All Politics Is Local: National Architecture and Urban Identity in Bonn in the 1960s

            A small city of students and pensioners prior to 1949, Bonn became perhaps the most peculiar European capital city of the twentieth century. Central to Bonn’s transformation into the provisional capital of West Germany was a conflict between the federal government’s attempts to meet an insatiable need for space, often in blatant contravention of Bonn’s nominally provisional status as the capital, and the municipal government’s efforts to retain control over its urban space and conserve its traditional identity. This paper explores a key turning point in Bonn’s postwar urban development, the planning and construction of a 30-story office tower, completed in 1969, for Bundestag members.

            Egon Eiermann, the architect, pleaded with federal officials not to build it. Wolfgang Hesse, Bonn’s city manager, demanded 250 million Deutschmarks just to hold negotiations over the state’s use of the land. Bundestag President Eugen Gerstenmaier barely managed a majority to allocate the funds for its construction. The resulting modernist, glass and steel monolith dominated the city’s skyline and immediately became a symbol onto which its occupants and the public could project their perceptions of a national identity. For Bonn’s residents, the structure represented a betrayal by the federal government and the disfigurement of the Rhine landscape.

            Critics and historians have alternately disparaged Bonn’s federal architecture as overly demure and demonstrative of the government’s lack of will and praised it as the deliberate embodiment of West German democratic ideals. This paper shows that, while Bonn’s federal buildings are the direct result of the kinds of vigorous debate and compromise that are hallmarks of democratic societies, to the extent that Bonn represents a national identity, that identity has a decidedly local cast. Ultimately, the story of the tower’s development calls into question the relationship between capital cities and national identities disconnected from their local contexts.