It turned out, however, that the architects would not be allowed complete free rein. Stung by criticism that they were letting “a few fat cats’ checkbooks” determine the fate of the Potsdamer Platz (and, by extension, the rest of Berlin-Mitte), city officials decided that there needed to be a unified developmental plan for the square. Volker Hassemer, senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection, orchestrated a juried competition that in October 1991 awarded first prize to a plan submitted by two architects from Munich. It called for a continuation of Berlin’s traditional height limit of thirty meters (Berlin was not to be “Frankfurtized” by a bunch of skyscrapers); the salvage of remaining historic structures; and a “mixed use” development that balanced retail, entertainment, office, and residential needs. The idea here was to ensure that the new Potsdamer Platz, like the Potsdamer Platz of old, functioned as a diverse and “living” part of the city.
One might question, of course, whether metropolitan liveliness could be planned at all. In the immediate context, however, the problem was how to reconcile the planners’ ideals with those of the developers and architects. There ensued a wearisome series of negotiations that set the tone, and many of the standards, for the continuing debate on the development of the city. The municipal government’s side in these negotiations was articulated by its new building commissioner, Hans Stimmann, who one commentator likened to Baron Haussmann, the rebuilder of Paris under Napoleon III. Those who believed that Berlin must continue to develop along traditional lines—whatever they were—could not have had a more forceful advocate. The stocky, white-haired Stimmann, who was born in Ltibeck and trained as a mason, was convinced that there was indeed a core Berlin aesthetic, which he called the “classical modern,” and he aimed to protect this ideal from its newest enemies: the horde of international architects who wanted to do for Berlin what they had done in places like Hong Kong and Toronto. Germany’s metropolis was special, Stimmann insisted, and it had to be treated as such. “Berlin was totally destroyed by the bombs and after the war it was totally destroyed by the planners,” he declared. “Berlin is the only city in the world where the inner city is empty. We must bring this city back so that when we look in the mirror, we will know that it is our face. If we look like Hong Kong or Tokyo, nobody will come. Berlin must look like Berlin.” With his doctrine of “critical reconstruction” Stimmann found some influential allies, most notably the architect Josef Paul Kleihues, the architectural historians Vittorio Lampugnani and Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, and the publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler, who wrote frequently on the necessity of maintaining a sense of history and continuity in the Spree metropolis.
For proponents of a radically new Berlin, Stimmann was anathema. His critics called him “a demon for Prussian order” and condemned his vision of Berlin as “New Teutonia.” The Polish-born American architect, Daniel Libeskind, who would design post-Wall Berlin’s most innovative building, the Jewish Museum, had little patience with the rules laid down by the building commissioner’s office. These regulations ignored, said Libeskind, Berlin’s more recent tradition of breaking-with-tradition, of setting off in new directions. As examples of such daring modernity, Libeskind liked to cite Erich Mendelsohn’s Columbushaus, Bruno Taut’s Horseshoe Housing Estate, and Peter Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory. “There is an unnerving nostalgia for the past,” he declared. Stimmann’s rules constituted “the total erasure of fifty years of history of this city. It is going back to a time when things were not problematic, coupled with an authoritarian ideal of how to develop the city.” Another Stimmann critic, the Frankfurt art historian Heinrich Klotz, echoed this charge of authoritarianism, to which he added megalomania. “Herr Stimmann and his allies claim that they are setting the world-standard for urban construction. Their blown-up metropolitan pretensions are simply embarrassing.” After locking horns with Stimmann on the Potsdamer Platz plan, Rem Koolhaas, a noted Dutch architect, concluded that Berlin was simply not up to the task of setting urban-design standards for the rest of Germany and the world. “Berlin has become the capital at the very moment it is least able to take on the responsibility,” he declared. The American critic, Goldberger, also doubted that Stimmann’s Berlin was capable of breaking new ground: “What is troubling about the city’s present architectural picture,” he wrote, “is the sense that in post-Wall Berlin the very openness to new ideas and new forms that so long defined the city’s culture is threatened by a desire to make Berlin too comfortable. It is as if the city had gone from oppression to smugness in one step.” In the view of Richard Rogers, Berlin was “architecturally lost.”
As might have been predicted, what resulted from the clash of visions over Potsdamer Platz was a series of compromises that left no one entirely satisfied. The architects were allowed to build somewhat higher than the general plan specified, and they were not forced to conform to a strict stylistic blueprint. On the other hand, they had to tone down some of their boldest conceits, abide by the mixed-use requirement, reduce intended space for parking, and preserve historical structures. In Daimler-Benz’s case, this last stricture meant salvaging the Weinhaus Huth, a tavern-restaurant established in 1871 in which Theodor Fontane had been a regular, Himmler had held court, and Hitler’s half-brother Alois had worked as head waiter in the 1930s. Sony had to preserve part of the facade and the “Kaisersaal” of the Grand Hotel Esplanade, which had been 90 percent destroyed in the war. To salvage this structure Sony went to the extraordinary length of building around the facade and moving the Kaisersaal seventy-five meters to the west. The old world would thus live on in the new, though as quaint museum pieces, rather like Augustus Pugin’s “Medieval Room” in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851.
Potsdamer Platz in the mid-1990s was invariably described as “Europe’s largest construction site,” but in addition to being large the project was extremely challenging technically. Given Berlin’s location above a giant aquifer, the builders created a sizable body of water as they dug foundations; divers worked sixty feet under the surface of this murky “lake,” casting the concrete slabs on which the buildings would be propped. When the anchors were secured, pumps removed the ground water, but the pumpers had to be careful not to suck out too much lest they starve the trees in the neighboring Tiergarten. As they excavated, crews came across artifacts of Berlin’s recent past: SchultheiB beer mugs, plates from the Café Josty, countless bomb fragments, and a “Stalin-Organ” rocket-launcher. One wonders what the workers, many of whom were Irish and Portuguese, made of these finds.
The square’s relics may not have meant much to the workers, or for that matter, to the developers, but the topping-out of the construction in October 1996 was marked by a celebration that resembled nothing so much as a reconsecration. Daniel Barenboim, the new music director of the Staatsoper, used semaphore flags to conduct a ballet of construction cranes as they nodded and swung in time to the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that ode to joy and universal brotherhood which had also been played at the reopening of the Brandenburg Gate. Most of the people who attended this strange ceremony probably were not aware that the Nazis had likewise used this music for special occasions, including a birthday celebration for Hitler in April 1942, when Goebbels proclaimed that “the sounds of the most heroic music of titans that ever flowed from a Faustian German heart should raise [the thought of serving and obeying the Führer] to a serious and devotional height.”
As the buildings of the Potsdamer Platz slowly rose up from the sandy terrain, it became possible to get a sense of how the project would look when it was fully completed. Viewing the work in February 1999, when it was about two-thirds finished, the American critic Herbert Muschamp was less than overwhelmed. Although he found some of the individual buildings quite arresting, the complex as a whole, in his view, lacked distinctive power; it radiated a spectacular but not a specific modernism. “What Potsdamer Platz resembles,” he wrote, “is an edge city; one of those private, development-driven urbanoid clusters that have sprouted up across the American landscape in recent years. It is reassuring that the new Potsdamer Platz is notably without nationalist expressions. The downside of this is that the place could be anywhere. Like other edge cities, it occupies a kind of nebulous international airport space.” When it was completed a few months later, the Daimler-Benz portion of the project confirmed some of the critics’ worst fears. With its collection of franchise establishments and cookie-cutter boutiques, it might just as well have been in Houston. Examining the complex in June 1999, the American urban sociologist, Saskia Sassen, sensed a lack of “social thickness”—an absence of diversity and complexity.