BERLIN – Former President George H.W. Bush inaugurated the new U.S. Embassy in Germany at its pre-World War II site on Friday, a return that he said symbolized the fulfillment of “a great and noble dream” of European freedom and unity.
Bush, who was president when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and supported German reunification less than a year later, spoke alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel at the site in front of the Brandenburg Gate – the symbol of Germany’s postwar division and then of its unification.
The embassy completes the post-reunification rebuilding of the Pariser Platz, the square in front of the gate, which once stood in the fortified no man’s land behind the Berlin Wall.
“Today, we fit one of the last pieces of a historic puzzle into place,” Bush said. “The reality that it lays bare – a new American Embassy in the capital of a unified Germany, fitting in the heart of a Europe that is indeed whole and free and at peace, is in fact a great and noble dream realized.”
“To my fellow Americans, I simply say: Welcome home,” Bush added in a speech after he and Ambassador William Timken used golden scissors to cut a red, white and blue ribbon outside the embassy in a Fourth of July ceremony.
The site of the modern limestone-fronted building has a turbulent history.
By the time U.S. diplomats moved into the embassy in April 1939, Washington had already recalled its chief envoy to protest the Nazis’ anti-Semitic pogrom the previous year. The remaining diplomats left in 1941 after Germany declared war on the United States.
The building was heavily damaged during World War II and later razed by communist East Germany.
For nearly three decades, the site stood in East Germany’s heavily fortified border zone. Just across the wall, Bush’s predecessor, Ronald Reagan, in 1987 delivered his famous speech in which he implored then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “open this gate” and “tear down this wall.”
Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, said the embassy’s return to the Brandenburg Gate was a “special and moving moment” for Germans.