Everybody knows that New York City is called the Big Apple. The City of Love? Also clear. Paris. And the Eternal City is so obviously Rome that it hardly dignifies a trivia question.

What, some might ask, should Berlin's nickname be?

In the 1990's, it seemed, the city was lobbying for the title of "City of Modern Architecture." New buildings were rapidly popping up around the city and each new architectural highlight trumped its predecessor. Frank Gehry's bank building, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, Sir Norman Foster's Reichstag dome and I.M. Pei's addition to the German History Museum all hinted at a German capital looking to its future rather than its past.

The most recent phase of construction in Berlin, however, indicates the pendulum is swinging back toward the city's past. A rash of new monuments is either under construction in the center of Berlin or set to break ground soon. Many of them, including the massive "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" -- with its 2,700 stele on a plot of land the size of three football fields just west of the Brandenburg Gate -- are focused on the crimes of the Nazis during World War II. But in recent months, interest in memorializing the Berlin Wall and the city's division during the Cold War has risen as well. This month, the German parliament, the Bundestag, will likely debate a proposal backed by almost 200 representatives to construct a monument to the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin.

But with the "City of Monuments" seemingly taking the lead in the nickname competition, some are beginning to ask if so many monuments are really necessary? Existing monuments, such as the memorial to the victims of World War II in the Neue Wache on Berlin's graceful boulevard Unter den Linden, the book burning monument at Humboldt University, and the Monument for Murdered Parliamentarians in front of the German parliament, are enough say others.

"A non-strategy is being followed at the moment," says Peter Reichel, author of a book about World War II monuments in Germany called Politik mit der Erinnerung ("The Politics of Memory"). "Nobody knows where it is leading and nobody wants to talk about where it is going."

A make-shift memorial

The most recent proposal, for a wall monument at the Brandenburg Gate, comes partially as a result of a private memorial built up by the Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie and the museum's director, Alexandra Hildebrandt. At the end of October and to great media attention, Hildebrandt erected a 200-meter long portion of the wall and 1,065 wooden crosses dedicated to those who died trying to escape from the East to the West. Because the site, located at the site of the former Checkpoint Charlie wall crossing, is on land leased through the end of 2004, Hildebrandt may soon have to remove her private memorial. But the popularity of the site has demonstrated that there is a great interest in a centrally located wall memorial.

"We can argue about the appropriateness of the crosses at Checkpoint Charlie," said co-initiator of the Brandenburg Gate memorial Franziska Eichstaedt-Bohlig to Die Welt newspaper last week, "but the interest showed that there is a need for such a place in Berlin."

The proposal comes as the most recent in an ongoing string of new monuments being planned for the German capital. In addition to the Jewish monument, which will be officially opened on May 10, construction on a monument to the half-million Sinti and Roma murdered in the Holocaust will likely begin this year across the street from the Reichstag. A memorial to homosexuals murdered by the Nazis -- to be placed across the street from the Jewish memorial near Potsdamer Platz -- has been approved and is in the planning stages. And the so-called "Topography of Terror" -- an empty city block where the Gestapo headquarters once stood and which now hosts an outdoor exhibit -- is also soon to get a new interpretive center. In addition, other Holocaust victim groups -- including those persecuted for deserting Hitler's Wehrmacht, a group representing victims of euthanasia, and the Jehovah's Witnesses -- have likewise indicated interest in a monument.

Berlin's house of horrors?

In short, the compact central area of Berlin centered on the Brandenburg Gate between Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, and the ultra-modern Potsdamer Platz is threatening to become a House of Horrors, with memorial after memorial dedicated to the unspeakable crimes of the 20th century.

It wasn't supposed to come to this. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who oversaw German reunification in 1990, had hoped that a central monument at the eastern end of Unter den Linden would cover the need for a Berlin World War II memorial. The site, called the Neue Wache, had served as a monument to German soldiers following World War I and was also an important site for Nazi Berlin. Kohl, however, failed to get all of the victim groups on board and, in the end, inaugurated a modest monument dedicated to all victims of World War II, a formulation which also includes German soldiers and Nazi dead.

"My biggest gripe with Helmut Kohl -- well, one of the biggest -- is the way he handled (Berlin's) monuments," says Reichel. "He made two huge mistakes. One was visiting the SS-cemetery at Bitburg. And the second was his pushing through of the Neue Wache as a Holocaust monument without talking to all of the groups involved and without developing a consensus behind it. If he had made more careful preparations, we might have been able to avoid the current situation. But he was like an a elephant in a china shop. I am sure it could have been an important monument."

Indeed, in the discussions that led to the construction of the Jewish memorial in Berlin, many had hoped that it would solve the convoluted symbolism of the Neue Wache. There were calls early on to make the site into a memorial dedicated to all Holocaust victims rather than just to the Jews. Lea Rosh, the primary mover and shaker behind the Jewish monument, however, convinced Berlin that the Jews, as the primary target of the Nazi killing machine, deserved their own monument. She has also been active in promoting the creation of separate monuments for the other victim groups, particularly the Sinti-Roma monument.

German Minister of Culture Christina Weiss likewise supports the creation of one monument per victim group. "Those who criticize that the German capital is creating a 'Memorial Trail,'" she told this reporter recently, "fail to recognize the degree to which minorities were affected by the systematic crimes of the National Socialists. We are not inventing new sites of memory; rather they are marked out by Germany's history. Each and every victim group has the right to their own memory."

That conclusion, seemingly, is one the German parliament is now applying to the memorializing of the Berlin Wall. Since the fall of the Wall, the city has been criticized for erecting its Wall documentation center in the not-so-central Bernauer Strasse. What a potential Wall memorial at the Brandenburg Gate might look like is, for now, unclear. But the idea's promoters have said they are not looking to create something comparable with the size of the Jewish memorial. Rather, they want to find a dignified site that fits in with the city's other monuments.