BERLIN (dpa) – Germany’s capital still has plenty of gaps. But one at least will soon disappear when a start is finally made on erecting a new United States embassy close to the historic Brandenburg Gate.
For more than five years, U.S. officials concerned about security issues have been squabbling with the Berlin authorities over the precise location of the embassy near the Pariser Platz.
At one stage, there was even talk of the U.S. administration abandoning its plans to build on its former pre-war site.
Instead, there was talk of settling for a new location near the Alexanderplatz or out at the former U.S. Army headquarters on the Clay Allee in the west of the city.
At the core of the problem was nervousness after the horrific bombings of the U.S.embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania in the late 1990s.
The U.S. subsequently insisted on tough new security regulations, including a 100-foot security zone being provided around all its embassies.
In Berlin, that would have meant altering the flow of vehicles and pedestrians around the city’s famous Pariser Platz, causing traffic dislocation in one of the city’s biggest tourist areas.
Berlin refused to give in to the U.S.demands. Now, after a compromise agreement worked out between Washington and Berlin, the U.S. embassy will after all be on its old pre-World War II site. Designed by the U.S. architecture practice Moore Roble Yudell, the building will have a reduced security zone and the existing street will be shifted only eight metres sideways.
It’s all been made possible, according to Daniel R.Coats, the U.S. ambassador, by new techniques in architectural design which allow for better integrated security in modern buildings
As he stood under a canvas awning on the embassy site with Berlin’s governing mayor on Thursday, Coats explained that while some modifications to the original design had been made, its “essential integrity” was being maintained.
Coats said a compromise had been made possible through officials representing the Holocaust Memorial site agreeing to cede a small piece of land to the U.S., which meant they now had more “set back” space for the new embassy along the Behrenstrasse.
Work on the embassy is to go ahead in the summer of 2003, but the building will not be completed until the end of 2006.
The United States is the last of the three wartime Western allies to build a new embassy in Berlin. Britain’s new embassy, also built on its former pre-war site on the nearby Wilhelmstrasse, has been up and running for two years now.
The new French embassy on the Pariser Platz is also now nearing completion. A century ago the Pariser Platz used to be known as “the Kaiser’s reception room”. It lies on the edge of the sprawling Tiergarten, once a royal hunting ground.
Currently there are some 350 American diplomats working in Berlin. They operate out of a building close to the Unten den Linden, which formerly served as the United States embassy to communist East Germany in the Cold War years.
