8oo years ago, on a sandy marsh in the middle of a windy plain,
building began.
The story of Berlin and its buildings has been one of visionary creation.
But also terrible destruction.
More than any other city, Berlin has, over the centuries,
been a place where men have cast their dreams in stone.
Now, more than half a century after the Second World War
and 2o years after the fall of the wall,
Berlin is still a work in progress.
The forest of cranes suggest a new version of the city is rising.
But in Berlin, nothing is simple.
Berlin is a city where the past and the future just keep colliding.
l love this place, it fascinates me.
But as a German l also feel that some of its buildings, perhaps inevitably,
inspire feelings of guilt.
ln fact, l can't really think of another city in the world
where the morality of the architecture has been so heavily scrutinised and mulled over
as here in Berlin.
There is no such thing as just bricks and mortar here.
Every fragment is charged with history,
both good and bad.
Stones that tell us about ourselves, our idealism, our hubris, our ambition,
and of course, our delusion.
This is a tale of rubble and remembrance,
of mortar and morality.
on the morning of the 3rd of May, 1945,
weary Berliners emerged bleary-eyed from their cellars and their bomb shelters.
And then it suddenly dawned on them.
The war was over...
but so was Berlin.
What had been a proud metropolis in stone
had now been reduced to a city of dust.
For Berliners, this terrible moment would become known as Stunde Null
or Zero Hour.
The victorious Allied commanders soon arrived.
What Winston Churchill saw was an apocalyptic landscape that shocked even him.
British Air-Marshal Arthur Tedder
had come to the city to accept the formal surrender of the Germans.
He compared Berlin to a ruined classical city.
/n his opinion, it would never be rebuilt.
At the centre of this devastation was the wreck of a building familiar to all Berliners,
and that felt as old as the city itself.
The Berliner Schloss.
This is the Schloss in the 193os.
/t was a royal palace and had been home to Berlin's rulers for centuries.
Originally a medieval fortress, it had been, in typical Berlin fashion,
built and rebuilt.
/n the mid-17oos, it settled on its final baroque form.
/t was the heart of Berlin.
By 1945, the Schloss stood for the fate of the city itself.
Once the centre of an imperial power,
now reduced to a blackened shell.
After the war, control of the city was divided
with the Russians in charge of the east
and the west controlled by the Americans, the British and the French.
So in effect, there were now two Berlins -
East and West.
But facing both sides were millions of tonnes of rubble.
Each Berlin sought to use the rubble creatively,
as a building material
but also as a political tool.
/n Treptower Park, East Berlin, stands a vast memorial to the 5,ooo Russian soldiers
who died in the Battle of Berlin.
Completed in 1949,
the Soviet War Memorial used slabs of red marble from Hitler's Chancellery,
destroyed at the end of the war.
The Russians recycled the stone that had formed the core of Hitler's world
and created a memorial that was designed the make the victor feel proud
and the vanquished pathetic.
This is stone deployed as a propaganda tool,
intended to rub and keep rubbing German noses in their own defeat.
But the Russians weren't only ones looking to make a point with the spoils of war.
On the western edge of the city, the British and American authorities used their rubble
to create a hill.
But this was no ordinary hill, and in the difficult years that were to come,
it would prove of great strategic value.
l've got the Cold War crunching under my feet here.
Whoo! Bloody hell!
lt's freezing!
Windy! Amazing, look at this.
Look at this stuff.
lt's like a sail that... of course, this was once all completely enclosed.
Not nearly as noisy.
ln fact it was silent because everyone here
would be listening to what was going on over there.
This was a listening post in the Cold War for what was going on in the east.
Apparently they could listen to conversations being held 3oo miles that direction.
This is amazing, and it's almost impossible to imagine that this place, two decades ago,
would have been absolutely jam-packed with technicians and spies.
ln fact, you can see some of the wires here.
You can still see some of the old fuse boxes left behind.
This is a vintage Cold War relic. Never seen anything like it.
Extraordinary place. And remember, although we're on top of a mountain,
this is in fact not made by nature, it was made by man.
Millions of tonnes of rubble from the city of Berlin,
shipped here at the end of the Second World War,
to make the Teufelsberg, the Devil's Mountain.
You couldn't find a better name for this place.
Layer upon layer of history, and tight on top, like a white cherry on a green cake,
the Cold War listening station.
only in Berlin.
Call me weird, but l love this place.
The question is, what do you do with it?
No one here can agree.
l mean, there have been several suggestions.
Turn it into a museum, leave it exactly as it is,
make it into a hotel.
Why not have a spa?
But no one here can agree and the reason is that in Berlin,
the act of demolition is just as politically and emotionally charged
as the act of construction.
lt's the curse of this city.
