What was striking about Potsdamer Platz by the 1960s, then, was the contrast between the memories (or, if you needed them, the pictures) of bustle and the utter desolation that had replaced it. By the 1960s, East and West Berlin, each in its own way, must have been among the least lively cities of their size in the world; the demoralized population on both sides of the Wall missed the activity and the personalities that typified early-twentieth-century Berlin. Potsdamer Platz thus embodied a Berlin state of mind in the 1960s, as it had half a century before.
