When I first came to Berlin in the late 1990s, Potsdamer Platz was a huge construction site with a bright red Infobox proudly presenting the future. I remember when the Sony Center opened on June 14, 2000, exactly 25 years ago, featuring not only that sail roof, but an underground cineplex with movies in English – a rare treat at the time.
Not everyone was so excited. I recall a grumpy old West Berlin architect scoffing, “In 25 years, they’ll be tearing this all down again.” In a sense he was wrong; nothing has been torn down. But in another sense, he nailed it: just a few decades after opening, the biggest complexes needed expensive makeovers.
Potsdamer Platz has not grown into Berliners’ hearts. Taz has called it a “drafty, barren place” and a “Potemkin village”. The Tagesspiegel even asked: “Should we just tear it down?”
Berliners had hoped to get back to the pulsing nightlife of the 1920s: Haus Vaterland alone had half a dozen themed restaurants that could host up to 8,000 people at a time. Instead, we got office buildings and eerily empty malls. What went wrong?
Rebrandings
Of course, it’s not like Potsdamer Platz is empty – 100,000 people pass through every day. But these are mostly office workers (people paid to be there) and tourists drawn by the Sony Center’s still-impressive roof (people who don’t know better). When the workday ends, only tumbleweeds roam the streets. Honestly, when was the last time you went there to hang out?
Part of this is bad luck: the new Potsdamer Platz was conceived around shopping malls and movie theatres, just a few years before such industries collapsed due to online shopping and streaming. By now, the eight-screen Cinestar multiplex below the Sony Center, as well as Berlin’s only proper IMAX cinema, plus the Arsenal art theatre have all closed their doors, robbing the Berlinale of its focal point.
Anneke Hasenritter of Oxford Properties, the Canadian pension fund that took over the property in 2017, reminds us that the Sony Center – now called the Center am Potsdamer Platz – “was always 80% office space”. At the moment, Deutsche Bahn, Motorola and many other large corporations work there. A new master plan aims to reconfigure the space for these workers.
“What do people need so they enjoy coming into the office?” Hasenritter asks. “Community spaces where they can work together, and a wide range of amenities.” She shows us through a new lobby full of luscious plants and monkey sculptures. In the open spaces between the buildings, there is wild greenery and a fitness class in progress.
The old IMAX is getting converted into one of those generic international food courts that are supposed to convey uniqueness, but are strikingly similar in every European city. The underground tunnel to the train station, which once housed small shops, now has a flashy purple bike garage. But entertainment still has its place: Hasenritter talks about plans to rent out the old basement cineplex for multimedia exhibitions or perhaps indoor bouldering.
Across the road, the mall once called Potsdamer Platz Arkaden has been rechristened The Playce. The number and usefulness of shops has dropped dramatically; inside, you’ll find another one of those food courts.
Glorious past
Potsdamer Platz was once Europe’s busiest square, and there were so many cars that Germany’s first traffic light was installed here in 1924. It was not only home to the city’s full spectrum of nightlife, but also to shopping temples like the Wertheim department store and swanky hotels like Esplanade.
But all this was heavily damaged during World War II, and soon after, Potsdamer Platz was divided between East and West. One office tower that more or less survived the bombing was Columbushaus. By 1950, it had been partially restored to make room for an East German department store and a police station. Then, during the uprising of June 17, 1953, it too was burned down and abandoned.
When the Wall was built in 1961, all the ruins were cleared away. One triangular area known as the Lenné Dreieck, just off Tiergarten, was in a strange legal no man’s land: it was on the Western side of the Wall, despite belonging to the German Democratic Republic. This is because the border zigzagged endlessly, but the Wall needed to be as straight as possible.
This empty lot was ignored for decades. But in May 1988, a few hundred punks occupied the Lenné Triangle, and West Berlin police were not allowed to cross the border, while East Berlin police had no reason to. A tiny pocket of anarchy, a punk utopia. On July 1, however, the patch of land was sold to the Federal Republic, and police could finally enter, while the punks fled over the Wall – the only such mass escape from West to East! Now, the triangle houses Henriette-Herz-Park, plus a few hotels.
When the Wall came down, this overgrown wasteland of Potsdamer Platz became a new kind of utopia, but this time, it was property developers who could do anything they wanted. First, Potsdamer Platz housed a Polenmarkt – a Polish flea market where merchants from the impoverished East sold everything and anything. An elevated magnetic train called the M-Bahn started gliding through the area in 1989, but closed within two years. Soon, big corporations developed plans to build a new centre of Berlin.
“From an urban planning perspective, Potsdamer Platz is a catastrophe,” said Steffen de Rudder of Bauhaus University Weimar in 2019. Today, he sounds a bit more conciliatory, recalling the discussions about the empty field in the 1990s: “It was an extremely difficult task, given so many hopes and expectations.” The area had been full of trash – and now it was supposed to recall the Roaring Twenties, with a square named after Marlene Dietrich. Some of Europe’s best architects, including Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the stars behind Paris’ Centre Pompidou, signed on.
But it just didn’t work. Despite all the money and talent, Potsdamer Platz became “hermetically sealed” from its neighbours, de Rudder says. Thousands of people go to the Staatsbibliothek, or Stabi, every day, yet Potsdamer Platz blocks itself off from the library with a fortress-like wall. And when people pour out of a concert at the Philharmonie, nothing draws them to the Center am Potsdamer Platz next door. There’s also no good way to reach the two gorgeous parks on either side, Tiergarten and Gleisdreieck. Plus, the two huge roads crosscutting Potsdamer Platz prevent anything like flanieren.
What happened? Again, de Rudder avoids any arrogance: “It’s hard to say why something went wrong – it’s much easier to find an explanation when something in urban planning goes right, like the wonderful Gleisdreieck Park.” But one thing that several critics have pointed out is that almost no one lives at Potsdamer Platz. Less than 20% of the total floor space is dedicated to apartments, de Rudder explains. Center am Potsdamer Platz, for example, has just 67 rental apartments and 134 condos, all at astronomical prices.
“Cities become vital via mixture,” de Rudder says. “A city must be mixed socially and functionally.” A successful quarter is one where people live, shop, work, take their kids to school and seek out entertainment. But no one was thinking about this back in the 1990s, when Berlin had such a surplus of housing that thousands of units in East Berlin were actually torn down.
Is there any way to save Potsdamer Platz? There’s hardly any space to add apartments. The cold dictates of capitalist investment offer little possibility that affordable housing, independent cafés, or cultural spaces will ever find a home there. “For me, Potsdamer Platz is done,” de Rudder says. Echoing the German writer Alfred Döblin, he does offer some comfort. “But hey, Berlin is big.”
