Potsdamer Platz and the history of German railways

Photo taken from Potsdamer Platz. Trams on their way to Leipzigerstrasse, passing between the two gate houses in greek style.

What’s in a name ? The first part of the square's name is "Potsdamer" alright, but what does it mean? The answer is that the road to the town of Potsdam started there. But, you may wonder, why was Potsdam so important ?

You may have heard of Potsdam Conference in 1945, where the victor powers of WWII met. Then you're aware that for world leaders like Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, Potsdam was important enough. Of course, if they chose it as a meeting place was because Berlin was in ruins, but also because Potsdam had the appropriate facilities for such a summit meeting, namely Sans Souci, a rococo Palace built by Frederick the Great around 1750.

But Potsdam was a key place well ahead of that meeting, and the reason was that, even though the kings of Prussia had a palace in Berlin itself, they preferred Sans Souci with its beautiful and peaceful gardens, far from the nuisances of Berlin. The same reason why Louis XIV preferred Versailles to Paris. But the fact that the King had two residences, made it necessary to have good communications between them. Hence the importance of the Potsdam road, which became the first paved road in Prussia by 1790.

In those years, Berlin was encircled by an 8 km long palisade which had replaced the medieval ramparts. Its function was to prevent smuggling and to stop young men from escaping military service. In order to leave Berlin you had to get through that wall. Fourteen different gates were at your disposal, but if your goal was Potsdam, you would naturally choose the Potsdam gate (Potsdamer Tor). From there, four roads started, besides the one leading to Potsdam (but also to Leipzig, in Saxony).    

 

The sparsely populated space outside the gate wasn’t yet known as Potsdamer Platz. It was just "the area outside the Potsdam Gate". It wasn't before around 1830 that it got its name, Potsdamer Platz. The space inside the gate on the other hand had a well thought octogonal shape and from 1814 also a name : Leipziger Platz.

1838 happened something which changed this whole area dramatically : a train station was inaugurated, the first one in town. Its name was Potsdamer Bahnhof as it was the starting point for the new railway to Potsdam. Short after that, four new stations saw the light of day. From them, Berliners could board the train to Anhalt (a region west of Berlin), to Hamburg, to Stettin on the Baltic Sea or to Frankfurt an der Oder, to the south-east. Those stations were logically called Anhalter, Hamburger, Stettiner and Frankfurter (our days’ Ostbahnhof).

Those lines were run by different private operators. If you needed to transfer from one to the other, let’s say if you came from Potsdam but your final destination was Stettin, you were forced to traverse Berlin on foot or on a horse-drawn carriage. If you had baggage, that was not very convenient. The authorities realized that and in 1850 they built a Verbindungsbahn (Connection Railway), which didn’t run across town but rounded it, running alongside the city wall in a three quarters circle, connecting the five stations and making transfers much easier.

Tracks were laid at street level, though, meaning that the Connector Trains competed for space with pedestrians and horse traffic. That created trafic jams, not least in the point already known as Potsdamer Platz. Besides, it was a nuisance for the people living around, because of the smoke, the soot and the noise caused by the maneuvers necessary when the trains approached a station.

Above: a train passing alongside the city wall, today Ebertstrasse, thereby impeding the traffic through the gate houses, that is, through Potsdamer Tor and thereafter Leipziger Platz. Picture from around 1860.

The solution ? To build a new Connection Rail, a new circle, but a much larger one, which didn’t follow the old city wall but went a long way outside the city limits. This new circle was 11,2 km long, of which 8 were elevated, to prevent all conflicts with street traffic. This new layout, whose shape resembled a dog’s head, is the same as our days’ S-Bahn. It was opened in 1871, the same year when the German Empire was founded after Prussia’s victory agains France.

The old Connection Line doesn’t exist anymore. Furthermore, of the five train stations it served, only Potsdamer Bahnhof and Frankfurter Bahnhof (now Ostbahnhof) have still some long-distance activity. Stettiner Bahnhof (today Nordbahnhof) has only S-bahn trains, Hamburger Bahnhof has become art museum, and the once so prestigious Anhalter Bahnhof was destroyed during WWII.

More Potsdamer Platz

Potsdamer Platz, as opposed to other Berlin squares, lacked a regular shape. In fact, it had grown in a somewhat anarchic way, the reason being aht it was not part of Berlin proper until 1920. I hope the pictures I post here will help to understand better this place, a very important one in the Berlin of the 1920s and 1930s. They were taken by different photographs and from different angles. I have added explanatory labels for buildings and streets.

 

By Willy Römer, 1938

1920

 

By Waldemar Titzenthaler, 1932

Old hotel Bellevue, with its konditorei, went bankrupt and the lot was used to build the modernistic building known as Columbushaus in 1932 (picture above). It offered a blatant contrast with the style of its neighbouring buildings, but then this was Potsdamer Platz, were contrasts and paradoxes were the rule.

