The Once and Future Berlin

02.05.2001: Hover Institution: Policy Review

The Once and Future Berlin

By Victor Matus

A city in a constant state of becoming Berlin 2001

On a visit to Berlin in February, I found a city that was still a gigantic construction yard — cranes having become a permanent fixture of the cityscape. The Adlon was rebuilt in 1997, amid much fanfare. It had burned down during the Red Army’s occupation. Lorenz Adlon’s descendants insisted the hotel should only be built when the city was one. And so, 90 years after its first opening, the Adlon was back — as lavish as ever. "Berlin is now the fourth most visited city in Europe by foreigners, only behind London, Paris, and Rome,” the Adlon’s communications director, Sabine Held, tells me. "We want to be third.” Asked what image the city wants to convey now, Held admitted that that would have to be the heady days of Weimar. ("Why would you want to bring that back?” asks Franziska Lang, a Berlin archaeologist. "Weimar was a terrible time. We should be looking forward, not backward.”)

Across from the Adlon, the French embassy is being erected. On the same block as the hotel is the new British embassy. Down the block on Unter den Linden is the Russian embassy. "We’ve got over 100 embassies setting up shop in and around Berlin. Of course we are a Weltstadt,” says the speaker of the Berlin senate, Michael-Andreas Butz. "We are international too — the roof of our very own Reichstag was designed by Sir Norman Foster. Imagine if a German was to redesign Westminster Abbey?”

No one doubts that the Berlin Mitte district (which the wall had split), and particularly Pariser Platz on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate, have made phenomenal improvements. The center of the city has indeed shifted back to its historic location. And ghostly Friedrichstrasse in the former East is now competing against Kurfürstendamm in the West as a shopping and dining street. But parts of old East Berlin are still in need of much attention. And in the suburbs, where unemployment remains high, much reeducation of the "reeducated” is necessary. One member of the Berlin parliament who has gone to a few outlying neighborhoods to talk about democracy and freedom is Özcan Mutlu, a Turkish representative from Kreuzberg — one of Berlin’s minority-majority districts. "I couldn’t understand why I needed a police escort to visit a high school,” says Mutlu. "But when I arrived, I realized every one of these 15-year-olds was a skinhead. They couldn’t have cared less about democracy. They just kept shouting, ‘Why are you here?’ and ‘Why are you in our country?’” Mutlu grows frustrated, saying, "Unemployment among the small Turkish minority is in double digits, more than that among the native Germans. Can’t they add?” He explains that despite a new generation being born after 1989, their parents, who lived underneath the gdr’s welfare blanket, only tell them that life was much better. And a few older Germans tell these kids life was even better than that in the 1930s.

Meanwhile, city officials intend to rebuild the ancient Prussian residence destroyed during the last war and at the same time tear down the gdr’s Palace of the Republic. Both decisions have caused an eruption from every corner of Berlin. It has become a raging debate over both identity and the direction the city should be going. Says Butz, "Prussia is a part of our history. And there’s nothing really wrong with Prussian traditions. We are . . . [and here he pauses to come up with something positive] . . . punctual. Yes?” He also says that it is only natural for Germans to want back some measure of pride and patriotism. ("Patriotism?” asks Caroline Fetscher, a columnist with Tagesspiegel. "I just don’t think a people responsible for killing two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population has any business engaging in patriotism.” She adds, "Your Statue of Liberty and our Siegessäule are not exactly the same things.”)

The drive to tear down the Palace of the Republic is perceived by many East Germans as an act of arrogance by the Wessis. To those who lived under the communist regime, this is tantamount to erasing their history. Berliners ran into a similar problem when construction uncovered remnants of the headquarters of the ss, Gestapo, and the sd (ss security service). No one was quite sure what to do. Paving it over would be seen by some as an attempt to wipe away the city’s past crimes — an act of denial. Others saw a memorial over the site as focusing too much on the victims and not enough on the perpetrators. To date, the city block that once housed the killing apparatus of the Third Reich remains partially uncovered and kept as an exhibit entitled "Topography of Terror.” And just a few feet away from this excavation is one of the few remnants of the Berlin Wall.

Layers upon layers of history. A burden hard to fathom. And despite all that, almost all the Berliners I spoke with sounded optimistic. Take David Gill, a lawyer from East Germany who at the age of 23 was appointed head of the committee overseeing the newly released Stasi (East German secret police) files. He couldn’t feel better: "Sure we have our problems. But if you were to tell me in 1990 that, having been raised in a communist country, barred from studying law because my degree was from a religious school, that I could one day become a lawyer and visit the world and live freely, I just simply would not have believed you.” Özcan Mutlu asks, "In 10 years’ time? I am a pessimist. Rising debt is going to kill us.” But on further reflection, he admits, "even though we have this skinhead problem and debts to repay, there is no other city I would rather live in. Well, except maybe New York or Istanbul. But Berlin is where it’s at. Years from now, I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren, ‘Hey! I was there! I saw it all happen and did something about it.’”

Nor is this merely elite sentiment. A cab driver from the western suburb of Charlottenburg says, "Sure we’ve got problems—like immigration. People with no concept of capitalism who come to Germany expecting to get rich. But are things going to get better? Absolutely. It’ll all happen.”

And so Berlin in 2001 is finding its way out of the darkness of its past — still becoming, not quite being. In a way, it’s 1900 again. Berlin can still be called "the youngest European city.” The slate is clean. The choice of what comes next is Berlin’s alone, and the city has a chance to get the next hundred years right.