Sony Center: Potsdamer Platz needs a new name

Opinion Sony-Center

Potsdamer Platz needs a new name

As of 12:37 p.m | Reading time: 2 minutes

After 10 p.m. dead: Potsdamer Platz

Source: pa/Bildagentur-online/Schoening

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Hundreds of thousands of tourists have visited the Sony Center in Berlin over the past 25 years. But now it is largely empty and is being renovated. A new name is also being sought. But the problem with this property lies deeper.

DThe post-reunification period in Berlin is irrevocably coming to an end. The Tacheles becomes a luxury property, Frank Castorf left the Volksbühne a long time ago, and now the Sony Center is no longer called the Sony Center. A new name for the building complex once built by the Sony group is being sought.

With the property opened in 1998 on the northern part of Potsdamer Platz, capitalism has realized its feverish utopias for Berlin, which has once again become the capital, just as the theater did in the Volksbühne and the precarious artists in the Tacheles. And everywhere the whole new Berlin was built on the rubble of the old legendary Berlin.

Castorf’s Volksühne referred, among other things, to Piscator’s total theater in the same house from 1924-27, the Tacheles resided in the ruins of the Friedrichstadtpassage, the last large passage construction of that epoch, which Walter Benjamin devoted to in his “Passagen-Werk”. And the new Potsdamer Platz, with its showcase of the investor architecture of the time, only came into existence in the 1990s because its name conjured up a legend – the mythical metropolitan Berlin before 1933. Almost nothing but the name was left of it. In “Der Himmel über Berlin” Wim Wenders let the old actor Curt Bois wander about no man’s land and look for the world of yesterday.

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But the name was still there. And he was the symbolic capital that attracted real capital. After 25 years, the name is now also ruined. Everyone in Berlin associates “Potsdamer Platz” only with “soulless” architecture, empty shops, deserted cinemas and a deserted environment where you can’t drink beer after 10 p.m. It is therefore inconsistent to only rename the Sony Center, just as the shopping arcade on the south side was given the stupidly designed name “The Playce”. If things are ever to pick up again here, the whole of Potsdamer Platz will have to shed its name, which is inextricably linked to failed hopes.