/n the aftermath of the war, the need for new homes for the thousands of homeless Berliners
became paramount.
The post-war blues gave way to a new mood of optimism.
/t was a race - west versus east -
to create a new model city that represented their way of thinking.
The socialist boulevard of Stalinallee, now called Karl-Marx-Allee
was a long, wide processional avenue in East Berlin,
constructed by thousands of willing workers.
To its critics, the apartment blocks that lined it were crass and more suited to Moscow.
To their new occupants, though, they were comfortable and modern.
Many of the builders and their families were given apartments.
Gerhardt Werlenski still lives there.
The response in West Berlin was ambitious and radical.
The /nterbau project brought together 48 renowned architects.
Their task was to design social housing for the Hansaviertel district
that had been decimated by bombs.
But the two new Berlins didn't define themselves by construction alone.
The destruction of old buildings also became a creative and political act.
Berlin's ruined royal palace, the Schloss, came in the firing line.
/ts remains stood in East Berlin and the Communist authorities there
decided that with its imperial past, it represented the wrong kind of history.
/n 195o, it was demolished.
/t was an ignominious end for what was, after all, Berlin's most historic building.
And where the Schloss stood, today there's a vast, sandy pit.
Once more an empty space at the heart of the city,
waiting for answers.
For a decade after the demolition of the Schloss,
East and West Berlin became more and more divided.
One Sunday in 1961,
the East Berlin authorities began work on a structure
that was to define the lives of all Berliners for nearly three decades.
That day came to be known as Stacheldraht-Sonntag
or Barbed Wire Sunday.
The barbed wire would quickly be replaced by reinforced concrete.
Arc lamps and guard towers watched over the notorious death strip,
an exposed no-go area of bare sand that cut a huge swathe through the city.
When the wall was built,
it instantly became the most infamous and emotionally charged structure,
not just in Berlin, but in the whole world.
The people of this city had seen many grotesque things in the 2oth century,
but this was new.
Ruthlessly, the wall cut everything in its path in half.
Entire communities, neighbourhoods, families,
even the dead weren't sacred enough.
The buildings of Berlin used to fit in with the Schloss.
Now they responded to the wall.
Once more, east and west competed, this time for height.
Right-wing press baron Axel Springer taunted the East Berlin authorities
by commissioning a new headquarters in West Berlin
right next to the wall.
The Communist response -
four new apartment blocks that put Springer's building in the shadow.
But even these were dwarfed by another project in the east -
the Fernsehturm, or TV Tower.
Constructed in 1969 and over 36o metres tall,
it quickly became a Berlin icon, visible right across the city,
east or west.
For the Communists, it was a symbol of newness, of technology, of the future,
proudly flaunted in the face of the west.
But how could the Communists replace this?
/t was now 2o years since the demolition of the Schloss,
Berlin's royal residence.
/n 1973, construction finally began on a replacement.
On the very spot where the Schloss had stood rose another palace,
the Palace of the Republic.
/t was the seat of the East German Parliament
but it was also meant to be an open house for the people.
And they made the most of it.
Despite sneers from the west,
it didn't take long for it to wedge in the hearts of East Berliners.
Those who mourned the Schloss, though,
looked rather less kindly on the building that had replaced it.
When the Berlin Wall finally fell in 1989,
the Palace of the Republic, a symbol of the Communist east,
was never likely to survive in a reunified city.
/n 2oo6, demolition began.
Asbestos, said the Government.
Wrong history, claimed aggrieved East Berliners.
Either way, the site became vacant once again...
and a question hung over the empty space.
What should be built here? A building that acknowledged the past
or one that embraced the future?
The thing about Berlin is that it's always been a new city,
even when it was old.
/n the first half of the 19th century, it was little more than a provincial town.
But architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel almost single-handedly transformed it.
His passion had been ignited in 18o6, when French soldiers marched into Berlin,
led by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel watched as Napoleon's troops marched into his city.
French occupation was to rouse his patriotic fervour.
But he vented his anger and his rage by creating some of the city's finest buildings.
/n less than 3o years, Schinkel dreamt up a series of new state buildings,
including the Altes Museum, the city's first public museum.
Schinkel used the elegance of Ancient Greece
to make a new city seem older than its years.
Schinkel was to build his king and master a classical paradise,
an Athens on the Spree.
At last, Berlin was to become a European capital of consequence.
And as a dreamer in stone, Schinkel's mind buzzed with ideas and forms.
Not content with that, though, Schinkel also saw the future of architecture itself.
And it came on a trip in 1826...
to England.
He sketched the grim mills and factories of Manchester and other northern towns
and he sketched them like a man possessed.
