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Sony Centre: is this huge semi-public space Berlin’s new centre? |
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Berlin has not quite finished growing together, though it’s well on the way to being rebuilt, with the near-completion of the Potsdamer Platz project.
Before its total destruction at the end of World War II, the Potsdamer Platz was an almost mythical place in the minds of many Germans. It was the centre of the booming, jazzy Berlin of the roaring twenties, the sort of place where pickpocket met millionaire. It was a place every Berliner passed through, because the square was the traffic hub of the city, and caught glimpses of the crowds enjoying themselves in the dozens of bars and hotels.
The Potsdamer Platz then spent much of its post-war existence as a wasteland in the dead zone of the divided Berlin – between the double wall – and came back into the city’s consciousness after German reunification in 1990. It was clear that the Potsdamer Platz was the key to the reconnection of Berlin.
After six years of building work at the 480,000 square metre site, Berlin’s new centre is now taking on its final shape. The rebuilt Potsdamer Platz is cool, chic and above all clean. The planners have carefully avoided any possibility of a come-back of the seediness that went hand in hand with the former glamour.
But does this new centre have a soul? Daimler and Sony, which bought most of the site, have built their own private shopping and entertainment malls. The glass-roofed, fountain-watered atria within those buildings are in fact the only public meeting places.
The Potsdamer Platz has not become the natural meeting point it once was, but an amalgam of the Daimler City and the Sony Centre.
Berliners accuse the government of selling out to big corporations, thus giving away the chance, say critics, of creating a true city centre that is more inclusively designed than for the sole purpose of consumption.
But despite the criticism the place seems to work. There are now 30 restaurants and cafés, a theatre, a casino, cinemas and hotels en masse, as well as a roofed shopping centre with more than 100 shops, which alone attracts between 50,000 to 100,000 visitors a day. At least the departing executives at London’s millennium dome would call that a success.
As Europe’s biggest building site, the project also stimulated Berlin’s economy. More building on that scale would be a welcome remedy for the economic woes of eastern Germany, where the construction industry contributes one-third of GDP. When the post-reunification building boom began to falter in 1996, GDP in east Germany collapsed from an already modest 5% in 1995 to 2% in 1996, and with it went the hope that the Aufschwung Ost, the recovery in the east, would materialize any time soon and prove to be self-sustaining.
A decade after the end of central planning, productivity is at 60% of western German levels. Wages are at 70%, and growth rates – last year at 1.6% – have never reached west German levels again after 1996. Only the unemployment rate shows an upward trend. In some rural areas it runs as high as 30%, while the average level of unemployment in the eastern states is 17%, compared with 7% in the west.
In a recent exchange of opinion between MPs on the renewal of the solidarity pact – the transfer of money to the east – it was said that the east would need another 10 to 15 years to catch up – given, of course, that transfers of about Dm26 billion ($12 billion) a year continue.
Maybe it was the fear of backwardness in the east that caused the initial reluctance of German MPs in 1991 to move the government from its idyllic seat on the Rhine to Berlin, which had already by then become the capital of the united Germany, as stipulated in the unification treaty of 1990. The decision to move to Berlin barely passed through the Bundestag in 1991 with just 338 votes out of 660. Berlin was said to be too much in the east, as well as too far east – 100 kilometres from the Polish border – and above all too expensive to move to. That at least proved correct. The cost of relocation from Bonn is estimated to have been Dm20 billion.
Now the relocation is almost completed. The Bundestag started working in the beautifully renovated, dome-topped Reichstag in 1999, civil servants’ flats are being built nearby, and embassies are moving back into the peaceful calm of the Tiergarten park. Only Gerhard Schröder is still waiting for his new chancellery to be finished. Up to now he has presided over the republic from the old Staats-ratsgebäude, the building that housed the former GDR heads of state.
German MPs who were beaten in the vote over relocation probably have no great regrets, considering their new quarters. The only cause of discomfort may have been the sarcastic welcoming by the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) – the successor to the old East German communist party. It could not resist proffering as a slogan for the 1999 local election the line that: “No Bonner will be worse off” – a mocking reference to the 1990 election motto of Kohl’s CDU that: “No-one will be worse off than before.” The original was addressed to sceptical east Germans whose votes the CDU desperately needed in order to push through unification; the parody a jibe at the fate of the inhabitants of West Germany’s old capital.
East Berliners at least must have liked the new version of the slogan – and 41% of them voted for the PDS. Shockingly, the party at the very left of the political spectrum beat the two established mass parties, the CDU and SPD. In the western part of Berlin, though, the PDS was happy to win votes from 3.5% of the electorate. Such stark political and economic divisions between east and west have prompted Germans to question the basic assumption behind the unification slogan: “what belongs together, will grow together”.
Perhaps a final symbol of growing together will be achieved with the new chancellery that unites the two sides of the river Spree, and thus the former east and west Berlin.
Schröder’s new office will be ready this summer, and it is only a stone’s throw from the Potsdamer Platz. So he can easily pop out and help Berliners reconnect over a cappuccino in Daimler’s shopping mall.
