Berlin exists on the border of freedom and chaos – it’s why I keep coming back
War, reunification and a never-ending migration story have shaped Berlin into one of the most unconventional cities in Europe. But it’s this constant evolution – and the locals’ thrilling pursuit of abandon – that makes it so alluring, argues John Kampfner, in an exclusive extract from his new book
In October 1990, when the two Germanies became one again, when the two Berlins became one again, the impetus was towards a fresh start. Throw caution to the wind. Tear down that wall once and for all. Erase history. Put up monuments to “progress”.
Could Berlin, finally, be described as normal? The fall of the Wall precipitated another of its migration waves. Many from the former GDR (German Democratic Republic or East Germany) moved west, not so much to old West Berlin as to the smaller, more orderly small towns of the Federal Republic. Into their place came waves of foreigners and West Germans, snapping up cheap properties and wanting to savour what was left of the “original” Berlin. The city is now home to 3.5 million people, a third of whom did not live there when the city was brought back together.
In the 1990s, the chaos of the physical space gave it an immediate and unique selling point. Roughly a third of the buildings in the East had become vacant. DJs and musicians, the anarchic and entrepreneurial, set up clubs in abandoned warehouses and basements; artists set up studios. Nobody knew how long a venue would last, adding to the frisson of the new discovery. The music scene remains one of its biggest draws. Tomes have been written about the best-known venue, Berghain, its history as a former heating plant, its drugs scene, the sex, the music and the big names who tried, and sometimes failed, to get past the bouncers.
I talk about its allure to an Italian friend, Andrea, who moved to Berlin a decade ago “to seek a second chance” and to revel in its queer scene. He is to be found pretty much every weekend at Berghain. The rest of the time he has a senior job at one of the top e-commerce companies. Everyone he knows, foreign and German – and it seems he really does know everyone – goes for its sense of abandon. He says it is more than that. “Everyone,” he tells me, “comes to escape from something in their lives. And to walk on the border of freedom and chaos. Berlin and Berghain are magnets for the traumatised and for revelations.” No other city, he adds, comes close.
The city’s pull remains as strong as ever, giving rise to the same questions as have been asked down the centuries. Who is a Berliner? Whose Berlin is it anyway? As with the Huguenots, the Dutch, the Russians and the Jews, each group of new Berliners – German and foreign – challenges those who claim to understand the city best. English is now ubiquitous in the city, with many foreigners seeing no need to learn the native language. As for the hundreds of thousands of German incomers, they are lumped together by Berliners and ritually denounced as “Swabians”, a term that geographically locates them in the southwest state of Baden Württemberg (from which some but by no means the majority come). More than that, it denotes any of the following: well-to-do, bourgeois, square. In other words, not belonging.
Do these newbies assimilate into new Berlin and become “proper” Berliners? Or do they change it? The answer, as throughout the city’s history, is both. A city that wants to be global while paying little heed to globalisation, Berlin is one of the most unhurried of capitals. It is easy to get out of, and when you do, nature is never far away. But many parts of the city itself, for all its attempts at modernising, still retain the feel of the village, or rather a collection of villages knitted together. My years of traipsing from one end to the other, finding myself in the obscurest of settings, have left some of my Berlin friends quizzical. Many do not venture beyond their own neighbourhood. Berlin is quieter, quirkier, less consumerist – and cheaper – than equivalent cities. At least, it used to be. Housing has always been at the heart of political tensions.
Since reunification, the city has been growing on average by 40,000 people per year, many upwardly mobile people from other parts of Germany and abroad. Many low-income residents have been pushed further out. Yet the population is still below the peak before the Second World War. Germany has one of the lowest home-owning rates in Europe and, over the past decade, rent in the capital has more than doubled.
So much of what defines Berlin meets at the issue of housing: the city that has long prided itself on its socialism and working-class solidarity (but can never quite get its revolutions to succeed); the city that is suspicious of outside influences only to co-opt them; the city that always seeks to be different. Berlin does not want to be like New York or London. It wants to be at the centre of the world; but it also wants a quiet life.
The historian Benedikt Goebel attributes the problem to something more prosaic: a failure of planning. He has spent his career agitating for a new approach, curating an exhibition a few years ago at Berlin’s Stolen Centre. Yes, monuments and memorials are put up; yes, tourists flock to the Brandenburg Gate and the other sights; but, he argues, the historical heart of the city has been denuded of life. Part of this is the legacy of late-GDR architecture; some of it is global and contemporary.
There is another, more inspiring way of looking at the new Berlin. It is the city that continues to think hard about its difficult past, and how that past influences the future. Walk briskly past the hideous headquarters of Daimler and Sony on Potsdamer Platz and you will find the remnants of a railway terminus. Anhalter Bahnhof, and the area around it, is the Berlin story in microcosm.
