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.
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.”
