Perusing the cold meat counter in the Galeries Lafayette on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse, Rahel Schorn was taken by the idea that she may one day come here to pore over books instead. “The location is very central,” said the business student, shopping for groceries with her mother. “And the building is large, light and airy.”
Under proposals by Berlin’s culture senator, Joe Chialo, the French department store might yet be turned into the city’s first central library, something decision-makers have argued about for more than 100 years and German librarians insist is “the chance of a century”.
Chialo said this week he was pushing forward with plans for Tishman Speyer, the US owners of Quartier 207 – the building in which Lafayette currently rents a five-floor 10,000 sq metre space – to sell it to the city. Chialo has even put a price tag on a potential sale and the cost of turning it into a library space, telling the culture committee of Berlin’s House of Representatives that the project would require €589m (£510m).
The French chain store’s rental agreement runs out at the end of 2024. Its Paris owners have reportedly been contemplating a withdrawal from the Berlin capital after 28 years, referring to increasingly challenging retail conditions. Chialo says a library could be up and running in the building, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, by 2026.
Berlin’s MPs appeared to be in a state of shock at the suggestion. The Social Democrats, the coalition partners of Chialo’s Christian Democrats, are among the most sceptical, citing doubts over the condition of the building, its suitability as a library and, above all, about the cost for which they say there is no room in the budget.
But the nation’s librarians have joined the call for the project to go ahead and appear to be almost unanimous in their desire for it to happen.
“Berlin has been shilly shallying about having one proper central and regional library (ZLB) for no less than 120 years,” said Regina Kittler, the head of the Berlin branch of the German Library Association in a passionate article in the Berliner Morgenpost daily.
Kittler said that two sites – one in former east Berlin, and one in the former west – where the city keeps its library stock are “bursting at the seams and ramshackle”. Flooding and overheating are among the problems that have added to their plight in recent years. She, like the 700 other librarian signatories to a letter addressed to Berlin’s parliamentarians, called the prospect to finally merge the two sites into one large and central location, “the chance of a century”.
In the 33 years since reunification, many a location has been mooted as a suitable space, only to be subsequently dismissed. Thousands of euros have been spent on studies into the economic feasibility of turning either the severely run down and currently defunct 1970’s International Congress Centre, or the vast Tempelhof airport, which ceased operating in 2008, into a ZLB. Neither, it was concluded, was suitable.
Volker Heller, director of the ZLB foundation, speaking to the culture committee on Monday, said the Friedrichstrasse building, which is considered one of Berlin’s post-wall construction highlights, with a vertical garden on its glassy facade by the Parisian botanist Patrick Blanc, was “perfect – designed as if for a library”.
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The largely glass and metal structure draws in the natural light, has a circular, open-plan layout and an abundance of lifts and escalators.
Kittler has said it has the potential to be “Berlin’s new living room”, a meeting point to reinvigorate a somewhat lifeless quarter dominated by offices and luxury fashion stores, and give the city, which still suffers from the scars of division, “a proper centre, with a space that has communal rather than commercial interests at its heart”.
Picking up some prosciutto in the delicatessen, Schorn said she looked forward to being able to study there. “It’s got everything going for it. But I guess they just have to find the money,” she said.
Emblazoned on the wall in the delicatessen, a quotation in French by the 19th-century literary giant Oscar Wilde might be considered a good omen. “I have the simplest tastes,” it reads. “I am always satisfied with the best.”