Cinematic Ciphers: Postdamer Platz, Berlin

Abstract

In November 1993, more than fifty years after patrons of the popularCafé Josty on the famed Potsdamer Platz in Berlin came to enjoy agood cup of coffee and a piece of cake, or smoke a rare fine cigarbefore the bombs would raze the café to the ground, a hydraulic excavator’sbucket stopped in mid-air and miraculously saved five whiteporcelain cups with the initials CJ engraved upon each one in red.The delicate cups had rested under no more than ten feet of loose soiland rubble near the place where the café’s basement had been. Thebombs that fell on the Potsdamer Platz between 1943 and May 1945and a scoop by an excavator bucket bookend a series of perilous situationsthe cups survived. The East German regime sent tanks acrossthe square during the uprising in June of 1953, and the wall separatingBerlin was built right through the middle of it in August of 1961.After lying dormant and overgrown with weeds for many of its subsequentthirty years, the Potsdamer Platz was finally all but leveled; theWeinhaus Huth was the only building that escaped the dynamite andwrecker ball. The swing of the wrecking ball made room for the mostcontroversial construction project in recent German history: the citywithin-a-city Daimler-Benz would build on the Potsdamer Platz.