Architectural angst : 'Berlin Babylon'.

Two years ago, while renovation of Berlin's former Reichstag building was still underway, I asked a German diplomat why his government would entrust a British architect (Sir Norman Foster) with the redesign of its most significant national edifice. "That's what we do in Berlin now," he said, dryly. "We let foreign architects do the important buildings, so if a building ends up exuding a sense of power, we won't catch flak for it."

The diplomat's remarks reveal the acute awareness of image that Germans took on after World War II--a hypersensitivity to world opinion that is as unlike brash American insouciance as, well, defeat is to victory. With reunification and the move of government back to Berlin from provincial, unthreatening Bonn, Germans have been anxious to quell worries about a newly exuberant nationalism. The capital's return was celebrated in 1995 with the spectacle of the still-unfinished Reichstag being wrapped in a gargantuan sheet by the artist Christo, like a mammoth birthday present--an action that symbolically unveiled the new republic even as it inoculated, through its own colossal irreverence, against the age-old German virus of national glory.

"German history, it concerns us all," sighs an architect in Berlin Babylon, Hubertus Siegert's documentary film of the decade-long rebuilding of Berlin. Indeed. Seat not only of the Kaiser's Reich, but of Hitler's and the Communists' too, Berlin grapples ceaselessly with its past. The city contains some of the most somber and challenging commemorative art you'll see anywhere, like the memorial to the Nazi book burnings in Bebelplatz, a white room lined with empty shelves buried beneath the square, which you peer into through a plexiglass window underfoot; or the Bernauerstrasse monument to "The Victims of Communist Tyranny," where a high steel wall preserves a section of the Todesstreife, the Death Strip that divided East and West Berlin. This is public art that seeks what Germans call an Auseinandersetzung with history: a coming-to-terms; an encounter.

As with art, so with architecture. Nowhere is as much attention paid to the hermeneutics of architecture as in Berlin--to the messages buildings send and the historical and ideological links they command. When Christo's wrappers came off the Reichstag--now the new federal Bundestag--there remained the question of whether to restore the building's original dome, destroyed in WWII. Many considered that too bombastic, an echo of the monstrous, domed Great Hall that Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, once hoped to build. And what about the traditional Prussian eagle behind the speaker's podium in the legislative chamber in Bonn--in the context of Berlin, was it perhaps too aggressive looking, too predatory, too... Prussian? Should it be redesigned? New Yorker writer Jane Kramer has written of Berlin's "architectural anguish," its struggle with the aesthetics of German power; the city ties itself in knots, Kramer observed, "looking for Hitler in the details." Imagine Americans agonizing over whether building a porch with white columns celebrates slavery, and you get an idea of how tormented Berlin is by architecture. So when the Wall came down, leaving a huge empty space smack in the center of a major city, an already unique situation took on extra significance. In what image would the New Berlin be recreated?

Siegert's Berlin Babylon lists architects in the opening credits like movie stars--Renzo Piano, Helmut Jahn, Rem Koolhaas, and others who were the major players in the city's remaking. To a clanging symphony of construction equipment, director Siegert and his photographers, Ralf Dobrick and Thomas Plenert, swing us along on a Steadicam tour of Berlin, its dingy old apartments and gleaming new office complexes. Wide-angle panoramas, aerial surveys, and time-lapse shots of construction capture the immensity of Bauplatz Berlin, from the crane-cluttered Lehrter Banhof, soon to be Europe's biggest train station, all the way to Potsdamer Platz. Once a busy commercial center--Europe's first stoplight was here--Potsdamer Platz was obliterated in WW II, then split in two by the Wall. After reunification, Sony, Daimler Benz, and other corporate giants bought up the real estate and created a hi-rise corporate, retail, and leisure fantasyland that has been condemned by many as a drastic capitulation to American urban style and values. Director Siegert joins this chorus of boos--we see Helmut Jahn at a ludicrous dedication ceremony for his mammoth Sony Center, with dancers lowering a huge wreath--and adds several more for Helmut Kohl and his commissioning of Axel Schultes' grandiose Chancellory on the Spree River.

