Paul Scraton reviews the American historian’s comprehensive history of the city…
‘What Potsdamer Platz resembles 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.’ (Herbert Muschamp, quoted in Berlin by David Clay Large, p.590)
I certainly found Potsdamer Platz, the so-called heart of the ‘New Berlin’, decidedly underwhelming when I first arrived in the city, in 2001. The various columns of concrete, steel and glass, rising up over a space that had been planned down to the last inch, left me cold.
But over time, and as I thought about it further, Potsdamer Platz came to fascinate me as a representation of Berlin, not for what it is today but for what it had been. The fact that the world’s most celebrated architects had been given a chance to build anew was a consequence of history; the destruction of World War Two, the division of the city, the building of the Berlin Wall.
For the traveller searching for the broader and deeper perspective, history provides the context for our experiences. Our impressions are shaped by the food, the culture, the nightlife, the people, the architecture… but all those different elements are themselves shaped by the multitude of events past that led to the here and now. Whether we visit the Acropolis or the Forum in Rome, the battlefields of Flanders or Auschwitz-Birkenau, we are asking not only the question “what is here,” but also, “what happened here?”
In Berlin, history is everywhere, much of it painful. But those painful memories make the city what it is, for better and worse. The vibrant artistic and music scene that developed out of the squats and cheap housing of post-Wende Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain were at least partly created from such past traumas.
The Mauerpark full of people on a Sunday, searching through the flea-market or singing karaoke on that stretch of land that had once been the death strip, accessed only by border guards and their dogs. The playground where my daughter swings, sandwiched between two Altbau houses, the space cleared by a falling World War Two bomb. Many of the great historical events of the past 150 years played themselves out on the streets of this city, and they continue to shape the lives of the people to this day.
So much history, in fact, that you need a lot of pages to do justice to the story. Published in 2000, David Clay Large’s Berlin uses more than 700. The framework of the book is between unificati…