CCHS Seminar series with Sybille Frank, TU Darmstadt, Germany

New Potsdamer Platz has been the flagship urban development project of post-Wall Berlin. Throughout the 1990s, Potsdamer Platz evolved from an abandoned no-man’s-land, delineated by the Berlin Wall, into Europe’s largest construction site and, finally, into the much-vaunted new centre of the once and future capital of reunified Germany. While the piecewise sale of Potsdamer Platz to international enterprises such as DaimlerChrysler and the Sony Corporation provoked controversial discussions in the early 1990s, the fact that several monuments and other relics from the conflictual history of Potsdamer Platz were part of the sales has hardly caught attention. 

This talk will investigate the diverging interests of the public and private players involved in the politics of heritage-making and urban development at Potsdamer Platz since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It will trace how discourses and material symbols were combined to support the transformation of selected aspects of the urban square’s past into heritage while obliterating other remnants. An imaginary walk through today’s Potsdamer Platz will serve to underpin my argument that the complex heritage landscape of the place was redeveloped into a landscape of corporate power that indeed commemorates the present. This was achieved through the partial destruction of protected monuments, the integration of new historicizing symbols in the urban space and the highly selective heritage interpretation that was first resisted but later sustained by the municipal government.

Open to all and refreshments will be served, courtesy of  UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies.

Photo: 2005 © Potsdamer Platz, Replica of the traffic tower of 1924 by Norbert Aepli, Switzerland (User:Noebu) Licensed under CC-BY-2.5