When I arrived in Potsdam, I took a tram from the train station through the centre of the city to the more suburban area where my housesit is located. I passed a huge pink rococo building which I had assumed was one of the palaces of Frederick the Great.
In fairness to what I later learned, cursive gold lettered words on the wall do proclaim (in French), that this is not a palace.
I remarked to my homeowners on how surprised I was that the historic centre of the city seemed incredibly well preserved. After all, there had to have been a lot of damage during the Battle of Berlin in WW II. And the Communist regime in East Germany was not exactly known for its love of ‘bourgeois’ architecture or royal palaces.
I was told that there had indeed been much devastation, but that large parts of the city had ‘been rebuilt, block for block’. The conversation moved on and I didn’t give that remark too much consideration. Then.
During my visit to Sanssouci Park, I had seen what was labelled as the ‘Historic Windmill’
I accepted it then for what it appeared to be, an old building which had occupied this ground for centuries. It was only after I got back and started reading that I realized this ‘historic’ building is actually part of the slippery reality that is the landscape of Potsdam.
For although the windmill looks old, and indeed specifically tells the visitor that it is historic, in fact on April 27th, 1945, a Soviet tank was hit by a German anti-tank weapon right in the road where I was standing. The windmill burned to the ground in the ensuing battle. This ‘historic’ windmill was built in 1993. It is a replica of one that was itself the third mill to stand on this site. It’s 25 years old.
Now, dear readers, consider the fact that a replica of this replica was built for the International Wind- and Watermill Museum elsewhere in Germany. Is this one more ‘historic’ than the one in Saxony? Does the fact that it stands where the original stood make it more authentic?
That, along with the fake hieroglyphics on the ‘Egyptian’ obelisk, was just a sample of what I would find in the ‘historic’ centre. It would have been clear even to those who hadn’t been forewarned about the massive reconstructions in Potsdam, that pretty much everything is a rebuild.
The buildings look like they were just erected – new, clean and sanitized.
Even the trees don’t look more than 25 years old.
And that’s where there are any trees at all. The Luizenplatz just beside the Brandenburg Gate was so bare that it was almost painful to look at.
It’s a pity, because in the 1800s there were gardens and a fountain here. We can’t blame either the war or the Communists for its present sterility. It was in the 1930s that the gardens were converted to a parking lot. Bare though it presently is, it’s a least an improvement over a parking lot.
John is a model railroader. The first time he started ‘weathering’ a model building for his train layout to look like the paint was peeling and the roof tiles were coming off and the window glass was dirty, I was astounded. He explained to me that if he simply put the ‘raw’ buildings on his layout, the illusion of reality would be destroyed. The buildings, as well as the trains and the landscaping, had to look lived in. As well, the entire layout had to show a variety of ages in the buildings, and in their state of repair. This is, after all, how a town or city looks. It grows over years, decades, even centuries in the case of Europe.
I thought of this as I walked down Brandenburg Strasse between rows of buildings almost uniform in their apparent period of design (18th century) but which looked so pristine they seemed to have been erected only recently. It looks completely artificial and completely lifeless.
It is the difference between a waxwork figure, and a living, animated person.
I turned down into a little alley, thinking maybe I would find some charming tourist plaza like the one we were in in Santiago, but no, it had some shops, but no people. Absolutely silent except for one store which had a loudspeaker outside its door playing, of all things, “The Banks of the O-hi-o”.
It was surreal.
Ironically, I did pass a model train shop with two men peering in the window.
The city planners would have done well to consult some model railroaders in planning their ‘stone for stone’ reconstruction.
I made my way towards the Alte Markt (old market) where there were supposed to be a number of buildings and churches of interest. A wind swept concrete plaza was occupied by a stunning pink stucco rococo building.
Although adorned with statues of horses, it announced itself to be the Film Museum.
It turns out that this building is exactly of the age its rococo design would lead the viewer to believe. The structure was built as a horse stable by Frederick the Great’s father. In 1746, Frederick had it redesigned by Georg Von Knobelsdorff who was one of the architects of the “Frederician Rococo” style. It was indeed damaged during the war. It was also slated for demolition by the Communist regime, but they never got around to it.
This is a restoration, not a recreation. The question I ask myself is, “Does it matter?
On the other side of the street stands a very ugly post-war building, in the process of being demolished.
It housed the Fachhochschule (University of Applied Sciences). The campus actually occupied two sites, this one and the Pappelallee Campus in the buildings of the former Adolf-Hitler Barracks of the Wehrmacht Infantry Regiment 9. Click on this link for some interesting photos. You know you’re in Germany….
