GERMANY:Hailed as a triumph of planning a decade ago, Potsdamer Platz is a dispiriting place, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin
THE OLD man in the 1987 Wim Wenders film Wings of Desirestumbles around a rubble and weed strewn landscape with a confused look on his face.
"But where is Potsdamer Platz?" exclaims the actor, Curt Bois, a German-Jewish actor who in real life fled the Nazis in the 1930s. The Potsdamer Platz he remembered, wiped from the map by war, was once Berlin's answer to Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, a chaotic amusement mile of theatres, cafes and nightclubs.
After a half-century gap, the new Potsdamer Platz was unveiled to the world a decade ago and hailed by many as an unprecedented triumph, the planning equivalent of a heart transplant that had given the city back its beat.
Others dismissed it as a corporate sell-out, a foreign body that would never become part of the city around it. So who was right? Potsdamer Platz was never a platz or plaza in the classical sense. It was where Reichsstrasse Number 1, connecting Paris with St Petersburg, crossed the main drag leading to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag.
Pre-war footage shows the platz clogged with horse-drawn carts, countless cars and over 600 trams, all steered by a policeman in a lookout tower which also housed the first electric traffic light in Europe.
Throngs of pedestrians spilled out from the U-Bahn and from the nearby main Anhalter train station, Europe's largest, on their way to one of the variety theatres or cafes.
"The streams of traffic came from all sides," noted writer Paul Westheim in 1929. "The trams, the cars, the rushing passers-by whipping by to their destination. How does it all keep moving, twisting and turning, ebbing and flowing and never tiring . . . ?"
Just two decades later, with the flick of a pen, Potsdamer Platz fell silent and became the middle of nowhere, the widest sectoral divide between the Allied and Soviet sectors of post-war Berlin and the chilly epicentre of the Cold War.
For decades, two ruined buildings and the occasional flock of sheep were all that could be spotted on the platz by hordes of western tourists peeking over the Berlin Wall.
Then, on a chilly night in 1989, Potsdamer Platz re-entered the history books as the spot where the wall was first breached. Television teams set up at the Brandenburg Gate down the road had to hurry down with their cameras.
The government of the reunited capital, overwhelmed by the reconstruction task facing them, took the hugely controversial decision to sell off the entire site, at a knock-down price, to Daimler-Benz and Sony.
Amid the crane thicket of what would become Europe's largest building site, landmark buildings by the world's leading architects slowly took shape.
Hans Kollhoff created a widely admired 101m-high red brick nod to New York's Flatiron building. Across the street, Sony hired German star architect Helmut Jahn to create a complex of steel and glass dismissed by one critic as a "cross between an oil refinery and a circus".
For years after its pompous opening in 1998, the platz struggled to attract tenants and customers as puzzled managers wondered why their plans hadn't come to life as they had expected.
A few hours' walk around shows why. By day, there is a pleasant buzz, but by night Potsdamer Platz is a dispiriting place of over-priced chain restaurants and soulless bars.
After several failed nightclubs, the only entertainment options are the cinema, a plastic musical in the 2,000-seat theatre or the casino.
Bored tourists loiter around a Dunkin' Donuts. Those who stray from the mall-like safety into upper Potsdamer Strasse are picked off by prostitutes.
A planned, corporate Potsdamer Platz was always going to come off second best to the unique, unplanned pre-war atmosphere. But Berlin city sociologist Hartmut Häussermann criticises the end result as a "city simulation".
"Lots of people like this sort of thing, I mean look at Las Vegas," he told Berlin radio. "Potsdamer Platz really could be anywhere. It doesn't live from the city's citizens." In the new Potsdamer Platz, Berlin has gained one of the largest self-contained tourist amusement strips in Europe, attracting 100,000 people a day at weekends.
"I don't ever go to Potsdamer Platz but, thankfully, all the tourists do and leave us in peace," remarked Berliner Jan Rützel drily.
Ten years on, Berlin's Potsdamer Platz is like a gleaming artificial hip that is slowly, painfully growing into the flesh of the surrounding city.
That's a more successful development than many predicted a decade ago but, 21 years after Curt Bois abandoned his search for the old Potsdamer Platz, it would be asking a lot to expect Berliners to come to love their real-life SimCity.