The exhibition organisers assume that a majority of its visitors will be Berliners, because the exhibition prompts them to remember what it was like to visit the building when it was still standing. It asks questions about the facilities available, and the sports and leisure activities it supported. (Besides the Volksstimme, there were several auditoria, art galleries, restaurants and beerhalls; a theatre; a cinema; a bowling alley; a swimming pool; a billiards hall; a skating rink; and a gymnasium.) The exhibition in fact asks a question about practically every object on show, which might seem to the non-German like a stereotypically German way to proceed. It even includes as a major part of the display a range of written responses to its leading questions. These vary between the bluntly dismissive (‘I never went near the place’) and the fondly nostalgic.

It swiftly becomes clear that the balance is tipped towards the latter – towards the camaraderie between work colleagues, between members of the various sports clubs and between the young people negotiating a place within the social culture that was fostered by the DDR. The Palace of the Republic operated as a laboratory for growing this culture within a controlled environment, and so the visitors’ comments offer a revealing array of responses to this control, ranging from nostalgic acquiescence to vehement and bitter rejection. The physical impedimenta – articles of furniture, the cutlery and crockery of the 1970s, waiters’ uniforms, office equipment – all now seem fatally compromised by a desire to look and feel cautiously futuristic that of course dates more rapidly than anything else. But it also lends a quaintness to this postwar culture of the dialectic that for many – perhaps most – was felt to be uncompromising, or worse.

Post-war communism produced a range of different ‘palaces of the people’ across Eastern Europe and Eurasia – with several aiming to beat the American skyscraper at its own game (see Warsaw’s Palace of Culture). East Germany chose to construct a gleaming submarine of a building, a vessel which they submerged in the consciousness of the German people for better and for worse. The responses in the visitors’ book show that for some this stealth vehicle is still down there, waiting in the depths as if ready to surface when the moment is right. (Like the air in a submarine, if you recirculate the same ideas enough times, everything and everyone starts to heat up.) The moment doesn’t however feel at all right when you step out into the street and walk east towards the other government buildings of the DDR. Soon enough, you are traversing the Nikolaiviertel, the reconstructed medieval square around the Nikolaikirche. Close to this is the prototype gastropub ‘Am Nussbaum’, which really does look like it hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages. And inside there are the same ageing proprietors I remember from the 1990s. There is however a spectacular difference in the form of a tall Black waitress who is now the main public-facing member of staff. I wonder how long she will last – every time she enters the kitchen she is barked at, and every time she comes out her eyes are raised to heaven. I find my own eyebrows lifting in sympathy. And they lift even higher when I am told that card payments are not accepted – it’s cash only. Within these four walls a genuine Cold War economy stays firmly rooted, and I wonder how far those roots extend…

Ever distrustful of metaphors, the authorities (I am no longer sure which authorities – state, city, district?) are busy uprooting the bushes that used to line the southward route of the Mühlendamm. Shutting you off from all sense of your surroundings in both space and time is a plywood tunnel leading from the Mühlendamm to the northern end of Leipziger Straße. You enter this, having left the meticulous reconstruction that is the Nikolaiviertel, and emerge from it to the very active deconstruction of the 1960s apartment blocks west of Leipziger Straße. On your right hand side, a wrecking ball is smashing the outsize concrete slabs of the remaining blocks, while straight ahead meagre scatterings of earth cover a series of small rubble mounds.
A middle-aged woman is using one of these as a podium for her poodle whose fluffy legs have been sprayed a bright pink. The dog is coaxed to stay put while she takes a rapid-fire series of portrait snaps. You can tell this has happened before – the dog is wearing a small tartan saddle, and an air of total capitulation.

Meanwhile the sun is going down over the Potsdamer Platz – so completely obliterated during the Second World War, and so memorably captured in Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire, where it is the setting for the scene in which an old man drifts in bewilderment among the piles of rubble, muttering ‘I cannot find the Potsdamer Platz, I cannot find the Potsdamer Platz’. There is only one area in central East Berlin which remains in a ruined state. It is the former city block between Leipziger Straße and Zimmerstraße whose western side is bounded by Wilhelmstraße. This wasteland is the mooring place for the Welt hot air balloon, which was once an indicator of cosmopolitanism after the fall of the Berlin Wall – and the Wall ran straight down one side of this block. The balloon is still airborne, but not exactly buoyant – more like a reminder of times when any idea might float – when the future would be very different; whereas now Eastern Germany’s vision of the future is starting to resemble a projection from the deep past. It is after all a balloon – a container for hot air – and you get the feeling that it must be slowly, invisibly, deflating. And its legerity, its most encouraging feature, is rendered totally absurd by the building opposite – the old East German House of Ministries that fills the entire block on the other side of Wilhelmstrasse and runs for a hundred yards at least down Leipziger Straße. This was the fortress of the old East German civil service – the functionaries of the state apparatus for whom the Palace of the Republic was no more than window dressing – until 1990, when it all ended. And before even the DDR was founded, this building was the Reich Aviation Ministry – seven storeys high, with seven kilometres of corridors, 2,500 rooms and 4,000 windows – all now empty. The exhausted wasteland in front of its façade is now its mirror image – and the aimless, sauntering balloon now seems like pure satire, as it fools around in front of what was once the nerve centre of the Luftwaffe. And then I remembered – Hermann Goering was head of the Luftwaffe. He adored animals. He regarded Jews as less than human but he pampered an entire menagerie. He also fancied himself as an elegant style guru, although his own style was pure kitsch. You could actually imagine him spraying the legs of a poodle pink. Suddenly it was all like a fairground mirror reflection of the history of Berlin, complete with mini-barrage balloon. I cannot find the Potsdamer Platz. But nothing stands out more from the debris than two pairs of pink legs.