By Max Missmann, 1925

By Willy Römer

 

Potsdamer Platz

Potsdamer Platz was one of Weimar Berlin’s neuralgic points, a traffic hub, among other things. You stumble over that name all the time if you are interested in old Berlin. Still, I could never make it clear for myself what kind of place it was. I have seen hundreds of photographs showing different buildings around the Platz, there are also films showing the bustling traffic, the people running from one side to the other of the streets, but the impression I got of all these graphic documents was a quite chaotic one.

One reason is of course that it is difficult to represent oneself such a big open space without actually being there, being able to wander around, to observe with a panoramic view. Two-dimensional pictures, taken from different angles, give only a partial view. 

What adds to my confusion is the immediate vicinity of Leipziger Platz, so immediate in fact that both squares formed a whole urban space, but an asymmetric one, because they are of a very different nature.

But when I found the picture on top of this post, everything started falling into place. It is an aerial view from 1919, with explanatory labels by Michael Knapp, a Berlin lover.

The receding Haus Vaterland

Another thing which makes most photographs of Potsdamer Platz confusing is the receding position of the perhaps most iconic building: the Haus Vaterland, with its characteristic coupole. It is not right on the square, it is a bit behind it. That is why, seeing a close picture of Haus Vaterland, you don’t see the Potsdamer Platz itself, although the Haus is supposed to be on it. Potsdamer Bahnhof, the train station, is receding as well. You would expect such important buildings to face the square, not to be 150 yards behind it, shying away from attention, as it were. The photo above is probably taken from the north, from outside Bellevue Konditorei maybe. The Potsdamer Platz proper is the area around the traffic light (a famous traffic light); the Haus Vaterland and the grandiose facade of the train station are well behind, in the background in fact. That's why the pedagogical photograph on top, with the labels, doesn't show them. This was a square whose appearance changed radically depending on the position of the beholder. 

Potsdamer Platz 1920

The picture above shows clearly how peripheral the location of Haus Vaterland was.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Max Missmann, 1925

 

 

 

In the picture above, taken from a slightly different position, the Haus Vaterland disappears altogether (well, we do get a glimpse of its coupole's top).

 

 

 

 

Above, one quintessential coloured picture. Judging from it, one would think that the eye-catching Haus Vaterland dominates Potsdamer Platz. But, as eye-catching as it may be, it is actually some 150 yards behind the yellow trams. It looks closer if you see it from this angle, that is, from the middle of the square looking south but, from other angles, it disappears.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I felt the need to draw a schema showing the arteries leading to Potsdamer Platz. This is how it looks. Haus Vaterland was at the intersection of Köthener Strasse and Königgrätzer Strasse (our days' Stresemannstrasse).   

Above, the Leipziger Platz, an octogonal orderly designed open space. The fact that this postcard is said to depict Potsdamer Platz, while actually showing its neighbor, illustrates the ambiguous character of this whole area. The temple-looking gate houses are often seen in pictures labeled Potsdamer Platz; they are there to mark the border between the two squares, which had been once the border of the city of Berlin itself. Because the space called Potsdamer Platz, lying outside of the city proper, was not subject to the urban planning constraints of a capital.

Instead, it grew in a fragmented and disorderly way, and became in time a symbol for wildness and excess, which contributed to its legendary status. Leipziger Platz on the other hand, which lied inside the city and had been endowed with a name almost a century before its neighbor, had been built in one go, which gave it its regular geometric shape, like Pariser Platz or Wilhelmplatz, just what one would expect of a Prussian city. Interestingly, the Berlin Wall separated again Leipziger Platz, on the communist side, from a waste Potsdamer Platz on the West. 

Palast Hotel on Potsdamer Platz

 

The Palast Hotel stood on the north-eastern angle of the Potsdamer Platz, facing the Friedrich-Ebert Strasse and the Leipziger Platz. It shouldn't be confused with the Hotel Palast in DDR-Berlin. In 1943 the building on Potsdamer Platz was burned out during an Allied air raid on Berlin and was eventually demolished. 

It was a high-class hotel, as the other around Potsdamer Platz. During the Nazi period it became the headquarters of the Mittel Europäisches Reisebüro (Middle European Travel Agency). This organisation had been taken over and run by the SS. It played a role in the Holocaust.

 

 

Anita Rée

Born into a Jewish family of Hamburg merchants Anita Rée (1885-1933) was however baptized and raised as a Lutheran. In 1906, she met Max Liebermann, who recognized her talent and encouraged her to continue her artistic career. In 1912–1913, she studied with Fernand Léger in Paris.

From around 1914, Anita Rée gained recognition as a portrait painter. In 1921, she toured the Tyrol. From 1922 to 1925, her primary residence was in Positano, Italy.

1922-1925

She returned to Hamburg in 1926 and helped found an association of women artists. In 1930, she received a commission to create a triptych for the altar at the new Ansgarkirche in Langenhorn. The church fathers were not happy with her designs, however, and the commission was withdrawn in 1932 over "religious concerns". Meanwhile, the Nazis had denounced her as a Jew and the Hamburg Art Association called her an "alien".

She committed suicide in 1933, partly as a result of having been subjected to such hostility and continuing harassment by antisemitic forces, partly due to disappointments on the personal level. In 1937, the Nazis designated Rée's work as "Degenerate art" and began purging it from museum collections.

1921

1920