"The Potsdamer Platz is the heart of Berlin, the busiest crossroads of Europe in the 1920s. Five important streets lead into the square. Each one leads to very different places in the city. Potsdamer Platz has twenty-five tram lines, not counting innumerable cars, buses, taxis, horse-drawn carriages, bicycles and wheelbarrows, which yield an average of 2753 vehicles per hour, according to an official 1928 statistic. We will begin our walk in the kiosk that is in front of the tall traffic light : five steel-beams, that emerge from a block of cement and disperse in form of pentagon; from each of its five sides hang rectangles, also made of steel, where the traffic lights that look at the five streets that converge in the square are installed. Above, a kind of slightly convex roof, a beacon that, at night, illuminates almost a hundred bulbs that shine upwards. Not a single ornamental detail. It is a modern and functional architecture: the omnipresence of steel is compensated by the open and airy structure of the tower, a visible point of reference a kilometer away, from each of the streets that converge there. The clocks are other indicators, reminding the stroller that it is time to go home, that the curtain is about to rise, that he has to take a train, or maybe, just maybe, that he has to go to work. The tower that houses the traffic lights does not like anyone; a Berlin newspaper requested its immediate demolition; another called it "madness". But the opinion of the urban planning technicians finally prevailed, and the tower continued where it was, at the Potsdamer Platz, "observing the network of streets, like the judge who decides a tennis match."
"If we turn our eyes to the side, we see the renowned Café Josty; if we look in the opposite direction, the neighborhood in which the imposing headquarters of the Government rise up. Take a look around us is to take a look at the different means of transport used over the past fifty years: a horse carriage loaded with barrels of beer, cars that follow different directions, incessant trams that stop to let the passengers disembark, who already have thought to go to a cafe, to a theater or just to walk around the square and have a look. Some will stay for a while before crossing the short distance that separates them from the two main railway stations, the Potsdamer, to the right of the square, and the Anhalter, a little further on. Both take Berliners to faraway places, located east, west or south of the city; also to the populous peripheral neighborhoods. Every day, tens of thousands of Berliners enter or exit the subway and the underground interchanges of the different lines that run through the basement of the square. Others climb, in a jump, to a tram that has just started. To give an idea of the turmoil, not even a double-decker bus is missing. A woman goes from café to café, selling flowers. Newspapers vendors shout the latest news and, in the words of the Berliner Tageblatt, they seem the only thing motionless in the middle of such a hubbub. The array of offerings of different political parties of all imaginable tendencies is such that anyone finds something that matches their interests. A horrible bustle, but who said that life is simple? To each walker who approaches with pennies in hand, the vendors give carefully folded publications that offer him «all the feelings and knowledge anyone needs for a weekday evening, if he aims to be well informed».
(this is not the original text by professor Weitz, but a re-translation from a Spanish version, hence the clumsy English which the professor is not to be blamed for)
University of Minnesota history professor Eric D. Weitz has written a book about Weimar Germany. He sees that era as a time of progressive achievements and he views Weimar in its own right, not just as a prelude to the Third Reich.
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