99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-36- Super Bon Bonn

Episode Date: September 16, 2011

Cities are pretty robust organisms, they tend to survive even when put under tremendous stress and strain. Local industries rise and fall, people immigrate and emigrate, but most of these changes happen over decades. What happens to a city when … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Trying to succinctly sum up the character or purpose of any city in the world is probably a fruitless exercise. But for much of its history, Bond Germany was particularly... The first word that comes to mind is quiet.

Unremarkable. Bond is just a quiet town. Kind of hard to pin down. We got hills on one side, the river on the other side. Generally, it's just a sleepy, quiet, you know, even quaint little town. That's Sarouc Farr of R, and he works for the German International Broadcaster, Deutsche Vela, and he lives in Bonn. Bonn has just over 300,000 people, it's on the Rhine River, so it was strategically

important during World War II. And let's not forget Beethoven was born there in 1770. But he took off in his early 20s for the burgeoning musical capital of Vienna. Not much happened in Bonn until the end of World War II, when Bonn was named as the Provisional Capital of West Germany, it became a city with a purpose. It was the government's seat. And then, a half a century later, the country was reunified, the Berlin Wall came down, and Germany decided to move the capital away from Bonn and back to Berlin. Now, over a decade after its move, Bonn is trying to forge its own identity.

This is what Saroosa Street sounds like at 9 a.m. on a weekday. He actually lives in what was once the old diplomatic quarter of Bonn, former home to many embassies and ambassadors' residences. It's pretty quiet. It's pretty quiet. But it turns out that for newcomers like me, it's not immediately obvious where the embassies used to be.

But according to Mikhail Venshal, a local journalist who grew up in the neighborhood and wrote a book about Bond's diplomatic history, there is one thing that you can look for to clue you in as to where the embassies used to be. Flagpole. Flagpole. Flagpole. Flagpole. Flagpole.

Flagpole. With no flag this house was for example the embassy of Lebanon michael had a tough time remembering the english word flagpole but today when you see a flag a pole

oh my god when you see a flagpole without flag i think an 80 80% sign for former Amazon. For former Amazon. Because you have no other signs. Michele explained to me that half a century before World War II, this part of bond was founded as a small summer retreat

for the wealthy. In fact, this specific part of bond is is known as Badgotisberg, and this specific part of Badgotisberg is called the Philanthiertel, the Villa Quarter. Down closer to the Rhine, Michal pointed out the former British ambassador's residence. When the Union Jack was flying over this building, you said there was a certain feeling about it. Yes, it was a feeling of you know, Union Jack, stars and stripes, a feeling of the end of World War II. So peace basically. Peace, no peace. Something important. Union Jack here on the Rhine, it was a symbol.

It was a symbol. American forces took Bohn in 1945, not long before the end of the war. After the war ended, Germany was carved up into various zones of occupation, and Bohn was firmly in the British zone. In 1949, Bohn became the provisional capital of West Germany. The choice was made mainly due to the advocacy of West Germany's first chancellor, Conrad Adenauer. He was a former mayor of Cologne and a native of the area. But Bond was also an appealing choice as the capital city because it was a small town

relatively intact, and it didn't really have a character. Choosing Bon was choosing provisionality. Berlin was out of the question, of course, the Nazis had set up shop there before. Frankfurt and Hamburg were the wrong choice because they were too big and would have felt too permanent. Bon was a clean slate. Little Sleepy Bon was still the subject of some ridicule. A 1986 Los Angeles Times article, Profiling Bond, had a few good one-line zingers about the city. Ignat's Kieshla, the Minister of Agriculture, is fond of saying that the best thing about Bond

is the train to Munich. Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt called Bond a collection of crippled villages. He spent most weekends in his native Hamburg. An American correspondent based in Bond said it was half the size of a Chicago cemetery and twice his dead. But you shouldn't feel too bad for bond. It struck it big is the capital. Bond got tons of cash.

The city built a subway, an international school, an opera house, all of this in a city of just around 300,000 people. But then, the impossible happened. The Cold War ended. Germany reunified and the Berlin Wall came down. And the German parliament voted to move the capital back to Berlin. A June of 91 when the decision failed to go to Berlin. Here in Bonnet was a shock for all people. We said each other, all the things were left to Berlin,

and Bonnet was terrible this moment. In other words, everyone thought Bonn would lose its mojo at best and at worst would become a ghost town. The parliament decided that by 1999, nearly all government ministries would move back to Berlin, and that of course included the embassies, as all the action was now in Berlin. Today the former French embassy in Bonn is the physical embodiment of all the fears that people had about what Bonn would be like once the capital moved away. A ghost town. Do you see this building?

It was the embassy of France. And France sold it... It looks terrible. It's a ruin. Yeah, it looks like there's graffiti, there's broken glass, there's there's vines growing everywhere. Just to further paint the image of this old French embassy today, there are like 30-foot high bushes in the front of the building, there's broken glass and graffiti everywhere. You can see all of this on Google Street View. And you might think that this would be the case for all of the former embassies in Bonn. But actually, what happened was that some of the embassies

got turned into consulates. Others got sold and turned it to private homes. And many actually still have empty flag poles out front. But the important thing is that Bonn is not a ghost town. It turns out that moving the capital to Berlin might just be the best thing for the city And 20 years later we see that it was a very good decision and Uberschriftner, the newspapers, boom-town-born. It was an historical change.

This house, this buildings were occupied by many countries about 30, 40, 50 years. The country's left and the houses, buildings, offices became new owners. The first thing that the owners did was to renovate this houses. It's wonderful. And today, what makes Bonn so attractive for lots of people, including newly privatized major companies like Deutsche Post and Deutsche Telekom, is that all of that infrastructure that bond lucked into getting when it was the capital of West Germany, the subway, the international school, you know, that all that stuff, that's what now makes bond such a nice

place to live. And unlike the old and new capital of Berlin, bond has had both job and population growth over the last 10 years. Becoming the capital put bond on the map. But today to quote bond's own mayor from an article in the New York Times, bond is no longer a boring bureaucrat city. It's now able to figure out what it wants to be on its own. bureaucrat city. It's now able to figure out what it wants to be on its own. And maybe someday we'll even take down all those empty flag pools. Or how about this?

Put up a flag. The German flag is nice. The city of Bonn has a nice flag too. There's a strong lion and a cross. Someone call him like small the law of legends. 99% in visible was produced this week by Sirou Svaravar and me Roman Mars, with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW-91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. To find out more, go to the website. It's 99%Invisible.org. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, It's wonderful. you