that once guarded the river from night smuggling. In 1896, a pair of neo-Gothic towers resembling the Mitteltor Tower in Prenzlau, along with a 154m double-deck brick structure, were completed as the new Oberbaum Bridge for the Berlin Trades Exhibition. The fusion of medieval towers and a metropolitan railway viaduct revealed the conflicting desires of the newly formed German Empire. Six years later, the u-bahn (subway) made its first ever Spree-crossing on the Oberbaum Bridge, during the decade of the empire’s peak fortunes when Berlin seriously challenged London and New York as the world’s biggest metropolis of the twentieth century. Wars brought everything to an abrupt end. The bridge’s first major blow took place in 1945 when Hitler ordered his troops to blow up the Oberbaum Bridge in an attempt to stop the advancing Red Army. The bridge was temporarily restored after the war, only to be closed off again in 1961 as the
fabric or in former demilitarised zones. There is little ambition for making bold statements in the master-plan. One may speculate that the new government was distancing itself from Hitler and Speer who had imagined the grandeur of the Third Reich’s capital to rival Imperial Rome, and avoiding extra spending in the long-haul unification process. Some architects, however, see in Berlin’s lack of bold architectural statement a revelation of self-uncertainty. Philip Johnson referred to the Germans as ‘timid’ and who ‘have made no great plans’. 4 Aldo Rossi felt that ‘Berlin has lost awareness of its destiny as a capital and in history’. 5 The story of the Oberbaum Bridge may offer a clue to decipher the architectural dilemma of post-Cold War Berlin. In 1742, a wooden drawbridge over the Spree at Berlin’s eastern limit replaced an earlier boom-bridge. The drawbridge was named Oberbaum, meaning ‘tree trunk’, in memory of a heavy tree trunk
46 On Site review 22: WAR
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