Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506190025
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BERLIN LENGTH: Medium
An idea that the artist Christo has nurtured for 24 years began to take shape Saturday as climbers wrestled silvery fabric into folds on Germany's once and future parliament, the Reichstag.
The first protest was wrapped, too.
Across the Spree River, white cloth was tied over a half-size replica of a Soviet tank. Protesters said it was undignified to wrap the Reichstag, and were angry that the art extravaganza began on the anniversary of a 1953 revolt in East Berlin that communist tanks crushed, killing many people.
By Tuesday, if blustery weather doesn't delay the operation, the 101-year-old Reichstag should be wrapped in 120,000 square yards of lustrous silver fabric and tied with 9.75 miles of bright blue rope.
``It's a visual work of beauty,'' the Bulgarian-born Christo said Friday night during a television interview. ``It will show the volume and shape of the Reichstag.''
Neither Christo nor his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who shares equal credit for the work, would talk about the sensitive political side of the wrap.
The couple took out a loan to finance the $11 million project and plan to pay it back entirely from sales of Christo's drawings and Reichstag-related works.
Christo had pressed to wrap the Reichstag since 1971, at a time when it housed a museum devoted to Germany's tragic search for democracy. Prewar democracy was extinguished in January 1933, when a fire at the Reichstag gave Hitler a pretext to impose dictatorship.
After the postwar division of Germany, the Reichstag stood forlornly on the West Berlin side of the Berlin Wall, barely 10 yards from the Cold War symbol.
The building was a ``sleeping beauty'' awakened by the 1989 opening of the Wall and Germany's unification in 1990, Christo says. It will be Germany's parliament again when the government moves from Bonn to Berlin by 2000.
A vote in parliament last year finally approved the wrapping over opposition by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who thought it undignified.
Thousands of people ignored a chilly drizzle to watch from the Reichstag lawn as climbers - 90 of them are working on the project - dangled from ropes to place silvery fabric on the top stories of the building's 136-foot-tall corner towers.
The wrapping will stay in place until July 6, and is expected to draw an estimated three million visitors.
Protest organizer Siegmar Faust thought Christo was misusing an important German anniversary and abusing ``the only democratic symbol we have.''
``I can't imagine the Americans letting someone wrap the White House,'' Faust said. ``This doesn't make the Reichstag laughable, it makes our political leaders laughable.''
by CNB