Berlin's city hall and Television Tower are more recent additions to the German capital than the Molkenmarkt, or 'whey market,' where archeologists have been unearthing signs of how people lived in this area since the Middle Ages.
Brick-wall remnants from medieval times, foundations of 17th-century mansions and substructure of an 1890s electricity station – these remains lie in the centre of an excavated pit in Germany’s capital. Behind them, Berlin’s city hall, restored after the Second World War, and the Television Tower, once a symbol of Communist power, form a backdrop to what was once the city’s oldest square.
The excavation at the Molkenmarkt, the largest urban archeological dig under way in Germany, is nearing completion after five years.
From the bottom of the archeological dig site, the view rolls like a layered stage set: staggered symbols from the city’s most important eras, helpfully arranged in chronological order.
Soon, construction will start to fill the 21,500 square metres with hundreds of much-needed residential units, half of which it has promised will be affordable.
But the site has become subject to heated debate, with Berliners split over what the architecture on this future site should look like.
While some groups are pushing for historic styles, others say these design requirements come at the cost of affordability – and represent an idealized version of the past.
It’s dynamic playing out across Germany, where tensions about the country’s past underlie every major building project: To what degree should its future urban fabric be modelled on its history?
The Molkenmarkt dig is the biggest urban archeological project in Germany, yielding thousands of artifacts such as these.Supplied
Molkenmarkt, or “whey market,” was named after the dairy products once traded there. Surrounded by chain-link fences and mounds of earth, it now bears little resemblance to the square it was before. And it certainly doesn’t look like the city’s medieval heart. But it was here where medieval settlers made camp on the edge of the Spree river in the 1200s.
Over the centuries, the area was filled with medieval structures, then grand mansions for the wealthy.
In the 17th century, it became a market square, and was later densely populated with housing.
Bombing during the Second World War left this area largely empty, and in the 1960s, the German Democratic Republic of East Berlin developed it as one of the city’s largest traffic junctions, with eight lanes making the area a void in the otherwise dense city.
Since 2019, the area has proved to be rich in finds. About 600,000 artifacts have been extracted from Berlin’s sandy foundations, including a plank road from the time of the first documented mention of the city from the early 1200s, medieval leather shoes, equipment from Berlin’s early adoption of electric lighting and unexploded ordnance from the war.
Few such undeveloped areas have remained, and it is the largest one, making it a choice spot for redevelopment, says Björn Zäugle, one of the archaeologists leading the dig. “It’s a good opportunity to fill the gap, make it more attractive and build homes,” he said.
In 2016, the city announced its plans to build a mixed-use development on the site, including 450 residential units.
But with excavation work a year away from completion, the appearance of the future development is still in question.
The Molkenmarkt excavation will continue for a year or so, but in the meantime, it's not yet clear what a Frankfurt architectural firm will propose to be built in this neighbourhood.ina Nieschulz/BA Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg
At the Molkenmarkt site, two approaches have been at odds.
One view contends that architecture that references a site’s historic significance will draw visitors and customers, as Berlin, like many Canadian cities, has struggled to attract commerce to its downtown core.
The Berlin state government, responsible for the site, says it does not want to build an exact recreation of the buildings previously on the site, but has called for a “current interpretation” of those styles. This could mean, for instance, basing the designs on the 19th-century residential buildings characteristic of the neighbourhood: four or five stories, a stout sloped roof, tall windows and materials, such as stone and brick.
But others, including Offene Mitte Berlin and The Berlin Platform, urban development advocacy groups, say that this type of design is more expensive to build, making it a barrier to affordable housing.
Berlin, once a city known for its cheap and abundant real estate, now has a vacancy of less than one per cent. Slow development, increased immigration to the city and rising rents are adding pressure on Berlin to keep up with new affordable units.
A 2022 competition produced two leading entries, one that embraced a historic design and one that prioritized affordability.
Instead of picking one, the city instead drew aspects from both in its creation of a framework plan adopted last year, a move seen by some as a cop-out. The plan lays out the broad expectations for the site, but not the details of building-design expectations.
In June, the Berlin government commissioned Frankfurt architectural firm Mäckler Architekten GmbH to outline the architectural design guidelines for the new neighbourhood in a manual on its behalf. That plan is expected by the end of the year, and what the firm will decide on is not yet clear.
Meanwhile, the number of houses expected seems to be shrinking. On Aug. 12, the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung reported that new city documents for the development show 137 units, not 450 as promised.
While a state representative told the Berliner Zeitung that an additional 130 could be built elsewhere on site, none appear to be currently planned.
Molkenmarkt isn’t the only contentious site in the Berlin area. Debate has also swirled around the reconstruction of the Garrison Church, a near-exact reconstruction of a 1735 building, in Potsdam, about 30 minutes away.
The original church was famously the location of a 1933 handshake between Adolf Hitler and then-Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, marking the official start of National Socialist power. Before being destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945, it featured prominently in Nazi iconography.
The building’s reconstruction – funded by the federal government – has been the subject of political debate, as the country deals with the rise of the far right, which has been associated with nationalist perspectives and a revisionist view of history.
In Germany, urban design, especially when it touches history, is often a source of controversy.
And at the Molkenmarkt, construction is due to start in 2026. Berliners have until then to grapple with what kind of architectural layer they want to add to their historic city’s legacy.
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