Palast der Republik (Berlin) - Under demolition (July, 2007)

The Palast der Republik (1973-76) was the seat of the East German Parliament until 1990. In 2003, thirteen years after reunification, the German Parliament voted to demolish the building.


Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings, listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size – the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lock-keeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden – are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze in wonder, a kind of wonder which itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. A. Bell (London, 2001; Paperback, 2002), pp. 23-24.


Brokedown Palast (Ole Tangen Jr.) - Berlin Erases its Communist Past. This is the story of the Palast der Republik in Berlin.

The Berlin Wall - A Surviving Section (October, 2005)

Toby as a victim of the historical virus could not look at the town without seeing it historically, so to speak - layer after layer of history laid up in slices, embodied in its architecture. There was no corner of the place which did not conjure up for him delicious reveries, vivid associations.
Laurence Durrell, Monsieur (London, 1974, 1984 ed.), p. 83.