This chapter explores what it means for cleaners to enter the upperworld. It discusses how cleaners approach the upperworld, and interact with upperworlders. Forays into the upperworld constitute both blessing and curse. Through access, cleaners may gain insight, and stories, and the upperworld’s exclusivity may rub off onto cleaners. More often than not, however, the opposite is true. The more exposure cleaners get to the upperworld, the more they come face-to-face with an inflexible status hierarchy that poses a serious ongoing threat to their dignity. The issue is not just stigmatization and abuse by customers, but denial of the cleaners’ personhood. Cleaners are not passive victims, though. They frame their situation and debunk their environment in ways that provide them with a defensive superiority. To varying degrees, they confront upperworlders, sometimes just by making themselves seen and heard. As to escape from the indignities in the upperworld, cleaners also turn to the invisible underworld. Call it the Potsdamer Platz paradox: encounters between those who work and live in the upperworld and those who labor there out of sight tend to drive the worlds further apart.

This chapter explores how the spatial segregation of Potsdamer Platz is not a matter of architectural design, but rather a particular social mapping that interrelates with status. Potsdamer Platz is designed to reinforce status hierarchies that separate the upperworld and underworld. Whereas the upperworld is shiny and spacious, the underworld is dark, labyrinthine, cramped and malodorous. These worlds have distinct populations: shoppers, tourists, white-collar workers and wealthy residents above, cleaners and other workers below. The cleaners have access to the upperworld for the purpose of cleaning it, but the people from above cannot enter the underworld. It remains hidden, buried spatially and discursively, making cleaners into an invisible “presence from below.” However, cleaners experience themselves and their place at Potsdamer Platz not just as an invisible presence from below. They are part of a workers’ scene that extends from the corporate underworld to the upperworld. The underworld is also more than a dark and sticky space for them. They turn to it as a place of social encounters, of taking breaks and withdrawing from the gaze of managers and clients alike.

This chapter explores how cleaners experience and approach dirt. Dirt plays a pivotal role in their everyday work life. It matters not just symbolically but also in its very materiality. Working with dirt can feel cyclical, frustrating, painful and futile. It can threaten cleaners’ health, safety and their dignity. At the same time, cleaners also find in their work opportunities for earning an honest living, a sense of satisfaction and the respect of others. They enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when turning dirty spaces into clean ones. Working with dirt can allow for liberties, providing cleaners with a sense of autonomy. As much as dirt can disgust, it also fascinates cleaners. The pursuit of dirt can make their work exciting, fun, and even hot. All this shows how treating dirt as merely a source of shame, a common assumption in academia and public, does not do justice to cleaners’ lived experiences. This assumption risks reinforcing a stigma and deny that cleaners can approach what they do with both interest and motivation. Whereas dirt plays a significant, even starring role in the cleaners’ workplace dramas of dignity, it is but only one of many.

This chapter explores the cleaners’ relationships and interactions within their microcosm. It examines how cleaners show little interest in defining themselves as one group and articulating common interests. Friendships and coalitions as well as divisions and strife characterize the cleaners’ microcosm. Cleaners form alliances and divisions as they seek to establish a status hierarchy, by creating and enforcing markers of difference. These markers range from age, gender and ethnicity to fashion, cultural tastes and educational backgrounds. Some are subtle, some are stark. But despite these differentiations, a sense of equivalence persists, posing a threat to any sense of specialness. It is a negative equivalence of belonging to a stigmatized group of “anyones”. Cleaners wish to believe that their work and their presence are on some level unique and valued as such, that they are not interchangeable and replaceable; and to fortify their sense of worth they resort to the creation and enforcement of status hierarchies. Such constructions all too often rest on the most fragile of foundations, and the risk of collapse plays no small role in cleaners’ dramas of dignity.

This chapter sets out the case for studying cleaners’ dignity at work. It starts with a description of my arrival at Potsdamer Platz, of the cleaners and the corporate underworld. The overarching question concerning what happens to cleaners’ dignity in social interactions is developed, and the book’s central notion of “dramas of dignity” is introduced. The chapter ends with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

In the postscript, I discuss what happened to the cleaners after I left the field, focusing on the current work situation of some of the book’s main characters. I also point out how the more recent coronavirus crisis has affected cleaners. The developments are discussed in relation to the theme of dignity.

The conclusion starts with a description of me leaving the field as this made the status differences between the cleaners and me come to the fore. Following this, it explicates cleaners’ dramas of dignity by bringing together the findings of the previous chapters. It discusses the extent to which the book’s insights can be transferred to invisible service work, more generally. Placing these insights into their historical context, I discuss whether we are currently witnessing a return of the servant society. The book ends with a reflection on the encounter of two images – The Statue of Liberty and Harold Lloyd – in Potsdamer Platz’s underworld.