As I pack my baggage after 9 years in Berlin, I’m leaving a metropolis that appears to be trapped in a story of its personal decline.
Veterans say it has jumped the shark. Flats are unimaginable to seek out. Spots in day care are like hen’s enamel. The paperwork is mind-numbingly analogue. Gentrification has flattened its anarchic soul. The edginess has gone.
A few of this can be true. But it surely doesn’t replicate my expertise. To me, Berlin is on the high of its recreation, a metropolis that, if it weren’t so self-effacing, might virtually be the capital of Europe.
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Once I began out because the FT’s correspondent right here in 2016, all of it appeared a tiny bit provincial. Its folks have been notoriously surly and insular. On daily basis introduced a brush with “Berliner Schnauze”, the locals’ well-known rudeness.
Within the intervening years its laborious edges have been smoothed down. It’s grow to be much more worldwide and fewer mistrustful of foreigners. And, as English turns into extra prevalent, it has blossomed right into a sort of international village.
Prior to now 9 years I’ve seen Berlin welcome tens of 1000’s of refugees, first from Syria, then from Ukraine. It took in a wave of Brexit émigrés, determined to protect their ties to Europe. After which, particularly since 2022, it embraced the Russian intelligentsia-in-exile, the artists, writers and human rights activists fleeing Putin’s dictatorship.
It grew whereas holding on to its — relative — innocence. It’s a capital metropolis, sure, however not like London, looming over the remainder of the nation. The place isn’t dominated by banks, as a result of they’re all in Frankfurt. The large media conglomerates are in Hamburg, the carmakers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Berlin is numerous issues — the seat of presidency and a thriving tech hub — however it’s not at all a slave to Mammon.
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Meaning public area hasn’t been privatised the way in which it has elsewhere, and there are few of the dreary chains that make London excessive streets look so generic. Strangers you meet at events nonetheless appear much less inquisitive about what you do for a dwelling than your ideas on a sure “left-autonomous” technoclub or the newest premiere on the Schaubühne.
Nonetheless, those that say town has modified for the more severe do have a degree. A former mayor as soon as described Berlin as “poor however attractive”. Some say it’s now rich and boring.
Exhibit A — the Am Tacheles complicated on Oranienburger Strasse. It’s a former division retailer that was half-destroyed within the struggle after which taken over by an artists’ collective after the Wall got here down, turning into an emblem of Berlin’s unruly spirit. I keep in mind visits there within the Nineties, the large murals, the graffiti, the bizarre sculptures within the courtyard, the uncooked, scuzzy power of the place. Now it’s a posh of places of work, luxurious flats and high-end outlets, all glitzy and easy, with its personal personal for-profit pictures museum.
Then there’s the small matter of the €130mn Berlin’s authorities has slashed from town’s arts finances for subsequent yr. The cultural elite, lengthy used to a drip-feed of lavish subsidies, is in uproar: dozens of fringe theatre teams and artist initiatives might shut. An act of “self-inflicted cultural vandalism”, one outstanding director known as it.
However one thing tells me Berlin will get via. That is, in spite of everything, a metropolis that survived the near-death expertise of Allied bombing, and being on the frontline of the chilly struggle, cut up in two by a 4-metre-high wall for 28 years.
Regardless of all the pieces it’s nonetheless, within the phrases of 1 Irish buddy of mine who has lived right here for greater than twenty years, the world’s “largest assortment of black sheep”. It’s a sanctuary for renegades and misfits of all persuasions, who benignly coexist with their extra bourgeois Bürger neighbours. Regardless of the rising value of dwelling right here, it nonetheless appears to be stuffed with artistic folks doing God is aware of what however at all times wanting like they’re having the time of their lives.
And as anybody navigating its numerous development websites is aware of, it’s additionally a spot of sheer, unbounded potentiality. Because the artwork critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it’s a metropolis that’s “damned to maintain turning into, and by no means to be”. Once I lastly board the aircraft out of right here after almost a decade on this metropolis, will probably be that “becoming-ness” I’ll miss most.
E-mail Man at guy.chazan@ft.com