Schinkel was torn.
At heart, he was a romantic who yearned for beauty,
but there was something about the industrial architecture that he encountered in England
that excited him.
Back in Berlin, he came up with a building that married the two
and would take architecture in a wholly new direction.
The Bauakademie was finished in 1836.
Nothing like it had ever been built before in Berlin
or indeed anywhere else.
Schinkel had dreamt up a building that was elegant in appearance
but pioneering in construction.
The Bauakademie now only exists in architecture books.
The original building has long vanished from the city.
Damaged during the war, the East Berlin authorities saw it as just another old ruin
and demolished it in 1962.
Today, though, in a city of ghosts, a doppelga'nger appears to be rising.
But in Berlin, nothing is ever quite what it seems.
Well, there's not much to see inside. But you know what?
After two centuries of construction and destruction,
they've finally got the answer to their problems in this city of facades.
Make them all out of plastic.
The Bauakademie is where Schinkel died in 1841.
From overwork, they said.
The Berlin that he left behind was now on the verge of greatness.
The city, like Schinkel himself, both romantic and progressive.
By the turn of the 2oth century,
Berlin had become the most modern city in the western world.
The American author Mark Twain was a new visitor,
a man familiar with the great metropolises of Chicago and New York.
But it was in Berlin that he saw the future.
No other European capital could touch it for innovation.
/t had some of the first electric traffic signals and street lights on the continent.
Berlin fizzed with activity.
And everything had to beautiful.
Even the transformer stations that powered the city were works of art.
Peter Behrens was an architect obsessed with reconciling advances in technology
with artistic form.
His turbine factory for the AEG power company was completed in 191o.
1oo years on, it's still producing state-of-the-art turbines
and it still looks inspirational.
Like Schinkel before him, Behrens instinctively understood the beauty
inherent in the industrial form,
through the marriage of glass and steel and brick.
Believe it or not, this building changed the course of architecture.
Modernism, an architectural movement that embraced the new, was born.
By the 192os, across the city, new visions of living and working
were springing up.
Berlin had become a cauldron of creativity.
On its edges, pioneering architects were commissioned to come up with new homes,
to take the masses out of the overcrowded city.
The Hufeisensiedlung, or Horseshoe Estate, designed by Bruno Taut,
had more than 1,ooo residences.
Onkel-Toms Seidlung, built five years later, would accommodate twice as many again.
These estates were like garden cities.
Boldly colourful - the fruits of a society that celebrated the new.
Modernism now led.
And where Berlin led, the rest of the world followed.
or so it seemed.
From 1933, Berlin became Hitler's city.
The rise to power of the Nazi Party spelt the end of modernism,
condemned by them as ''cosmopolitan rubbish''.
This estate was mainly home to Communists.
The emerging Nazi Party regarded them, as well as the style of buildings they lived in,
as their enemies.
Modernism itself was now in the firing line.
But the Nazis were to take on their opponents with more than just jackboots.
Just around the corner, a very different vision of Germanic identity was being built.
The Nazis armed themselves with pitched roofs to combat the flat ones of Modernism.
/t would be dubbed the Battle of the Roofs.
The perfect chocolate box village, straight out of a Grimm fairy tale,
with the pitched roofs and the folkish style,
this place looks idyllic.
But guess what. lt was built in the late 193os
specifically for the SS,
as a model community.
Today, this neighbourhood, originally known as the SS Comradeship Estate,
is once again very desirable.
But whether it has managed to shake off the connection with Hitler's infamous security force,
is less clear.
/n December 193o, a young architectural student named Albert Speer
heard Hitler at a rally.
He was enthralled and his life transformed.
Within there years, Speer was working for Hitler and the pair were inseparable.
Together, they planned to transform Berlin into Germania,
a new capital of the Third Reich.
Speer would build on Schinkel's legacy to create a new city of the future
that would last for a thousand years.
A huge north-south processional route would cut through the centre of the city.
At its northern end would be the heart of Germania itself,
the GroBer Platz.
So this is where it would have been, the giant square, der GroBer Platz.
To the west, Hitler's own palace.
To the east, the existing Reichstag.
To the north,
the crowning glory of Germania,
the people's hall, the Volkshalle.
lts dome 16 times higher than the dome of St Peter's. ust imagine.
And then to the south, at the end of a grand avenue,
the largest triumphal arch in the world,
dwarfing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
ln fact, everything in this city would have been designed to dwarf everything in it and around it.
Speer was so excited about his plans he showed them to his father.
The old man looked at them and then said,
''You've all gone bloody mad.''
But for the young architect, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.
Put yourself in Speer's shoes. You're given a blank canvas, unlimited funds,
a workforce at your disposal.
