The Reichstag building had been scrubbed, renovated, crowned with a glass dome. The smell was of new carpet, fresh paint, and polished wood. On April 19, 1999, the deputies filed in. The sound was a low murmur of conversation, the shuffle of papers, the click of heels on stone that had known other boots. The chamber was modern, airy, democratic in its new design. But the walls, stripped back to their original brick in places, still bore the scars of Red Army graffiti from 1945. The ghosts were not exorcised; they were put on display.
The move from Bonn was not merely logistical. It was existential. Bonn was provisional, a post-war promise to be temporary. Berlin was historical, layered, heavy. To sit in Berlin was to accept the full narrative—the imperial ambition, the Weimar fragility, the Nazi horror, the Cold War division. It was to legislate in a building that had burned, been besieged, and lain fallow for decades. The debate that day was procedural. The significance was in the act of sitting down. Each deputy felt the chill of the stone, saw the preserved Cyrillic scrawls in their peripheral vision. They were not just moving a government. They were attempting to write a new chapter in a very old, and very fraught, book. The precision of the return—the specific date, the voted-upon motion—was a controlled attempt to master a chaotic history. It was an agreement to work within the haunted house.