New German Academy of Arts Lays Ghosts of Past to Rest

Germany's most prestigious arts club, whose members include Günter Grass, Harold Pinter and Sir Norman Foster, returns to the heart of Berlin tomorrow after decades of cold war division and exile.

The Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) will be officially reopened in a new glass-fronted modernist building next to Berlin's Brandenburg Gate.

The academy has attracted some of Germany's most celebrated musicians, artists and writers, including the novelists Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. But it has also been the source of controversy.

In 1933 the Nazis forced several of its members to resign - including its Jewish president, the painter Max Liebermann. The writer Hermann Mann and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz were also kicked out.

The building was later used by Hitler's architect Albert Speer to draw up plans for Germania, his grandiose Nazi world capital, and Hitler and Speer met in it frequently. In 1945 it was severely damaged when fighting engulfed Berlin.

After the war the academy was divided between east and west Berlin. The original building in Pariser Platz became part of the infamous "death strip", just behind the Berlin Wall, and was partly used by communist border guards.

Germany's president, Horst Köhler, and chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, will open the new building tomorrow in one of the country's last major acts of reunification. Many of the academy's 370 contemporary members, who include Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Bridget Riley, are expected to turn up.

"This is a new beginning. We wanted to get away from the era of Hitler and Speer with a democratic building," said an academy spokeswoman, Tatja Giele.

"It's made from glass, rather than from sandstone like the original, which some people have found controversial. But so far the reception has been extremely positive."

The four-storey building is already exhibiting several contemporary art works - including an abstract wall painting by Riley. Some of the old facades have been incorporated into the new design.

The building, by the veteran German architect Günter Behnisch, virtually brings to an end years of construction in and around Pariser Platz, at the end of Unter Den Linden, the capital's most famous avenue, and just next to the vast new Holocaust Memorial, which opened last week.

Only one building is still being constructed: the new American embassy.