — had finally come into existence.

Sir Norman Foster's innovative redesign for the Reichstag proclaims the values that are to be associated with the “new” Germany. The glass cupola set upon the building's nineteenth-century skeleton containing galleries from which the public is able to peer down into the debating chamber thus symbolizes a very contemporary commitment to the definitive realization of the ideal of democratic transparency.