It is something of a poignant moment at the famous address of 18 Tiergartenstrasse in the heart of Berlin. Eric Singh, veteran anti-apartheid campaigner and long-term resident of the old East Berlin, is shaking a friendly finger at his old adversary, former South African ambassador Donald Sole.
”Yes, we used to give you a hard time at the old embassy in Bonn,” says Singh, with a twinkle in his eye. ”We picketed you mercilessly.”
Sole smiles back. He doesn’t disagree with what Singh is saying. It is all water under the bridge.
The important thing is that we have all lived to tell the tale. And more than that, we have all lived to see the opening of a brand new South African embassy in the centre of formerly divided Berlin.
It is tale of miracle and wonder, befitting the fairy-tale transformation of both the implacable system of apartheid at the southern tip of the African continent and a German state at the heart of Europe reunited after more than 40 years of ideological confrontation, exemplified by the harsh reality of the Berlin Wall and the tragedies and indignities of the Cold War.
Sole (father of intrepid Mail & Guardian investigative journalist Sam Sole, as it happens) was apartheid South Africa’s ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1977 — he left to take up Pik Botha’s former post at the South African embassy in Washington.
With typically diplomatic aplomb, he sidesteps the awkward question of where he stood regarding apartheid. He was a professional diplomat, he says, representing his country wherever his country chose to place him.
There is too much champagne and bonhomie going on to press the point. It is smiles all round for the opening of the new South African embassy on a sunny, wintry November day in the new Berlin, and Sole and his wife are there to celebrate what is a victory for them as much as for the rest of South Africa, and indeed for the reunited republic of Germany.
Sole’s vision, after all, back in the dark days of east-west, north-south, black-white confrontation, is a significant part of what has enabled us all to be here for this groundbreaking occasion.
By the time Sole took up his post as ambassador to Germany, Berlin had long ceased to be the capital city of the country. The aftermath of World War II had seen the division of the country, and the East, champion of the cause of worldwide socialist revolution, had seized the capital city for itself.
West Germany, licking its capitalist wounds, established a new capital city in Bonn. West Berlin, isolated and surrounded by the infamous Berlin Wall, remained a distant beacon of ”freedom” for the West.
South Africa, with the Anglo-Boer South African War not long behind it, had decided to establish a legation to Adolph Hitler’s Germany and bought the property at Tiergartenstrasse, in the heart of the fashionable embassy district, in 1934.
Then came World War II. The sedate mansions that housed the embassy were not exempt from the allied bombings that brought Germany’s fascist rulers to their knees. By the end of the war in 1945 they were smouldering ruins.
All could have been forgotten in the twinkling of an eye. The division of the world between East and West seemed to be a permanent condition by the time Sole was appointed ambassador to West Germany — as did the intractable condition of apartheid, the system he effectively represented.
In 1970, a year into his term as ambassador, the West German government approached Sole with a request to repurchase the land on which the former embassy in Berlin had stood. After all, what was South Africa going to do in the foreseeable future with a piece of wasteland inhabited by bombed out buildings? Why not surrender it to the heroic occupants of West Berlin?
For some reason Sole refused, and persuaded his government back home in Pretoria to hold on to the property.
”I believed that one day there would be a reunification of Germany,” he says, ”and that it would be important for South Africa to have an established diplomatic presence at the heart of it, where we had always been.”
In the back of his mind was also the possibility that South Africa’s presence would not necessarily be representative of the conflictual entity that it was at the time. Things would surely come right back home, as they inevitably would in Germany.
So he arranged to lease the land to the West German government for the nominal amount of one Deutchmark a year. And in this way the New South Africa, when it finally came along, was still the proud owner of prime land in the heart of Berlin when the New Germany, in its turn, came into being.
It is on this prime piece of land that the new South African embassy, the first of its kind to be built anywhere in the world, is now standing.
