Berlin, Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz

The Brandenburg Gate (215 feet wide, 36 feet thick, and 85 feet high) was built starting in 1788, with the Quadriga (four horses pulling a Roman chariot) on top. In 1957 a West Berlin foundry recast the Quadriga, using the original plaster models, stored in the West. It was damaged during the over-ambitious victory party (celebrating the removal of the Wall) on New Years Eve 1989, so once more it was removed and repaired.

The portion of the Berlin Wall built right across the many-lane Straße des 17 Juni, at the Brandenburg Gate, was built much thicker than elsewhere. News photos showed celebrants dancing on top of the several feet thick wall. Since the wide street permitted a vehicle to gain high speed, East Berlin authorities had been afraid someone would drive a bulldozer, or an Army tank down 17 Juni at high speed, crash through the Wall, and celebrate at the Brandenburg Gate, just a few yards away. The Wall they built in front of the Brandenburg Gate, was much too thick for any vehicle to crash.

Potsdamer Platz, with the octagonal Leipziger Platz and Leipziger Strasse, had been the highlight of the old city. Berlin’s busiest intersection before the WW II, 600 trams crossed Potsdamer Platz every day. It had been congested with the clutter of auto traffic, the clatter of street cars, and the scramble of pedestrians, but now it was devastated.

It was severely damaged during WW II, flattened during the East German uprising in 1953, then designated as a no-man’s-land and a killing zone, with the Berlin Wall running down its middle for 28 years. Many square blocks of what had been the bustling center of a major Capital city, were a vacant, trash strewn wasteland, nearly fifty years after WW II had ended.

Starting in the mid-1990s, companies such as Sony Europe, Hertie, and Daimler-Chrysler constructed curved, mirrored office towers in this city-center. None of the pre-WW II charm survived, but the office towers and shopping arcades will draw life and commerce back to this geographic core of the city. The huge commercial development in Potsdammer Platz, arose from the ashes of WW II, and the tragedy of Communist rule, but it’s a shame that Potsdamer Platz reincarnate does look not one iota like the old.