The Most Desirable Room in Berlin

SPD and AfD in a tug-of-war over square footage in the halls of power

The Otto Wels Room in the Bundestag

A strange battle was lost and won in political Berlin this week. At face value, it seemed a trivial matter. Two parties in the German parliament were arguing over meeting space. They both wanted to secure Room 3-S-001 as a regular home for their parliamentary groups.

The resulting wranglings could have been funny, but then, German politics rarely is. In a way only Germany can, this logistical dispute escalated into a battle over the country’s political soul. Before you could say ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, one of the parliamentarians had the great-niece of a Nazi opponent on the phone for moral support. This tug-of-war isn’t really about meeting space. It’s about power and history.

But let’s start from the top. The two parties laying claim to the room in question are the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). They happen to be the oldest and newest political parties in the German parliament respectively, and this is what this struggle is really about: seismic power shifts and their physical manifestation as square footage in the halls of power.

Since Room 3-S-001 has existed, it has been the home of the parliamentary SPD. It is 462 square metres large, pretty much the same as the meeting room of the centre-right Union (CDU/CSU) which has 463 square metres. Then there are two smaller rooms, a bit over half that size each, for other political parties.

There were good reasons for this setup. After German reunification, a decision was made to move the German parliament (formerly called Reichstag, now Bundestag) back to Berlin where the Reichstag building was restored and redesigned by Norman Foster.

Disused Reichstag in West Berlin, 1982. Img: Monster4711, CC0

Foster’s team gutted the place, which had never been fully restored since the Reichstag Fire of 1933. While Foster was in many ways sympathetic to the history of the Reichstag, he also wanted it to work as a modern hub of politics and administration. So the inside now contains the sorts of corridors and meeting rooms you would expect from a newly built public structure.

The meeting spaces were designed to meet the political landscape as Foster found it at the time. Foster — while British and used to a political system that doesn’t suddenly change — understood that the German system, with its strong element of proportional representation, would never produce a pure two-party system. But he had every reason to believe that what he saw then was stable: two main parties, the SPD and the Union, flanked by two smaller parties: the Greens and the liberal FDP. His meeting room setup mirrored the political realities: two big spaces, two smaller ones.

There would have been little argument over who gets which room when the German political family moved house from Bonn to Berlin. Their new accommodation had practically been purpose-built to match their needs.

The problem is that those needs have changed now. The FDP has been kicked out and is currently roaming the political world, homeless, bruised and disorientated. The AfD has not just moved in but become the second largest party – for the first time in (West) German post-war history that’s now not the SPD or the Union. At the same time, it’s an unwelcome inhabitant as far as the other residents are concerned. Meanwhile, the SPD is the smallest it has been since the 1800s. The far-left Die Linke, which had almost been declared dead, has become a sizeable political force.

The upshot of all of this is that the political distribution of seats in the Bundestag now doesn’t match the available meeting rooms anymore. Two big rooms and two small rooms now have to be divvied up between five political parties.

On paper, the SPD should give up Room 3-S-001. It’s the second largest in the house and the second largest party is now the AfD, which has 151 MPs compared to the SPD’s 120. That is exactly the line of argument with which the AfD has tried to claim the space. The SPD has tried to find arguments to stay in a room that is now too big for them: they have to be next door to the Union since they are in a coalition with them. Also, they need more space than just for their MPs because they are in government, so often meet with other MPs and their staff.

Dirk Wiese from the SPD was so keen to make the point that this argument was fought out on a purely ‘pragmatic-factual’ basis that he repeated the phrase six times in a public statement. But he and everyone else knows that this isn’t about practicalities. For the SPD to move out of Room 3-S-001 would be to gaze into the abyss.

Moving into the room the FDP has just had to vacate would be a blow the SPD is just not ready to take. The FDP, a party that had been central to post-war politics in its role as kingmaker, has lost its way and is struggling to find a path back. It’s a cautionary tale for the SPD whose fall is longer but also much deeper if it can’t turn things around. If the SPD moved into the FDP’s room, it would feel like walking in dead men’s shoes.

