Potsdamer Platz

In the centre of a bustling intersection at the end of Leipziger Straße, in the heart of Berlin's commercial district, stands a traffic light. This traffic light is dark green and 20 ft in height, it is five sided and clocked. Lights flash in regular intervals from red to green to red to green not unlike the continuous ticking of the five clocks in unison. In the centre of the street stands a traffic light. In any other city this would be a rather mundane observation worthy of mention in only the most obscure and specialised of blogs, but this is not any city and likewise this is no normal traffic light. 

In 1924 the exact same model was the first electronic traffic light in Europe, installed here at what was the busiest intersection in the four million strong metropolis of 1920s Berlin. The traffic light was a symbol of a city surging forward into modernity, restless and eager to consume the gadgets of the future. 

Potsdamer Platz in the 1920s at the centre of the busy metropolis life of Berlin

The traffic light stands today as testament to its prized position in days gone by.

Potsdamer Platz of the 1920s was a testament to Berlin's growth, exuberance, modernity and unbridled capitalism that lay at the beating heart of the industrial powerhouse. Since 1900 the city had doubled its population and was now the third largest city in the world after New York and London. Cabarets, loose sexuality, drinking houses, shops, theatres, hotels, peepshows, department stores and dance halls lined the five streets that intersected below the metronomic traffic light presiding over it all. Berlin was big and brash and nothing was bigger and brasher than Potsdamer Platz. 

Writing in 1919, during the failed Spartacist uprising by communists attempting to seize control of Germany, a diarist Count Harry Kessler noted that the failed revolution hardly made a ripple of disturbance on the day to day humdrum of the city: 

It is as if an elephant is stabbed with a penknife. It shakes itself and strides on as if nothing had happened.

Count Henry Kessler 

By the 1930s however, Potsdamer Platz was changing in a way that mirrored the rest of the Nazi ruled Germany; fun was postponed, the unfettered delights of the cabaret halted and hotels became in some cases palaces of torture and in others residences of the National Socialists and their allies. 

Skipping forward, to quote Terminator, Berlin's "Judgement Day" came during World War II, in which 90% of the city's buildings were destroyed and only rubble left to form the broken clues of what had come before. By 1945 Potsdamer Platz stood as the desolate dividing line between East (soviet influenced, communist controlled GDR Berlin) and West (US influenced, democratic capitalist FDR Berlin). After this Potsdamer Platz became famous for being a wasteland at the centre of the divided European city. Western look out platforms offered the opportunity to gaze out over this desolation without a traffic light in sight. 

Post war Potsdamer Platz with the ruin of Haus Vaterland (a pleasure house of the 1920s) in the background.

Now, 25 years on from the fall of the wall, presiding metronomically over a very different cliental, stands a traffic light. The same model as stood here nearly a century ago. Today though, it has no function, the traffic is instead controlled by multiple other electronic manifestations of modernity to fulfil the stop/go purpose. Rather this dark green, five sided traffic light turning red to green to red to green stands as a point of reference for the hoards of tourists below to gawp at and imagine what had been before. It is a museum exhibit, a monument, an artefact of a time gone by - relatively unnoticed by the hundreds of people who pass under it daily. 

Back are the hotels, back are the dance halls (albeit rarely frequented by Berliners, but rather the corporate visitors who refuse to stray further than a few hundred metres from their hotels), back are the cafes (though more Starbucks than Cafe Josty), back are the restaurants (though sadly lacking the sumptuous temptations of the flapper generation) and back are the visitors. But Potsdamer Platz today doesn't feel like a place built for Berliners, rather for those who wish to come and recognise a piece of their own hyper modern cities. Tall buildings tower over cinemas and glitzy walkways vacated by those new to or visiting the capital of reunited Germany.

Potsdamer Platz 2012 with the lonely traffic light in the distance. 

2015 Potsdamer Platz begs the question, who is this complex for? What is it supposed to represent if indeed it can be successfully argued that it doesn't represent Berlin as it is today? Is it perhaps instead for a Berlin that is yet to exist? A commercially thriving and financially confident city at the head of a powerful and rich country. Is it a testament, not to the past, but to what this city will one day become? Personally I hope not. Walking through Potsdamer Platz today, you could be walking through anywhere else in the world, Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, New york or Dubai. The streams of Berliners expected to embrace this city centre, created in less than a decade, to live and thus breathe life into the area, have not come. Flats built to accommodate long term leases lie vacant in their sky high towers. Commercial spaces that were pegged for local businesses and small retailers have instead been taken over by multinationals creating yet another branch of their global franchisees.  In a city that offers a million different spaces that uniquely supply a space to drink coffee, read, write, chat, and eat the odd muffin, why travel to an urban moonscape to have a Starbucks frappuccino? 

This blog so often pays homage to the past, and that strongly reflects my own biases. I am a student, and devotee of historical study and thus find it fascinating to write about. However, when discussing Berlin, the obvious character in the play of the past is what on earth this all means for the future. Change is all around us here in Berlin - the city is not the same as it was five years ago let alone 25 years ago when the wall came down. But that does not always mean for the worse. I will not go into my own views on where this city is going (perhaps stay tuned for that), but I will say that I don't think it is shaping up to be the vision constructed by Renzo Piano and Helmut Jahn for their respective Daimler Quarter and Sony Centre. Rather Potsdamer Platz today begs us to ask what we want for the future of this city: an organically changing organism defined by current economic, social and political conditions as well as the people who choose to come and live here? Or rather a commercially dictated clone of numerous other nondescript metropoli scattered across the globe?  

So I will leave you there this time on that rather questioning of notes - for I have no answers. For me, Potsdamer Platz in 2015 throws up more questions than it answers: how are cities made? Can you build a city centre in less than a decade? Who are cities made for: the people who live, love, breath and work there or rather the companies that feed off their consumeristic tendencies? And finally, how will this growing metropolis once again define its position in world history in the coming years? Will Berlin yet again be steamrolling ahead in terms of social, economic and political movements, or will it finally sit on the scrap heap of history underneath that same redundant traffic light? 

Till next time....