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.