I walked past this monstrosity and around the end of the pink building which I had thought was part of the 18th century Sanssouci, thus entering the area known as the Alte Markt.
The pink building turned out to have an elaborate gate, giving access to a courtyard.
Within the courtyards were some structures that look like recreations of Sansouci.
When I got close, I realized they are like stage props. Slender slats of some sort of resin or something, bearing images of Sanssouci. It’s impossible to describe. See for yourself.
I never did see any signage indicating the purpose of the building or its occupants. The interior, from what I could see through the glass doors, looked like a highly functional government office building of some kind. Totally without charm or character, this interior sits inside this pink fluffy wedding cake of an exterior.
Turning to my trusty laptop when I returned home, I found out that this is yet another false ‘old’ building; a recreation of the City Palace, originally an official residence for monarchs and the like, constructed in the 1600s then reconstructed in the mid-1700s by – who else – Frederick the Great. The Palace was burnt by Allied bombs in 1945. The part that remained standing was demolished by the Communists in 1960.
If only I had thought of the Magritte painting ‘The Treachery of Images’ – “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” . It is plainly written on these ‘palace’ walls “Ceci n’est pas un chateau”. Clearly, someone was trying to tell us that this is only a representation of a chateau.
Today it serves to house the parliament of the state of Brandenburg.
Leaving the not-a-chateau, I went out into the plaza of the Alte Markt to try to distinguish what was an original building and what a recreation.
The most imposing building is the St. Nicholas church – St. Nikolaikirche – whose dome pops up in just about every photo one takes in this area. This surely, I thought, is a modern construction. It’s exterior was pristine, bland and unmarked.
Inside, I swear I could smell paint and wet concrete. The interior had some lovely byzantine-like painting behind the alter.
The dome was pretty, but not impressively decorated.
But over all there was a lack of the grandeur and majesty that makes a great church. Look at that shoddy little organ to one side of the sanctuary.
The paint scheme looked like something you’d see on an HGTV home improvement show.
Yet this is, by and large, the original Lutheran church that was erected here between 1830 and 1850.
It was badly damaged by Allied bombers and Soviet artillery fire, but you can see in this photograph from 1991 for example, that the exterior of the church looks pretty much now as it did before restoration, just lighter.
Across the plaza is the Barberini Museum (East German art) which certainly, I thought, must be an original old building. It looks aged and weather worn.
The original building was called the Barbarini Palace and was built in the 1770s. Guess what? It was largely destroyed in an air raid in April of 1945, and the Communists demolished what remained.
This is totally fake. Yet it looks old while the church looks brand new.
One of the more blindingly new looking buildings in the Alte Markt is the Old City Hall. Look at the gleam on the gold statue of Atlas on the top.
Turns out that while the back of this building suffered major damage from Soviet artillery fire, the front facades and the dome were largely intact.
So what looks new is actually older than the old looking buildings.
This photo shows the Alte Markt in 2009, with essentially nothing but bare ground where the Barberini Museum and the City Palace stand now. Indeed, except for the church, the Old City Hall is about the only building there.
That photo does show a column in front of the church.
Let’s play the game – original, restoration or entirely modern recreation?
The answer here is – new. It replaces an original column which was adorned by portraits of Prussian rulers and which was reduced to rubble in 1945. This old looking column was built by the Communist regime in 1978/79 using red marble from the Soviet Union and white marble from Yugoslavia. Instead of either Prussian monarchs or Soviet leaders however, it is now adorned with portraits of the architects who built the original building in the Alte Markt. Its style is antique. It references people dead hundreds of years. But the column itself is only 40 years old.
Bottom line, you never know what you’re looking at. You can’t even say, “Things are never as they seem”, because sometimes they are. Even when they most look like they aren’t.
The photo at the beginning of this post perfectly encapsulates the cognitive dissonance that is Potsdam. We have the dome of the Nikolai church which looks brand new but in fact is more or less historic. We have some very old columns, which no one has bothered to describe anywhere I can see. We have a rococo wedding cake of a building that looks like it should be the pinker twin of the Sanssouci palace, but is in fact entirely fake. And we have the Communist era Fachhochschule, which may be ugly but which at least can claim to be an authentic representation of its time.
It is an interesting conundrum. The historic heart of your city is destroyed by bombers and later by iconoclasts. Do you try to rebuild it as it was? Or do you go with something completely modern, but with perhaps a few elements referencing past glory?
Before I saw Potsdam, I probably would have applauded the idea of recreating the historic buildings. But now that I have seen Potsdam, I’m afraid my vote would be firmly on the side of creating something new.
The so called historic centre was, for me, just a whited sepulchre.
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