Utopie Kulturforum

Where today there is a courtyard of the Staatsbibliothek (State Library), Albert Speer began the redesign of Berlin into the world capital “Germania”. The terrain between the Landwehr Canal and Potsdamer Platz was intended for the “Runden Platz” with concave monumental buildings.

Starting in June 1938, the first and only largely completed of those buildings was erected: The house of the Reichsfremdenverkehrsverband (Tourism Association of the German Reich). Bombed in 1942, it was to take until 1963 before the rudiments were finally removed.

Where monumental architecture was supposed to glorify the massification of the individual, democratic Germany planned an asymmetrically designed place of cultural transmission and free science: creative, inspirational architectural counter-images to the stone deserts of National Socialism. What remains is a piece of debris, barely two meters long and 80 cm high, topped with a mosaic. Whose impetus it was to preserve a relic of Nazi architecture is unknown.