Potsdamer Platz

Potsdamer Platz was one of Weimar Berlin’s neuralgic points, a traffic hub, among other things. You stumble over that name all the time if you are interested in old Berlin. Still, I could never make it clear for myself what kind of place it was. I have seen hundreds of photographs showing different buildings around the Platz, there are also films showing the bustling traffic, the people running from one side to the other of the streets, but the impression I got of all these graphic documents was a quite chaotic one.

One reason is of course that it is difficult to represent oneself such a big open space without actually being there, being able to wander around, to observe with a panoramic view. Two-dimensional pictures, taken from different angles, give only a partial view. 

What adds to my confusion is the immediate vicinity of Leipziger Platz, so immediate in fact that both squares formed a whole urban space, but an asymmetric one, because they are of a very different nature.

But when I found the picture on top of this post, everything started falling into place. It is an aerial view from 1919, with explanatory labels by Michael Knapp, a Berlin lover.

The receding Haus Vaterland

Another thing which makes most photographs of Potsdamer Platz confusing is the receding position of the perhaps most iconic building: the Haus Vaterland, with its characteristic coupole. It is not right on the square, it is a bit behind it. That is why, seeing a close picture of Haus Vaterland, you don’t see the Potsdamer Platz itself, although the Haus is supposed to be on it. Potsdamer Bahnhof, the train station, is receding as well. You would expect such important buildings to face the square, not to be 150 yards behind it, shying away from attention, as it were. The photo above is probably taken from the north, from outside Bellevue Konditorei maybe. The Potsdamer Platz proper is the area around the traffic light (a famous traffic light); the Haus Vaterland and the grandiose facade of the train station are well behind, in the background in fact. That's why the pedagogical photograph on top, with the labels, doesn't show them. This was a square whose appearance changed radically depending on the position of the beholder. 

Potsdamer Platz 1920

The picture above shows clearly how peripheral the location of Haus Vaterland was.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Max Missmann, 1925

 

 

 

In the picture above, taken from a slightly different position, the Haus Vaterland disappears altogether (well, we do get a glimpse of its coupole's top).

 

 

 

 

Above, one quintessential coloured picture. Judging from it, one would think that the eye-catching Haus Vaterland dominates Potsdamer Platz. But, as eye-catching as it may be, it is actually some 150 yards behind the yellow trams. It looks closer if you see it from this angle, that is, from the middle of the square looking south but, from other angles, it disappears.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I felt the need to draw a schema showing the arteries leading to Potsdamer Platz. This is how it looks. Haus Vaterland was at the intersection of Köthener Strasse and Königgrätzer Strasse (our days' Stresemannstrasse).   

Above, the Leipziger Platz, an octogonal orderly designed open space. The fact that this postcard is said to depict Potsdamer Platz, while actually showing its neighbor, illustrates the ambiguous character of this whole area. The temple-looking gate houses are often seen in pictures labeled Potsdamer Platz; they are there to mark the border between the two squares, which had been once the border of the city of Berlin itself. Because the space called Potsdamer Platz, lying outside of the city proper, was not subject to the urban planning constraints of a capital.

Instead, it grew in a fragmented and disorderly way, and became in time a symbol for wildness and excess, which contributed to its legendary status. Leipziger Platz on the other hand, which lied inside the city and had been endowed with a name almost a century before its neighbor, had been built in one go, which gave it its regular geometric shape, like Pariser Platz or Wilhelmplatz, just what one would expect of a Prussian city. Interestingly, the Berlin Wall separated again Leipziger Platz, on the communist side, from a waste Potsdamer Platz on the West.