CCHS seminar series with Sybille Frank, University of Darmstadt

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.