Yes, it is appalling, must be the ugliest parliament in the western world, the kind of soulless modernist architecture only a rootless people wanting to forget its own history would think of building and which increasingly fills up cities all across western civilization.
The Bundestag, the plenary chamber is right under the giant glass dome that sprouts from the beautiful old neoclassical building like some pus-filled boil or cancerous growth. The eagle is its only redeeming quality:
The Bundestag when it was still the Reichstag, during the Weimar Republic:
Reichstag after the Reichstag fire and the rise of the National Socialists, Kroll opera house:
Compare with France:
The French National Assembly in the Palais Bourbon, resplendent neoclassicism with Corinthian columns outside and Ionic columns inside, plenty of tradition and history (note the imperial eagle standards on the rostrum):
The French Senate in the Palais du Luxembourg, the statues are of great French 16th to 18th century statesmen:
The French Congress in Louis XIV's Château de Versailles:
Merkel's office also looks like the headquarters of some tasteless corporate technocrat, which is fitting I guess. Suitably, the impressionist portrait is of Konrad Adenauer, Germany's first chancellor after the war.
Macron's baroque office, the Salon Doré (the Golden Room), in the Palais de l'Élysée:
Der Führer's tasteful office in Speer's Neue Reichskanzlei in Stripped Classicism (statues in the courtyard by Breker), regrettably destroyed in the war.
