State Library: "Himmel über Berlin" ("Wings of Desire")

In reality, the whole of Potsdamer Platz is the setting for "Wings of Desire", but no other place in Berlin has changed so much after the fall of the Berlin Wall as this former wasteland, which today houses a completely new district with high-rise buildings, a shopping mall and theatres. The square no longer bears any resemblance whatsoever to the wasteland in Wim Wender's masterpiece.

The State Library at the edge of the Potsdamer Platz, however, is still the elegantly curved intellectual centre where angels once read people's thoughts and soared by the elegant camera of grandmaster Henri Alekin.