But the cut runs even deeper than that for the SPD. When it moved into 3-S-001, it named the meeting place ‘Otto Wels Room’. Otto Wels was chairman of the SPD during the Weimar Republic. Like all opponents of the Nazi Party, he found himself in mortal danger in 1933. Hitler had become Chancellor and his followers began to crack down hard on political enemies. The communist party (KPD) was wiped out swiftly through incarceration, torture and murder of its members and MPs. Many SPD members faced the same fate. Wels was also threatened with arrest after legislation following the Reichstag Fire had given the Nazis extensive powers to crack down on leftwing opponents.

Otto Wels, 1924.

But Wels didn’t buckle under the pressure. He bravely stood up to Hitler at a time when few dared to do so. It is hard today to imagine the frenzy that ripped through Germany at the beginning 1933. ‘Wild’ concentration camps sprang up everywhere. The SA simply used basements or requisitioned buildings to set up torture and interrogation chambers at will. It was terrifying and drove many opponents into hiding or exile.

It was in this atmosphere that the infamous Enabling Act was put to the Reichstag to give Hitler dictatorial powers. The KPD had been eradicated and politicians of other parties agreed to it, partially because they hated democracy, partially because they feared to become the next target of the brutal Nazi thugs that roamed the streets. The big question was what the SPD would do. All eyes were on Wels.

It took a huge amount of courage to oppose Hitler at that moment and double so to do it publically. Wels volunteered to speak up on behalf of his party. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, ‘this is about the party and the honour of the party.’

On 23 March 1933, he delivered a powerful speech in parliament and declared that all those present in his entire parliamentary group would vote against the Enabling Act. ‘Freedom and life can be taken from us, but not our honour,’ Wels said. ‘No Enabling Act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible.’

For the SPD to hand over a room to the AfD that carries Otto Wels’s name isn’t about the number of chairs or how many minutes it takes to walk over to the coalition MPs. To the SPD, it would feel like a betrayal of their own history. Wiese found this confirmed when Tatjana Wels, a great-niece of Otto Wels, called to grant her moral support to the matter as if rectitude can be passed on through genes and telephone lines.

There is no getting away from the fact that there is a lot of symbolism and history wrapped up here. When the SPD, moved back into the Reichstag building in the 1990s, it was the only political party that moved back in. The other parties were constructs of the post-war world, especially the dominant centre-right CDU, which emerged as a pan-denominational Christian party after decades of conflict between the German Protestant majority and the Catholic minority. For the CDU, the move to Berlin wasn’t a homecoming. For the SPD, Germany’s oldest political party, it was.

With that came both positive and painful institutional memories, baked into the very foundations of the Reichstag building. The SPD was a forceful, emerging entity when the place was first built in the 1880s and 1890s as a powerful symbol of the confidence with which parliamentary democracy held its own against pushback from the old elites. By 1912, the SPD had become the largest political party in parliament but was given no governmental offices or executive powers.

Reichstag in 1895.

This changed after the war when the Kaiser had been forced to abdicate and a new, ultra-democratic constitution was established with the SPD as its driving force. The Presidency, an office created to replace the defunct monarchy as head of state, was filled by SPD man Friedrich Ebert before he died in office in 1925 and was replaced by Paul von Hindenburg. The democratic experiment of the Weimar Republic, conceived and run in an SPD-dominated context, ended in catastrophe. Many within the SPD see that as part of their legacy, one strongly connected to the Reichstag building and the name of Otto Wels.

It’s hard to tell to what extent the decision-makers took this into account when they solved the room dispute in the SPD’s favour. Though the AfD vowed to challenge the decision, for now, they have to use the FDP’s old room, which is indeed rather cramped with all 151 AfD deputies in a place where previously 92 FDP ones had sat.

The decision was made by the Ältestenrat or Council of Elders, a parliamentary committee that decides procedural matters and is made up of representatives from the parliamentary groups. The AfD has 6 of 28 members and was overruled.

So, for now, the SPD gets to keep its Otto Wels Room. But this must feel like a hollow victory — quite literally as they haven’t got enough deputies to fill the room. The AfD is already joking that the SPD can use ‘half the space as a dance floor’. It’s an SPD victory on paper only, not one that can change the parliamentary arithmetic back or preserve their legacy as one of Germany’s big ‘people’s parties’. Only better politics can do that.