Abstract
Much of reunified Berlin is new and sparkling, but it remains a backward-looking city, weighed down by, but also thriving on, attention to its past. Even for tourists, Berlin's history appears complex and troubling. The crowds of visitors help to show where its historical appeal lies. The scarred and restored Reichstag building has become the extraordinarily popular center of the otherwise new government quarter. Among the city's three most popular museums, the Checkpoint Charlie museum recreates the drama of the divided city, and the attraction of the new Jewish Museum rests partly on interest in the Holocaust and its origins in Berlin. The venerable Pergamon Museum stands for the more comforting, pre-twentieth-century past. Berlin's connection to this history is also unsettled, however, as evidenced by the popular wish to rebuild the destroyed royal palace. Here, as elsewhere in Berlin, buildings and public space are understood to offer the physical immediacy of history, and arguments about them freely mix aesthetics, politics, and morality.
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