The air feels damp and cold, and it smells a little musty. But the way Ulrike Jacobi's eyes are shining at the sight of walls over four meters (13 feet) thick and thousands of wooden stakes, you'd think she was in Shangri-la.
"Quite a work of art," gushes project leader Jacobi, from the German Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning. Then she leads the way into another undergound vault and points out a hole in the wall. "Bats fly through there," she says into the darkness, explaining that these chambers are known as "nursery roosts" because they provide a quiet refuge from male bats for roosting females.
Right now, those bats -- and their home in central Berlin -- are a major topic of conversation in Monika Grütters' office on the eighth floor of the Chancellery. The new government commissioner for culture and the media, Grütters has realized to her dismay that they're impeding one of the main projects she'll be overseeing during her years in office: The site where they've taken up residence, once occupied by a statue of Kaiser Wilhelm, is now earmarked for Germany's new monument to freedom and unity, a memorial to the country's 1990 reunification.
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