67 years later, we’re back

67 years later, we’re back

Scripps Howard News Service: Another chapter of World War II will close next Tuesday when the U.S. embassy in Berlin moves back to its pre-war site on the Pariser Platz adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate. It took long enough.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The capital moved from Bonn back to Berlin in 1999. But between Congress niggling about the funds and disputes between U.S. security types and Berlin, which didn’t want a grim fortress of the kind our embassies have become, brooding over one of the city’s great public spaces, construction didn’t start until 2004. The nearby French and British embassies are already in business.

The new embassy will open for business the day after Memorial Day and be formally dedicated on July 4th, rather fittingly since our first envoy to Berlin was John Quincy Adams whose father was in large part responsible for Independence Day.

The original building, the slightly forbidding Blucher Palace, had a short and unhappy life as our embassy. We bought the building in 1930, it caught fire in 1931 and wasn’t occupied again until 1939. And it never housed a full-fledged U.S. ambassador because President Roosevelt recalled ours in 1938 in protest of the Kristallnacht. The embassy staff left with the declaration of war in 1941.

The Pariser Platz was once one of the great crossroads of the world and will be again. The U.S. embassy should be there and not hunkered down in some remote but presumably secure location.