Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Bush won't have to testify in whistle-blower case
A Democratic judge rules Texas governor will not have to give a deposition in the so-called Formaldegate case.
By Robert Bryce
[08/31/99]

It's about character, stupid
Why the public needs to know whether, when and why George W. Bush used drugs.
By Fred Branfman
[08/31/99]

Don't ask, he'll tell
An openly gay Mormon Republican flouts the Clinton administration's gays-in-the-military policy.
By Amy Silverman
[08/30/99]

Raising the stakes
California Democrats and Republicans unite to support a constitutional amendment allowing Indian tribes to run casinos.
By Claudia Buck
[08/30/99]

With conservatives like these, who needs liberals?
By signing on to the war on Hollywood, the right has embraced another bad idea from the left.
By David Horowitz
[08/30/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Germans believe that only Americans would be so bold as to ask Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen and the city's governing senate to even consider such a drastic accommodation. The American plan calls for cutting into Tiergarten, the Central Park of Berlin, as well as slicing into prestigious Pariser Platz on one side and the grounds of the new Holocaust Museum on the other. It would also require the Germans to move a street in the symmetrical heart of Berlin away from the embassy and its security zone.

"If the German chancellor wanted to go there, with his office, we would say, 'No chance,'" said Volker Kaehne, a deputy mayor of Berlin.

The tiff stems from worries about the security of American embassies in the wake of the embassy bombings in Africa last August. A State Department panel chaired by Adm. William Crowe, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was charged with drawing up guidelines on better protecting U.S. diplomatic installations abroad. The panel came up with an $11.4 billion plan that will upgrade 90 percent of U.S. embassies over the next 10 years, making the U.S. look like a latter-day Roman empire.

The first priority was to set each embassy back 100 feet from the street or sidewalk. In most cases around the world, this entails rerouting streets, changing traffic patterns, buying up adjacent property and demolishing it, and tearing up massive tracts of land. The second priority was to install blast-proof walls in each facility, bomb detection units, metal detectors, X-ray equipment, closed-circuit cameras and at least one full armored unit outside. Four thousand new local guards were hired, and another 200 State Department security personnel were dispatched, temporarily, to embassies around the world.

The temporary U.S. Embassy in Berlin, just across Under den Linden from the Russian Embassy, shows just how alluring such features can be. The building is surrounded by double-ringed barbed-wire coiling looking as haphazardly placed as if it had just been unwound outside a Beirut airport. Inside the perimeter stand two armored German police units toting submachine guns and firing off stern looks to passersby.

But the proposed new embassy megasite, adjacent to the Brandenberg Gate, is much more unpopular than the existing site. The American argument has hinged on its historical claim to much of the land in question. Americans vacated the site after Adolf Hitler declared war in 1941, leaving behind a huge warning to bombers that this was U.S.-owned land. Thus, the Americans contend, the are only reclaiming land that was theirs before Hitler's campaign began. Many believe, however, that the historical claim has been greatly overstated.

Cultural historian Michael Cullen, an American who has lived in and studied Berlin since the 1960s, has uncovered documents showing that the Americans occupied the controversial site on Pariser Platz for only two years -- and that the U.S. Embassy has relocated frequently since John Quincy Adams came to Berlin as minister to Prussia in 1797.

"Americans purchased the site on Pariser Platz in September 1931," said Cullen. But "they only moved into the site on April 1, 1939."

A fire gutted the building on Pariser Platz that the Americans were negotiating to buy. The good news was the Germans were forced to shave $90,000 off the price. The bad news was the Depression-era Congress refused to appropriate funds to build a new embassy on the site, leaving the U.S. mission to operate out of several buildings in the Tiergarten.

Few find the American historical claim to the site convincing. And they ask: Would Americans consider shaving 100 feet off the small island on which the Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor to make a foreign power feel better about security? Or maybe trimming the Washington Mall? Not likely.

Next page | "There is no plan B"