Berlin is now a thrusting, thriving city at the heart of Europe’s new renaissance. You can barely see any sign of the old wall, and have to dig deep into its innards, penetrate its poorest and most remote suburbs, to see the grey life that lay behind it. There is no more East and West — only one Berlin. And it is a city at the cutting edge of the New Modernism.
Berlin today is what the world is going to look like tomorrow.
It is tempting to think that the new South African embassy in Berlin is also made of the stuff that South Africa will be built of in the future.
In the early 1990s, when all the world was young again, four young South African architects came together in an unlikely alliance.
Ghandi Maseko, struggle son of struggle parents, had just completed his architectural studies in the historic city of Weimar, deep in East Germany, and was hanging out in West Berlin in anticipation of returning home to the South Africa from which he had been exiled for many years.
Luyanda Mpahlwa had just completed his studies under unlikely circumstances. He had started out at the University of Natal (where he says he failed his first year dismally) and had then been rescued, in the ironic way that the struggle against apartheid rescued you, when he was arrested just ahead of his final examinations on suspicion of being part of a terrorist cell.
The apartheid government could not pin anything specific on him, but wanted him to give evidence against some of his comrades — including the recently beleaguered Bulelani Ngcuka.
When Mpahlwa refused to spill the beans about his buddies, he was slung into jail on Robben Island for the next five years. In that famous university of the struggle, he badgered the authorities of the time until they allowed him study privileges that enabled him to complete the theoretical phase of his first degree.
When he was finally released, he obtained a scholarship to pursue further studies at the Technical University in what was then West Berlin. He soon became a star student.
Alun Samuels is a white boy who grew up in a cloud of innocence in the Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville. He began by studying electrical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand (at which he says he was also a dismal failure) and was scratching his head about what to do next when he found himself conscripted into the apartheid army to go and fight ”terrorists in the north”.
Boot camp in Kimberley proved to be a wake up call. He quickly learned that he was being trained to fight in an unjust war to defend an unjust system. He deserted and made his way on foot across the border to neighbouring Botswana, where he threw himself at the mercy of the African National Congress.
The ANC sent him to a camp in Tanzania, where, after two years, he was told he had been awarded a scholarship to study architecture in Germany. He found himself in Dresden in the isolated East, but persevered and gained his degree with flying colours.
Mpheti Morojele had been at Waterford College in Swaziland with Ghandi Maseko, and had gone on to study architecture at the then predominantly white University of Cape Town (where, in contrast to the others, he says, he always passed with flying colours.)
After graduating in 1990 he went on to do his masters at the University of London and then returned to South Africa to teach and to start an architectural practice.
This band of brothers was attending a South African embassy party in Bonn, some time in the early 1990s, and happened to hear that the soon-to-be-formed, first-ever democratic South African government was looking at putting out tenders for the design of the country’s new embassy on the piece of ground that it had come to own by default in Berlin.
They leapt at the opportunity, and in spite of their inevitable weaknesses (”Have you ever designed an embassy before?” ”No. But think about it: has Nelson Mandela ever been a president before? Give us a chance!”), they somehow prevailed.
It took a number of years of setbacks and false starts, but in the end they were able to make their vision of a dignified embassy, free of the frills of the past and filled with the textures of the present and the future, come into being.
Today their achievement glows at the heart of Berlin’s once-and-future embassy row — between the Indian embassy and the yet-to-be-constructed embassy of Turkey.
South Africa has stolen a march, is ahead of the game, and can thank these enterprising young architects for the existence of a tall, sedate building that holds its own in the modernistic architecture of the new Berlin.
It did not take fake Ndebele wall paintings or folksy thatched roofs to make the point. The textures of South African granite and sandstone, the insertion of an African sense of light and air, and small, intimate touches of wood and iron are enough to make the point that this is a modern embassy, representing a modern country in a modern age.
For both Germany and South Africa, the new chancery at 18 Tiergartenstrasse represents a pinnacle of hope for two countries at the cutting edge of transformation.