Siegert refrains from narration, preferring to record Berlin's army of architects, developers, master planners, engineers, real estate moguls, and construction workers in their daily work talk. This method will frustrate those not well acquainted with the city's particular building controversies. For instance, we get a glimpse of the much-maligned East German Palast der Republik, now boarded up and riddled with graffiti; but Siegert doesn't fill in the fascinating battle over the fate of this particular building, the factions that have formed on every conceivable side: from those who want to tear down the eyesore and build a luxury hotel, to those who want to restore the eyesore as a testament to the horrors of Socialist aesthetics. Such are the contorted politics of Berlin architecture, when renovation can seem indistinguishable from revenge.

Partway through Berlin Babylon, Siegert gives us a five-second look--again, without comment--at the gleaming neo-Expressionist building that is arguably the most important of all Berlin's new architecture: the Jewish Museum, by Daniel Libeskind. A zig-zag structure said to represent a shattered star of David, with slit windows cut like wounds in its zinc skin, the Jewish Museum poses an intentionally shocking contrast to the neoclassical Berlin Museum next door--through which visitors actually enter, down a tunnel burrowing ominously from within the older building. Inside Libeskind's museum, asymmetrical corridors induce a surreal and claustrophobic sense of nightmare. One hallway gets smaller as you go, until finally you stand trapped and hunched; a Garden of Exile contains olive trees hidden in huge concrete planters with only the treetops visible, unreachably far overhead. Four hundred thousand people visited Libeskind's building before a single exhibit was installed--guides leading groups of Germans through the maze of tunnels and inquiring, What are you feeling now? ("Lost," a man said on the tour I took. "I don't know where to go or how to get out.") Yet another Auseinandersetzung with history.

A harrowingly metaphorical building, the Jewish Museum exemplifies the preoccupation with symbolism in Berlin's new architecture. To solve the Reichstag dome dilemma, Norman Foster ended up designing a mammoth cupola of clear glass--a structural trope for political transparency. Rooftop tour guides at the building toss off interpretive riffs on the theme of sunshine government. "Over there is the Eye of the Chancellor," they explain, pointing to a huge semicircular window in the nearby Chancellery. "Gerhard Schroder can look out and watch the Bundestag." So, too, can citizens, peering down into the legislative chamber below. Everyone is watching everyone. It is a striking feature of the capital's Weltanschauung, this earnest faith in the capacity of architecture not merely to symbolize, but somehow to guarantee, good politics.

The Bundestag dome, fitted out with concentric spiral staircases, has quickly become the city's biggest tourist attraction, and the never-ending stream of solitary, circling climbers, seen from a passing bus or boat, is a memorable and highly suggestive image of New Berlin. But what exactly does it suggest? With those double staircases ingeniously engineered to keep traffic flowing up one and down the other, is the real message that there's only one possible direction to go in? Or that once you're started, there's no turning back? And what about the distinct vibration one feels underfoot, a shakiness at the legislative center? Berlin does this to you--or rather, to itself: Its metaphors take ominous and unwonted turns; those tourists "trudging endlessly along the ramp," writes architecture critic Martin Filler in a recent New York Review of Books essay, "look like inmates in a nineteenth-century workhouse."

Berlin Babylon closes with a view of a large and empty lot halfway between the Bundestag and Potsdamer Platz. I'd seen this same lot several times during the film, and wondered why, until at last I recognized it as the site of the still-unbuilt Holocaust memorial, which has prompted the mother of all agonized Berlin design battles. Here Siegert's silence is eloquent, as if to acknowledge, amid the profusion of new buildings, of material and metaphor, the void at the center of it all. Berlin is a loud city by German standards, but one haunted by the unspeakable; and more than any particular dazzling new building, it is "the erasure and void of Berlin's Jewish life," to use Daniel Libeskind's words, that establishes it as the ultimate postmodern city--the new Berlin, a city rebuilt around an absence.