Potsdamer Sea

[Image: From Kiessling’s Grosser Verkehrs-Plan von Berlin (1920).]

It’s funny to be back in Berlin, a city where I once thought I’d spend the rest of my life, first arriving here as a backpacker in 1998 and temporarily moving in with a woman 14 years older than me, who practiced Kabbalah and had twin dogs and who, when seeing that I had bought myself a portable typewriter because I was going through a William Burroughs phase, blessed it one night in her apartment near the synagogue in a ceremony with some sort of bronze sword. It’s almost literally unbelievable how long ago that was. More years have passed since I spent time in Berlin—supposedly to study German for grad school, but in reality organized entirely around going to Tresor—than I had been alive at the time.

Because I’m here again on a reporting trip, I was speaking yesterday evening with a former geophysicist who, when the Berlin Wall came down, found work doing site-remediation studies and heritage-mapping projects on land beneath the old path of the Wall. He was tasked with looking for environmental damage and unexploded ordnance, but also for older foundations and lost buildings, earlier versions of Berlin that might pose a structural threat to the city’s future or that needed to be recorded for cultural posterity.

Ironically, in a phase of my life I rarely think about, I wrote my graduate thesis on almost exactly this topic, focused specifically on Potsdamer Platz—once divided by the Wall—and the role of architectural drawings in communicating historical context. When I was first here, in 1998 into early 1999, Potsdamer Platz was still a titanic hole in the ground, an abyss flooded with groundwater, melted snow, and rain, a kind of maelström you could walk over on pedestrian bridges, where engineering firms were busy stabilizing the earth for what would become today’s corporate office parks.

As I told the former geophysicist last night, I remember hearing at the time that there were people down there, SCUBA diving in the floodwaters, performing geotechnical studies or welding rebar or looking for WWII bombs, I had no idea, but, whatever it was, their very existence took on an outsized imaginative role in my experience of the city. Berlin, destroyed by war, divided by architecture, where people SCUBA dive through an artificial sea at its broken center. It felt like a mandala, a cosmic diagram, with this inverted Mt. Meru at its heart, not an infinite mountain but a bottomless pit.

What was so interesting to me about Berlin at the time was that it felt like a triple-exposure photograph, the city’s future overlaid atop everything else in a Piranesian haze of unbuilt architecture, whole neighborhoods yet to be constructed, everything still possible, out of focus somehow. It was incoherent in an exhilaratingly literal sense. In Potsdamer Platz, what you thought was the surface of the Earth was actually a bridge; you were not standing on the Earth at all, or at least not on earth. It was the Anthropocene in miniature, a kind of masquerade, architecture pretending to be geology.

The more that was built, however, the more Berlin seemed to lose this inchoate appeal. The only people with the power to control the rebuilding process seemed to be automobile consortiums and international hotel groups, office-strategy consultants not wizards and ghosts or backpacking writers. Perhaps the city still feels like that to other people now—unfinished, splintered, jagged in a temporal sense, excitingly so, a city with its future still taking shape in the waves of an underground sea—but it seems to me that Berlin’s blur has been misfocused.

In any case, with the caveat that I am in Berlin this week for a very specific research project, so many people I’ve met have pointed to the fall of the Wall as an explosive moment for geophysical surveys in the East. Engineers were hired by the dozen to map, scan, and survey damaged ground left behind by a collapsed imperialist Empire, and the residues of history, its chemical spills and lost foundations, its military bunkers and archaeological remains, needed to be recorded. The ground itself was a subject of study, an historical medium. On top of that, new freeways were being built and expanded, heading east into Poland—and this, too, required geophysical surveys. The future of the region was, briefly, accessible only after looking down. The gateway to the future was terrestrial, a question of gravel and sand, forgotten basements and fallen walls.

The SCUBA divers of the Potsdamer Sea now feel like mascots of that time, dream figures submerged in the waves of a future their work enabled, swimming through historical murk with limited visibility and, air tanks draining, limited time. Their pit was soon filled, the hole annihilated, and the surface of the Earth—which was actually architecture—returned with amnesia.

8 thoughts on “Potsdamer Sea”

  1. It’s hard to list what DOESN’T come to mind reading this post, whether personal, public, or related to the deep roots and history of this very blog.

    I’m not even going to try to write any sort of coherent comment. I’m just going to list things:
    – your posts about and interviews with Lebbeus Woods, applied in this case to the Wall-less Berlin that could have been, a permanent post-war laboratory were geological and architectural layers fight to one-up each other;
    – Wenders’ Potsdamer Platz in Der Himmel über Berlin, with the Wall cutting the ground and an elevated walkway cutting the air: both a one-way mirror to the captive East;
    – the Berlin I had been told about, in the mid to late Nineties, where raves and underground electronica seemed to have taken over everything, day morphing into night in a continuous drug-induced loop;
    – the Berlin I later saw, where Potsdamer Platz was already the sleek sanitized and oblivious affair it is now, with the Sony Center dominating the landscape, and a few hundred metres to the right, the Holocaust Memorial: memory goes deeper into Berlin’s sins of the past, but skips over the more recent ones that cut it in two for almost three decades;
    – your typewriter, which I hope was less mobile than Burroughs’ one in Cronenberg’s film;
    – SCUBA Divers!
    – Kabbalah. Apartments near Synagogues. Bronze Swords! I wonder how much magick (with and without a k) is left in the Berlin of today, which when I visited for the first time I could only define as “The city with the largest number of few people that I’ve ever seen”.
    – Before the pandemic, I kept going back at least once a year, and every year found it more built, more clean, and with less magic.

    1. Thanks, Federico—very sorry for the long-delayed reply. I think BLDGBLOG—as you potentially surmised here in your comment—made a whole lot of sense (to me) back when I launched it, both biographically and (for me) intellectually/thematically; but, as you have likely also surmised here, that original context no longer exists. Blogging now has the feel of stuffing curls of paper into a brick wall in a meadow somewhere, an act of almost willed derangement rather than one of communication. But perhaps I’ve fallen prey to age and cynicism. Thanks for the comment and for sticking around here over the years!

  2. Missed this one! The strange triple exposure feeling was still there in late 2001 even when Potsdam Platz was mostly complete.

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