And the chance to remodel Berlin and turn it into one of the grandest cities on the planet.
l'd be tempted.
And so, of course, was Speer.
He wanted to be Schinkel to Hitler's king.
And he took Shinkel's neo-classicism to new, square-jawed heights.
But in the process, he was making a pact with the devil.
Berlin was to host the 1936 Olympics.
Hitler asked Speer to oversee the building of a vast new stadium
to demonstrate to the watching world how to put on a show...
Nazi-style.
The Games were deemed by the Nazis to be such a huge success
that Hitler commissioned Speer to build another stadium four times the size of this one,
in which Berlin alone would host the olympic Games
every year.
On a residential side street south of the city,
there remains an extraordinary monument to their bloated vision.
You could call this Hitler's folly.
A vast slab of concrete
which bears witness to the scale, the enormous scale of the Nazis' ambitions for Berlin.
Plonked here in 1941,
the sole purpose of this slab was to see whether the marshy soil of Berlin
would literally take the weight of Hitler's ambitions...
for Germania.
This was to be the site of Hitler's giant triumphal arch.
The southern gateway to Germania.
But guess what. lt didn't work.
The slab sank into the boggy soil of Berlin and has remained there ever since,
an unintended monument to Hitler's hubris.
However, the groundwork for Germania was laid across the city.
And even today, under a park in the centre,
Berlin still retains some dark secrets from those preparations.
- Hallo! - Hallo!
off we go.
- Very good. - oK.
- (Man speaking German ) - oK.
Wow.
Amazing.
(Footstep echoes )
lt's like a sort of...subterranean Venice from Hell, this place.
of course, this is one of the very few bits of Germania that was actually built
and survives to this day.
And guess what it was supposed to be.
An underpass for cars,
so that the central junction next to GroBer Platz in Germania wouldn't be cluttered with traffic.
Hitler hated traffic jams.
of course, it's now as silent as the grave.
/n the end, the Fuhrer's lust for war overtook his dreams for Berlin,
and Speer's grandiose plans were put on ice.
Germania was crushed before it had even risen
and Speer fell to Earth like /carus.
At the Nuremburg Trials he was sentenced to 2o years' imprisonment
for his part in the madness.
on october the 1st, 1966, an ageing Albert Speer was finally released from Spandau prison.
As he drove slowly through the still-ruined streets of Berlin,
he tried to imagine what his Germania would have looked like.
After 2o years of perspective, Speer realised his own youthful hubris
but also his complicity
and Germania, rather like Atlantis,
would remain a city forever lost in myth.
# Was ham wa fur ne Feuerwehr bei uns in Tempelhof?
# Die Feuerwehr kommt anjerennt, und fragt.. ''Wo hat et denn jebrennt?''
#Ja, ja, ja, bei uns in Tempelhof/
#Ja, ja, ja, bei uns in Tempelhof/ #
This is Tempelhof Airport. /t's been called the mother of all airports.
Built by the Nazis, its continued serving the city until recently.
Now it stands empty, its future uncertain.
/t's a remarkable, spooky building that poses, for me, an almost unanswerable question.
This is still one of the biggest buildings in Europe today
and there's no doubt that it's impressive, awe-inspiring.
ust look at the dimensions of it.
And of course that's exactly the way the Nazis intended it to be.
But here's the question that bothers me.
Am l allowed to like a building
that was constructed by a regime like the Nazis?
ls there such a thing as original sin and morality in architecture?
There are other buildings in Berlin that have their confessions to make.
This is the German Ministry of Finance.
/t used to be the Nazi Ministry of Aviation.
But Berlin is a city that simply won't give up.
A succession of new old buildings keep appearing.
They acknowledge, rather than deny, their history.
The Neues Museum, damaged by Second World War bombs,
was left abandoned as a ruin for over half a century.
Today, the remnants of its original features
have been integrated into a spectacular new building.
And the Reichstag, traditional seat of the German Parliament
was rebuilt by Sir Norman Foster for the 21st century.
/t's a marriage of old and new
and it boldly incorporates into its design the graffiti left by victorious Russian soldiers
in 1945.
But there is one expanse of sand in the very centre of Berlin
that more than any other, demands resolution.
/t's the spot where until recently the Palace of the Republic stood.
Now, remarkably, plans are in place to rebuild the old royal palace,
the Schloss, on the very same spot where it once stood.
Another new old building.
/t's a proposal that divides Berliners.
For as long as arguments like these continue, Berlin will remain restless.
And this is what makes it unique.
A new city, still coming to terms with its past.
And this story ends where it began.
ln a large empty patch of earth right in the heart of the city.
A blank canvas onto which Berlin can construct yet another image of itself.