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Reinventing Berlin
The inscriptions in telephone booths in Kreuzberg, `Fuck the Police', are leftovers from another era, like last-election posters no one bothered to remove. Of course the Deutsche Telekom is too busy to scrub telephone booths: the company has webbed Berlin with 62,000km of high-speed fibre optic cable, and by 2000 every household will be plugged.
This is the densest fibre optic network worldwide, reflecting the new role history has thrust on Berlin. After The Wall, and communism, collapsed in 1989, Berlin is becoming the European capital for communications, trade and culture - "a stepping stone between East and West."
In World War II Allied bombing and Soviet attacks reduced Berlin to rubble, then The Wall dissected the city in 1961. Today the derelict slash that marks the course of The Wall, miles long and several hundred feet wide, is a forest of construction cranes. Potsdamer Platz, Europe's busiest square in the 1930's, is now Europe's largest construction site. Sony and Daimler-Benz, along with several other corporations, are creating a 3.5-billion-dollar complex of office and apartment towers, shopping malls, cinemas, theatres, cafes and restaurants, an underground railway station and an artificial lake. Elsewhere, Berlin is undergoing a 135-billion-dollar makeover - the most ambitious urban-renewal project ever - as the German government prepares to move to the new capital.
When I visited this high-energy city in November, it drew me into its air that crackles with action and expectations. The grey cloak of clouds and the city's smell of tar, coupled with the sour faces in the Underground, give the city an industrial feel - gritty and grimy. I felt a sense of buzzing and urgency. One night I met Jane Delta, an English woman making it as part-time model, part-time DJ; one of the stream of young people moving to Berlin. I asked her what attracted her.
"I couldn't make it in London and Berlin is happening," she replied. "People are doing things."
Meanwhile, for the 3.5 million residents the pivotal point was The Wall. They titled this historical turning point The Wende, meaning The Change. During the East-West divide Berlin squatted in the crater of the simmering Cold War volcano. Living on subsidies siphoned from the government, Berlin was an island whose existence represented "the stabilization of the impossible." It lured people on the social and political fringe, who found a home in Berlin's `alternative' lifestyle. They came for Berlin's reputation as a refuge for artists and anarchists, and for young people who wanted to dodge the national service. Many squatted in abandoned buildings, raised graffiti to an artform, and fought the police who tried to chuck them out of squats.
Arts and culture flourished. Galleries of post-modern art, bars with arty decor and original music, clubs spanning the whole spectrum of interests - Berlin has one of the liveliest cultural scenes in the world. And the local government's 760-million-dollar arts budget supports 3 operas, 6 symphonies, and more than 100 theatres.
Today the surviving piece of The Wall that people haven't hacked to pieces, called the East Side Gallery, is another leftover. It stands between the river Spree and an arterial traffic road, Muhlen Strasse. I strolled along the mile-long stretch one morning, as traffic roared past and 4 Japanese gleefully clicked their compacts. No one else hung around. Even the travelers who had camped in old trucks and buses behind The Wall have left. If you don't know it is The Wall, you would probably reason it is the wall of a scrap-yard; there are heaps of rubble and corpses of cars behind it. A message says: "East Side Gallery - the largest open-air gallery in the world." Every centimetre of The Wall is covered with paintings expressing political freedom, environmental action, and the shades of human obsession, emotions and oppression. One painting shows Soviet Premier Brezhnev and East German leader Honecker locked in a mouth-to-mouth kiss, with the inscription: "God, help me survive this deadly love."
In post-Wall Berlin the centre is shifting to the former East, between the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz. Around the corner the government is restoring the former parliament, the Reichstag, that was torched into a singed shell in 1933. The horse-drawn chariot topping the Brandenburg Gate looks over Unter den Linden - Berlin's grand boulevard. It's a six-laned road flanked by baroque and neoclassical buildings, facades of marble columns and statues dedicated to Prussian war victories. Strolling and taking it in it was hard to imagine that these buildings were bombed to crumbling shells in the war; the East German authorities re-created them piece by piece over 20 years.
Around here are most sites in Berlin: Checkpoint Charlie Museum that details how 5,000 East German made daring escapes to the West, Museum Island, Gendarmenmarkt with its churches. And in the central northeast districts of Mitte and Prenzlaur Berg the last anarchists squat in graffiti-draped buildings, and weekend-throngs of West Germans swing to the hip bars, cafes, clubs and art galleries.
To appreciate Berlin's size sprawled over 900km2 - 8 times larger than Paris - I went up to the revolving caf‚ in the TV Tower, Berlin's highest point at 206 metres. I recognized the parks that cover a third of Berlin, the Berliner Dom's green domes, and the largest synagogue's golden-yellow-gilded dome. The river Spree snaking through Berlin looked like a sedate black serpent whose skin's scales trembled in the breeze.
The physical difference between East and West is evident in the East's shabbiness - potholed pavements, facades scarred with chipped bricks and wartime shrapnel, weedy courtyards - and Stalinist architecture. Blocks of cement and glass towers loom over Alexanderplatz, a frigid and grey square; I felt as though I stood in the stomach of a gigantic cement creature. Further east is Karl Marx Allee, a bleak arterial road several miles long. Carbon-copy identical apartment blocks, one after the other, line both sides of the road. The white-marbled facades fail to breathe life into the apartments that housed top bureaucrats of the ex-GDR. No restaurants and shops add flair at street level, and few people walked about. An open-air market of food and clothes stalls, and a whiff of roasting Currywursts (sausages), was the only sign of habitation. After 2 hours ambling along the ambience chilled me, and I backtracked to the cafes-bars - wooden warm, welcoming, and creatively original.
It's in the cafes, bars and clubs that Berlin's bohemian lifestyle pulsates day and night. Anarchy as a way of life may be history, but at night, when the Germans stop bickering about German society and bureaucracy, anarchic Berlin springs into action. The new code is to work hard and party hard.
© Victor Paul Borg
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