Vol. 19 ˇ No. 4 ˇ Issue 61 ˇ Winter 2001 ˇ pp. 64-86 (23)

Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey

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Abstract

In November 1993, more than fifty years after patrons of the popular Café Josty on the famed Potsdamer Platz in Berlin came to enjoy a good cup of coffee and a piece of cake, or smoke a rare fine cigar before the bombs would raze the café to the ground, a hydraulic excavator's bucket stopped in mid-air and miraculously saved five white porcelain cups with the initials CJ engraved upon each one in red. The delicate cups had rested under no more than ten feet of loose soil and rubble near the place where the café's basement had been. The bombs that fell on the Potsdamer Platz between 1943 and May 1945 and a scoop by an excavator bucket bookend a series of perilous situations the cups survived. The East German regime sent tanks across the square during the uprising in June of 1953, and the wall separating Berlin was built right through the middle of it in August of 1961. After lying dormant and overgrown with weeds for many of its subsequent thirty years, the Potsdamer Platz was finally all but leveled; the Weinhaus Huth was the only building that escaped the dynamite and wrecker ball. The swing of the wrecking ball made room for the most controversial construction project in recent German history: the city-within-a-city Daimler-Benz would build on the Potsdamer Platz.