Built in 1841, the station started relatively small. As the money rolled in, as Berlin grew in status and power, it was demolished and reopened in 1880, by both Kaiser Wilhelm I and Bismarck. The lavish terminus, the “gateway to the south”, would cater for four classes of ticket holders – with a separate entrance (and hotel) for royal and diplomatic visitors. At its peak in the 1930s, trains left the six platforms at Anhalter Bahnhof every three to five minutes, carrying 16 million a year, making it one of the busiest stations in Europe. Now only its façade remains, a husk, one of several 19th-century edifices that stand as a testament to human folly.
Albert Speer had more grandiose plans for a north-south axis, and the station stood in his way. Instead, the Nazis got diverted by the war, and so they used the station (one of three in the city, the others being Grunewald and the Moabit goods depot) to transport Jews to the gas chambers. On 2 June 1942 at 6.07am, a train carrying 50 elderly Jewish men and women left platform one for Theresienstadt, the first in a succession of death transports from Anhalter Bahnhof. On one single night, 18 months later, on 23 November 1943, a Royal Air Force raid reduced much of Anhalter to rubble, though some of the tracks survived.
By late 1945 and over two desperately cold winters, the area around the station became a tent city. Tens of thousands of Germans, forced out from their Eastern lands, arrived at the ruin, disoriented, with nowhere to go. A reverse caravan. Margaret Bourke-White, a Life magazine photographer, took a series of images of emaciated women and children filling every space, some clinging to the sides of those trains that managed to leave. “They began to resemble barnacles,” she wrote.
Over the last few years, whenever I walked past this desolate area, my thoughts turned to Germany’s willingness to take in the world’s most destitute – the more than a million refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and more recently a similar number from Ukraine. The migrant story never stops.
In 2022, it was salutary to stand on platform 13 of Hauptbahnhof, Berlin’s gleaming new central station, watching thousands of Ukrainians descending, bewildered, from special trains. They were greeted by volunteers wearing brightly coloured bibs, providing them haven. Many Ukrainians will return home; most of those from the Middle East and North Africa will inevitably become the next generation of Berliners, people who come from somewhere to seek solace in this of all cities.
Two museums aim to put the refugee story in a German context; both have deliberately been sited at Anhalter Bahnhof. The ground will be laid for a new Exile Museum that will tell the human stories of migrants around the world. Across the road, in a less grand building, an exhibition centre opened during the pandemic that marks one of the most important attempts yet to help explain Berlin’s confused identity: the Centre for Learning and Remembrance for Displacement, Expulsion and Forced Migration.
It focuses on the 12 million physically and emotionally scarred people, who had lost their homes in what had been German lands in the East, had to be hurriedly resettled and absorbed into post-war West and East Germany in just a few years. Every fifth person in Germany is from a family of expellees and yet for decades the issue was considered toxic. It scratches at a sore, asking the painful question of whether the Germans, the culprits, can ever be seen as victims. The great achievement of the museum is to remember German suffering without relativising that suffering. The columnist Jörg Lau describes it as “a house for the unhoused”.
Given all that it has been through, given the terror of many Berliners of being like others, what exactly does success mean for their city now? Is it about being a “world city” again, a status achieved only once in a brief period between 1871 and 1914? Does it want it? And what does it mean in a contemporary context?
I notice how small the Brandenburg Gate really is and how tiny it would have been if Albert Speer had got his way
For my last morning of research, I do what I have always promised myself I would never do. I decide to go up the TV Tower, communist East Berlin’s pride and joy, spruced up for the modern era. The furniture is still GDR best, all orange and brown – kitsch seemingly still sells. The vegan breakfast menu offers homemade carrot and pea dip, with lentil salad, sunflower seeds and soy yoghurt with granola. I choose the traditional option of hearty meats and cheeses. For the next two hours, I circumnavigate the city three times, hoping that an aerial view will provide further clues about the city’s future.
Blessed by a bright blue sky, I gaze down at Unter den Linden and all the landmarks. I notice how small the Brandenburg Gate really is and how tiny it would have been if Albert Speer had got his way. I get a sense of how the Humboldt Forum might, before too long, start to feel integral to the centre of the city. Turning back eastwards again, I see the dome of the New Synagogue glistening in the sun. Lenin no longer stands tall. But the Soviet legacy of concrete blocks is ever visible, unlike the Nazi legacy, which is thrust back onto the city through memorials.
Berlin never stands still. It is never satisfied. It never believes it has the answer. That is what makes this city remarkable, what draws the world to it and what impels me to keep coming back. You cannot see so much of Berlin’s history, but you can feel it everywhere. Berlin does not come together, but it somehow hangs together. From on high, as at ground level, it is still a work in progress, as it almost always has been. It is not a city in the conventional sense, but a succession of ruptures, each superimposing itself on what came before. Each era creates a new set of buildings and a new set of inhabitants, each embarking on the never-ending task of reinvention.
‘In Search of Berlin: A Story of a Reinvented City’ by John Kampfner is published by Atlantic Books priced £22