The decision to rebuild the Schloss is indeed a strange one. There are various factors at play here; why does the city without a royal family need a Schloss? As it is to be a tourist attraction, why does it need to be the exact shape, size, and finish as the original? Surely the attraction is in its absence anyway, the knowledge of the events that caused it's destruction are surely more important that the thing itself. The former site around the Schloss is not devoid of monumental historic buildings and as such the value of adding another is not immediately clear.
There is also the question of how to rebuild a history for a city that has been almost raised to the ground due to the destructive nature of its past. There are generally seen to be three options; one, rebuild, two build something that has some resemblance to the past but that is clearly a new venture, or three build something entirely new. The first option is the one that has been taken here and in doing so one is reminded of the post modern philosophical concern of living within computer generated images without any real connection to the world or to the events that took place at the site. The worry is that a museum piece is being created using an inauthentic piece of architecture and as such the connection to the world that created and destroyed the building is lost. The viewer will be instructed that anything that is lost can be rebuilt, that there need not be memorials made to the past by the absence of historical places, for they can be rebuilt in concrete and steel within (they hope) 6 years.
The implication is that the State is attempting to change the past of the city, to recover things lost by the history it has faced. The destructive nature of the events Berlin has seen mean that buildings once at the heart of the city have been destroyed. I would argue that it is important to acknowledge their loss, and to acknowledge the history rather than recreating a past that doesn't and did not exist.
Millions of visitors will flock to the site once it is complete and marvel at the feat of engineering (which is clearly nothing compared to 1443), and at the intricacy of the detail of the replica, and how much it resembles the original. The problem is that even if the Schloss still stood, it would look nothing like what is being built on Unter den Linden today; it would show the marks of a 500 year history . The stairs would be worn alongside the bannister, the doorframes would show years of knocks and scrapes, the wooden floors would be worn to a shine, the brass door knobs would be tarnished, the windows slightly opaque with age. This is the history of an old building. History is in these small details and in the knowledge that people have stood in your steps and placed their hands on the same door handle for hundreds of years. You cannot create a history to replace what has been lost; it is an abstract element that is inherent in any object that has stood a while.
It is yet to be seen how the new Schloss will sit alongside its neighbouring museums and Cathedral, however, one imagines it will look stark and unreal, lacking the gravity of history. One talks of buildings 'standing the test of time'; the Schloss did not achieve this and there is a reason why it did not. To create a perfect replica is to attempt to create a perfect past which simply did not exist. If we think of buildings as being able to see, the original Schloss saw the most important events of the twentieth century. This new Schloss has seen nothing more than a mere moment of time; young eyes in a museum piece of architecture creates a vacant building at the historical centre of Berlin. Perhaps this is fitting, in demonstrating the chaos that has surrounded the rebuilding of Berlin post-War and post-reunification. This building serves as a testament to the uncertainty of government in how to build the history of the city into the future of its urban planning.