The Gedächtniskirche: How Berlin learnt from its history – Mira Bassi, Tiffin School

In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr similarly highlighted that “The more things change, the more they remain the same”. He’s not wrong. There is something so incredibly rewarding about being able to tuck away the rubble and file down the rough corners left in the wake of war. It doesn’t matter where you stand – winner or loser, triumphant or defeated – there is no sense of celebration in admitting our ugly losses, and the further we can prove we have changed and evolved from our failures, the better. Right? But it is just when we try to progress away from our past mistakes that we carousel right back round to them. Surely, however, Karr’s message operates in both directions. Could it be that the more we remain the same – accept and frame the beatings that tainted our past – the more we change? 

Germany is certainly a country who has taken a beating from the cyclical course of history. It is also a country that has learnt from this lesson. As many other war-ravaged cities swept the remnants of conflict away, Berlin – the capital of Germany – rose from the ashes of World War Two to paint a picture of remembrance. The Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) compellingly epitomises this objective. Wrecked by air raids in 1943, the architect Egon Eiermann proposed the entire demolition of the church in 1951, to construct a redesigned church in its place. After the people of West Berlin protested his “supermodern” design for robbing the city of its “most beautiful ruins”, Eiermann was forced to accept a compromise: the partially destroyed corpus of the church tower was to be preserved as a war memorial, joined by a four-part building ensemble including an octagonal nave, a hexagonal bell tower, a square chapel, and a foyer.

What made his design so special was how unlike its predecessor it was. The two buildings stand side by side like a pair of polar opposite twins, each trying to forge its own identity: the original church – a skeleton of the Romanesque Revival with its towering round arches and massive brickwork – and the new church – a vision of brutalism meets beauty, with its symmetrical steel framework forged with a facade of luminously blue stained glass. It’s obvious why the Gedächtniskirche is so popular with Berlin’s visitors. Even as it towered over me on my bitterly cold mid-January visit, Eiermann’s church emanated and pulsed with a mesmerising light. In a city so saturated with every sort of bustle, the church entranced me with its air of serenity.

But its importance runs infinitely deeper than its aesthetic power. The church confronts you with the suffering that Berlin endured. It’s easy to wander any other European city and revel in its beauty without even the faintest whiff of any of its tribulation – London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral has been built and rebuilt five times, each time repairing and concealing the blows it took to perfect the same impeccable image. The Gedächtniskirche, however, asserts its ruin and remodel into the cityscape. Unlike other cities, which hush the ugly evidence of loss and destruction along into dark little corners – an art gallery, a war museum – without forcing us to to stare them right between the eyes, Berlin enables us to see history as something that continues to course through the veins of the present. In an interview published in 1970, Eiermann observed that “my wish is for future generations to have an understanding for those who experienced the terror, and for whom the ruin symbolises their own sufferings”. Indeed, the ruined shell of the church transmits his objective perfectly: to remind us of the tragedy caused by war. In the decision not to replace, but rather to build around the ruins of the original church, Berlin shows us how to learn from history without separating ourselves from it. We have been warned enough times to know how not to ignore it, but it is not enough to learn about history when and where we wish. By injecting and mapping out the monuments and memorials of the past into our everyday lives, we can ensure that history will not repeat itself. Not only that: we evidence to ourselves, and future generations, that we can always bear the unbearable.