One way to lend specificity to a place is to attach to it names and symbols of historical significance. In 1997 the Potsdamer Platz promoters, with the backing of Berlin officials, decided to name a central plaza in the complex after one of Berlin’s most glamorous daughters, Marlene Dietrich, who had died in 1992 in Paris at the age of ninety-one. Although Dietrich might not have been pleased to be so honored, it is perhaps fitting that she got such recognition, since heretofore her native city had been anything but generous toward her. The actress’s decision to leave Berlin in 1930, to become an American citizen, and then to perform for Allied troops as they conquered Germany, earned her the reputation as a “traitor” in some Berlin circles. When she returned to Berlin in 1960 on a singing tour she drew bomb threats and protesters crying “Marlene, Go Home!” Her burial in 1992 in a Berlin cemetery next to her mother occasioned an outpouring of respect for her memory, but also some ugly complaints that the “foreign whore” was being allowed back in the city she had “rejected.” In 1996 a Social Democratic official in the district government of Schöneberg, where Dietrich was born, tried in vain to rename a local street, the Tempelhofer Weg, in her honor. Although the street in question was a dingy strip of auto-wrecking shops and recycling centers, the locals vehemently protested the plan. As one resident complained: “What did Dietrich do for us? She was always away.” Other efforts to rename Berlin localities after Dietrich also failed. She finally found a place in the anonymous glitz of the new Potsdamer Platz primarily because there was no living constituency there to keep her away. As one commentator observed: “Only in this thoroughly synthetic space, where a poetic amnesia prevails, could the diva who for good reason stayed away from Germany finally find a home.”
Marlene-Dietrich-Platz in Potsdamer Platz, 1999
Potsdamer Platz was still just a jungle of cranes and scaffolds when the newly rebuilt Friedrichstrasse made its debut as post-Wall eastern Berlin’s first major attempt at a commercial comeback. As we have seen, in economic terms the comeback was a flop, at least in its opening phase. But what about the aesthetic dimensions of the reconstruction? Friedrichstrasse boasts some impressive individual buildings. The most spectacular is Jean Nouvel’s Galeries Lafayette, which updates the great Berlin department store tradition with new devices to bedazzle the customer. The main hall is dominated by glass cones in whose panels the shopping area is reflected. The result is an ever-changing kaleidoscope of luxury. On the whole, however, the Friedrichstrasse corridor seems antiseptic and bland. Most of its buildings, at least on the outside, do not make any significant design statements. Critics have blamed this on Stimmann’s rules rather than on a lack of architectural talent, for the Friedrichstrasse reconstruction, like that of Potsdamer Platz, involved a number of international architects not known for their self-restraint. According to the Berlin journalist Gottfried Knapp, another source of the problem lay with the investors, for whom “the only acceptable building” was the traditional Büropalast (office palace), a structure with stores on the ground level, offices in the middle stories, and at the top a couple of luxury apartments for the mistresses of the real-estate barons. Thus, instead of “reviving the flair of Berlin-Mitte,” as the street’s promoters claimed, Friedrichstrasse managed merely to replicate the uninspiring commercial corridors found in most West German towns. All the hype notwithstanding, wrote Knapp, new Berlin’s fabled avenue looked no better “than the pedestrian zones of Salzkirchen and Gelsengitter.”
Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, the storied train station that opened for business in 1882 and served for years as a central crosstown transit point, was also extensively rebuilt. Between 1961 and 1989 this station was the end of the line for most East Germans traveling on the westbound S-Bahn line; only the privileged few (or the burdensome old) with permission to go west used the terminal as a point of departure. For westerners (other than West Berliners) coming into East Berlin by S-Bahn or subway, this was the station where they had to detrain and obtain visas for their short-term stays in the city. Accordingly, the building was a Kafkaesque labyrinth of dingy stairwells, jerrybuilt hallways, temporary barriers, and passport-inspection cubicles, all patrolled by machine-gun-toting guards. Next to the main station was a shabby annex where travelers heading west were processed; for understandable reasons, this was known as the “Palace of Tears.” With the reconstruction, which began in the early 1990s, all this changed. The place where GDR inspectors once stamped passports became a jeans store; the Palace of Tears was converted into a nightclub. Travelers could again walk from one part of the cavernous station to another; and, of course, the various trains, some 1,300 of them every day in the early 1990s, no longer had to reverse direction after arriving at the station. Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse was once again a major crossroads in the city, not the end of the line.
At the other end of Friedrichstrasse, near the intersection with Kochstrasse, stood the famous Checkpoint Charlie, which in the days of division had served as the principal crossing-point for foreigners between West Berlin and East Berlin. After the Wall came down the area around the dismantled checkpoint became the focal point of another major commercial redevelopment project in Berlin-Mitte, the so-called “American Business Center.” In 1992 two Americans, the cosmetics baron Ronald Lauder, and Mark Palmer, formerly Washington’s ambassador to Hungary, formed a partnership with a German real estate magnate, Abraham Rosenthal, to develop a large office complex on the site. “Once again, Americans and Germans extend their hands to build together,” was the project’s motto. These developers, too, hired star architects, most notably Philip Johnson, the grand old man of modern architecture. Johnson put up a giant billboard picture of himself on the property. (Later, in a reference to the famous kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, some Berlin anarchists stole the billboard and cut off Johnson’s ear, which they sent to the developers with a note demanding a ransom for the return of the rest of the picture.) As construction progressed, the bottom dropped out of Berlin’s commercial real estate market, prompting Lauder and Palmer to pull out. When the complex opened in 1997, only half its space could be rented. The name was quietly changed from American Business Center to International Business Center, but it probably should have been called the Rosenthal Center, since the German was left holding the bag. “As early as 1993 it was clear that Berlin was not going to become the jumping-off place for American business in Eastern Europe, as I had originally thought,” admitted Rosenthal later. “I miscalculated.”