Berlin – A City of Transformation

I wasn’t excited about spending time in Berlin. I’d been in East and West Berlin in 1979 on a college choir tour and remembered only the bleakness of the eastern city and the brashness of the western one. It wasn’t a city I thought I’d ever need to visit again. Besides, we were pretty exhausted after our time in London (as this photo that Hunter took on the plane shows), and Berlin didn’t seem like it was going to be a place where we could catch our breath.

Berlin isn’t an easy city, by any stretch, but things have certainly changed in the last 30 years. Some of the old landmarks are still here to help you get oriented. The Brandenburg Gate (the grandest and sole-survivor of Berlin’s 14 city gates, erected in 1791), The Reichstag (Germany’s Parliament building), Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (the bombed-out ruins left standing as a silent memorial to the destruction of WWII), and Check Point Charlie (the key border crossing between East and West Berlin) —though now it’s merely a tourist photo destination. But the wall, erected by the Soviets in 1961 to keep their citizens in East Germany (to stem the flood of talent that was leaving the country following the soviet occupation of East Berlin post-WWII) came down in 1989, and East Berlin has been a city in transformation ever since. Instead of being the place of depressing oppression and drabness I remembered, the city feels vibrant: it’s filled with life at all hours of the day. Of course, that may have been helped by the fact that prostitution is legal here, but it wasn’t just the working girls who were out at night. At midnight, people were walking dogs and biking as if it were midday.

 

The only remnants of the wall still standing are memorials or art canvases. The East Side Mauer (Wall) Gallery is the largest outdoor art gallery in the world!

Building walls, shorn up in repairs and restoration work following the bombing damage of WWII, have become art canvases too. Works by some of the world’s most famous graffiti/street artists can been seen here. Vacant buildings, left empty after the wall came down, have become places for squatting artists to set up studios. You can learn about one of the major “squats,” Kunsthaus Tacheles, here. Street art and street theatre grew up in the days after the wall, making Berlin a very happening place for artists, actors and musicians alike. It’s as if the falling of the wall and the ensuing chaos created fertile soil for creativity. That, and the fact that the rents are cheap, has drawn folks from all over the world to move to Berlin. The only problem is that as more and more tourists are drawn to the city, rents are going up, which isn’t good for the locals. There is, in fact, a pretty strong anti-tourist sentiment here for that very reason.

Each part of the city has its own feel. Museum Island, in the heart of the city and in the middle of the Spree River near Humboldt University, had a treasure trove of museums to explore . . . along with the bastion of Protestantism, The Berliner Dom (with statues of reformers keeping watch over worshippers). The bohemian feel of the Mitte area was delightful–in what used to be East Berlin—where art work adorned virtually every vacant building wall.

 

Prenzlauer Berg in the north had the youngest vibe . . . especially on Sunday, when Mauer Park filled with thousands of people for a wonderful weekly flea market and music fest in which performers set up throughout the park to entertain and families take picnic nearby.

In Kreutzberg, you could still feel the presence of the Turkish immigrants who have been there for years in shops and restaurants that tempted you with wonderful sights and smells. And in Central Berlin, there was the Tiergarten Park with its many memorials . . . and Potsdamer Platz (Plaza) giving testimony to the birth of the modern city in former West Berlin with the impressive Sony Center (where English language movies play near the German Film Museum).

It’s truly amazing how a city can open up when you have time to explore it! I especially liked the “Bear-lin” Bears!