I briefly visited the site of the Reichstag in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. I was shocked when a German citizen grabbed me by the shoulders and blurted: "Do you see this building? This is where all of Germany will be ruled from!" I silently retreated in disbelief, but the emotion of that moment has remained etched in my memory.

That was about 10 years ago. Today the Reichstag is the centerpiece of the new Berlin. It sets an architectural standard that should last well into the 21st century. The original building was torched in 1933.

According to Newsweek (April 19), the building's reopening in April of this year signaled "the coming of the Berlin Republic." Ironically the architect is British, Sir Norman Foster.

In 1995, when the conceptual artist Christo covered this building with more than a million square feet of silver-colored fabric and transformed the Reichstag into a stupendous gift box, it was described "as a powerful metaphor for the country's transition from West Germany's Bonn Republic to reunited Germany's Berlin Republic."

As an American observer expressed it: "If the architecture of the Reichstag represents a kind of Prussian hardness—Germany as it was—the wrapped version can be seen almost as an ideal symbol of the new Germany struggling to emerge from unification." GN