Sun Is Setting on a Temple to Aviation

The bigger boys usually wrested away the prizes from Klaus Eisermann in those meager times after the Third Reich fell. But the Allies kept coming, piercing the Soviet blockade of Berlin with C-47 Dakotas stuffed with food, cement, medicine, socks, whatever would fit in their cargo bays.

Eisermann, too, kept returning to Tempelhof, where today, keys jangling on his hip, hair bristly and white, he can lead you past burned walls and down hidden corridors.

He's curt when asked the question he's been asked too many times.

"No," says Eisermann, "this airport will never close."

The Berlin Airport Authority wants to shut down Tempelhof in 2006. Tegel International Airport has handled most of the city's commercial traffic for decades, and the planned expansion of Berlin's third airport, at Schoenefeld, would make Tempelhof and its small band of budget carriers obsolete. Lawsuits seeking to stop the expansion have won a reprieve for Tempelhof, but this monument to a bewildering era is running out of time.

One of the largest buildings in the world, Tempelhof lost nearly $20 million last year, serving only 441,580 of the city's 14.8 million airline passengers. Less than 40% of its nearly 300,000 square yards of usable space is rented.

But Tempelhof is grand -- a polished yet fading icon whose tarmac unfurls in the middle of a city that has grown around it. You can reach it by foot or by bike. It is as accessible as it is monstrous, a blueprint from the Third Reich's unrealized architectural dream of recasting Berlin in a fascist motif befitting the capital of a new empire.

"They wanted to symbolize the rising German state," says Eisermann, standing amid the pillars and windows of the airport's 360-foot-long main hall.

His eyes arc toward the ceiling. "Imagine you are in the 1930s," he says. "The idea was to create a temple of aviation in those times, when flying was an adventure. You walked into this imposing building and looked out the enormous windows at the other end and saw the sky and the planes."