It was the place where communist bigwigs tried to shed their drab bureaucratic image; where they got off their leatherette seats and waltzed the night away with the dumpy wives of Soviet generals: East Germany’s Palace of the Republic.

Now the palace is no more. In its stead, it was announced yesterday, there will be an extravagant Baroque-style building, harking back to the Prussian days, to be designed by Francesco Stella, the Italian architect. But Berliners are unhappy, some with the destruction of the East German relic, others with the €500 million (£420 million) cost of rebuilding the residence of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

The decision to replace an asbestos-poisoned “palace” with a new, but old-looking one was supposed to symbolise the triumph of democracy over communism. The political debate, however, has been messy.

Demolition teams were sawing rusty girders and uprooting the last cables yesterday, like gardeners hacking at weeds. Watched by a dozen tearful Berliners, a bulldozer attacked a solitary stairwell. “They’re just wiping out our past,” complained Conny Henkel, 43, a care worker who grew up in the old communist republic.

The building, nicknamed Erich’s Lamp Shop for the hundreds of Bohemian glass chandeliers that glittered above the head of the communist chief Erich Honecker and his cronies, has now become a gaping cavity at the heart of urban Berlin.

Arguments over the design are likely to rage until the German parliament finally gives the go-ahead for the project and earmarks the funds early next year. Then it will be left to the Berliners to devise another cheeky nickname for the building that has the temerity to replace Erich’s Lamp Shop.

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