Ghosts of Nazism haunt corridors of German government's new home

While Bonn bubbles with anxious speculation about the outcome of September's federal election, most Berliners remain indifferent to the fates of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Social Democratic challenger, Gerhard Schroeder. Their eyes are fixed on April 1999, when the Bundestag holds its first session in the newly-renovated Reichstag building near the Brandenburg Gate.

The chancellor and most government ministries will move to Berlin a few weeks later, followed by embassies, lobbyists, journalists and the other hangers-on that make up the political establishment.

Berlin's inhabitants are convinced that the government's move will transform the city, boosting the economy and slashing the city's massive unemployment rate. After almost a decade of post-unification gloom, the city has persuaded itself that a cultural renaissance is around the corner.

If Berlin's millennial relaunch is a flop, it certainly will not be because the city has set its sights too low. The skyline has been dominated by hundreds of giant cranes throughout the 1990s as thousands of labourers, many of them from Ireland, toiled on the biggest construction project Europe has seen this century.

Moving the government from Bonn will cost a total of DM20 billion, or DM244 for every German citizen - one-third of which will be spent on building costs. But if the politicians and government officials had been allowed to have their way, the move would have cost a lot more.

Reluctant to move from Bonn in the first place, they were determined that Berlin should provide all the comforts they had become accustomed to during 40 sleepy years by the Rhine. They scornfully dismissed a suggestion by Berlin's mayor that some ministries could move into old East German government offices or complexes left empty by departing Allied and Russian troops while they were waiting for new offices to be built.

But Germany's deepening financial crisis forced a rethink, obliging the government to scrap most of its ambitious plans to recreate the historic centre of Berlin.

The chancellor will have a custom-built office a stone's throw from the Reichstag but most ministers will, initially at least, have to occupy buildings once used by the East German communists or the Nazis - or both.

The new finance ministry, for example, was built in 1935 to house Hitler's air ministry and became the East German House of Ministries after the second World War. The building gained fresh notoriety after the fall of the Berlin Wall when it became the headquarters of the Treuhand privatisation agency, which sold off most of East Germany's industry.

The Foreign Minister, Klaus Kinkel, is understood to be unhappy about his ministry moving into the old Nazi Reichsbank, which housed the East German politburo until 1990. A DM395 million facelift aims to brighten up the vast, forbidding structure so that diplomats will feel comfortable using the old Central Committee plenary hall as a conference room.

The defence ministry is one of the few departments to keep its headquarters in Bonn but it will have a Berlin office, too - in the War Ministry building used during the first and second World Wars. It was here that Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg was executed after the failure of his plot to kill Hitler on July 20th, 1944.

Most ministries will do their best to forget about the ghosts from two dictatorships that will haunt the corridors of their new homes. But the most prestigious and historic building of all, the Reichstag, will wear its troubled past on its sleeve when it reopens next year.

The British architect, Sir Norman Foster, has revolutionised the Wilhelmine building, crowning it with a transparent dome and ripping out the frumpy, post-war interior to create a new, citizen-friendly, debating chamber.

More controversially, Foster has carefully preserved the traces left on the building by Germany's ugly history, such as a piece of wall still charred after the fire in 1933 that led to Hitler's seizure of power and antiGerman graffiti scrawled by Red Army soldiers in 1945.

Some Bundestag deputies complain that there is already too much history in Berlin without excavating more and they are uneasy about having to view such unpleasant sights every day.

Berliners retort that their representatives have been out of touch for too long during their cosy sojourn in Bonn and that it is time to wake up to the reality of the past - and the present.