The Building

Some buildings are custodians of history while others are the fruit of it. Das Haus am Werderschen Markt in Berlin, which has served as the seat of the German Foreign Office since 1999, is both of these things, as demonstrated by the unique direction of Andréas Lang. Brought to life by the many political documents and historical audio excerpts, the overlapping of events guides a visit to a building that was initially home to the Reichsbank (German central bank) and then, after the Second World War, to the Central Committee of the SED (Communist Party of East Germany). Completed in 1938 and designed by Heinrich Wolff, for its reappropriation it was redesigned by the architect Hans Kollhoff with the artist Gerhard Merz, and expanded with new buildings by the architects Thomas Müller and Ivan Reimann. The film displays the building in its latest 62,500 m2 guise. We begin in the enormous basement vaults, go along the infinite corridors and make our way to the offices, conference rooms and library on the upper floors. We wander through space and time, getting a sense of how architecture can glorify the present or erase the past.