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City leaders hoped this too, but in 1990 long-term planning took a back seat to aspirations for a quick burst of progress. As we have seen, the Momper government immediately sold off large sections of the square to Daimler-Benz and Sony. Other plots went to Hertie, a West German department store chain, and to Asean Brown Boveri (ABB), a multinational engineering firm. The companies all planned to develop major projects on their properties, and they were more interested in making a big commercial splash than in fitting in to some larger aesthetic design. Nor were they overly worried about the historical ghosts. As Daimler-Benz’s cheerleading publicist explained to a visiting journalist, “Potsdamer Platz is a free land. It has no memory. It is a new country.” To reinvent the square, the developers hired famous architects like Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, José Moneo, and Arata Isozaki (Daimler-Benz); Helmut Jahn (Sony); and Giorgio Grassi (ABB). Daimler’s Isozaki was especially enthusiastic about his assignment because Berlin perfectly fit his definition of a city as “a thing perpetually in a state of ruin.” Echoing Albert Speer, Isozaki envisaged something like “ruin value” in the things he built. “For me,” he said, “the moment of ecstasy is when everything that is built vanishes in a catastrophe.” He and his colleagues saw the void in the middle of Berlin as a perfect place in which to build monuments to themselves.

It turned out, however, that the architects would not be allowed complete free rein. Stung by criticism that they were letting “a few fat cats’ checkbooks” determine the fate of the Potsdamer Platz (and, by extension, the rest of Berlin-Mitte), city officials decided that there needed to be a unified developmental plan for the square. Volker Hassemer, senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection, orchestrated a juried competition that in October 1991 awarded first prize to a plan submitted by two architects from Munich. It called for a continuation of Berlin’s traditional height limit of thirty meters (Berlin was not to be “Frankfurtized” by a bunch of skyscrapers); the salvage of remaining historic structures; and a “mixed use” development that balanced retail, entertainment, office, and residential needs. The idea here was to ensure that the new Potsdamer Platz, like the Potsdamer Platz of old, functioned as a diverse and “living” part of the city.

One might question, of course, whether metropolitan liveliness could be planned at all. In the immediate context, however, the problem was how to reconcile the planners’ ideals with those of the developers and architects. There ensued a wearisome series of negotiations that set the tone, and many of the standards, for the continuing debate on the development of the city. The municipal government’s side in these negotiations was articulated by its new building commissioner, Hans Stimmann, who one commentator likened to Baron Haussmann, the rebuilder of Paris under Napoleon III. Those who believed that Berlin must continue to develop along traditional lines—whatever they were—could not have had a more forceful advocate. The stocky, white-haired Stimmann, who was born in Ltibeck and trained as a mason, was convinced that there was indeed a core Berlin aesthetic, which he called the “classical modern,” and he aimed to protect this ideal from its newest enemies: the horde of international architects who wanted to do for Berlin what they had done in places like Hong Kong and Toronto. Germany’s metropolis was special, Stimmann insisted, and it had to be treated as such. “Berlin was totally destroyed by the bombs and after the war it was totally destroyed by the planners,” he declared. “Berlin is the only city in the world where the inner city is empty. We must bring this city back so that when we look in the mirror, we will know that it is our face. If we look like Hong Kong or Tokyo, nobody will come. Berlin must look like Berlin.” With his doctrine of “critical reconstruction” Stimmann found some influential allies, most notably the architect Josef Paul Kleihues, the architectural historians Vittorio Lampugnani and Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, and the publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler, who wrote frequently on the necessity of maintaining a sense of history and continuity in the Spree metropolis.