How Berlin became a Hip Capital

"Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never to being.")

(Karl Scheffler, author of Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal, 1910)

The ICE train hurdles at 120 mph through the flat-lands between Goettingen and Berlin. There are extra seats in the coach, Berlin is far enough from most other German centers to make flying faster. After glimpses of Wolfsburg and its Volkswagen factory the most noticeable things to see are wind turbines that stand in clusters on seemingly endless lush green fields. These are the landscapes of East Germany which Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor who died this week and who had overseen unification, promised to turn into bluehende Landschaften. (Flourishing landscapes).

Germany still has more open space than one thought possible. Then, rather suddenly, there is Berlin, a city and also a state with probably the most turbulent history in all of Europe. Peeling back the layers of this particular onion reveals much of what shaped this continent in the last 200 years. For many visitors, no matter the nationality, it also opens a personal history and relationship to one or the other of those periods, whether as an original actor or as the offspring or relative of perpetrators, victims, liberators and bystanders.

American soldier and German bicyclist in the destroyed
Berlin of 1945 (photo: Noel Shutt)

When Berlin was a divided city it was an island in the former socialist East Germany reachable only by air or via bumpy so-called "transit" autobahns that hadn't been repaved since Hitler had built them. Those routes couldn't be used by the "Easterners" residing to their left and right to leave their country. To ensure that nobody got away, control points on each end of the corridor back then already looked like those terrorism fortified check-points of highly secure locations look today: Zig-zag courses around concrete blocks, watchtowers, cameras and soldiers with machine guns and thorough inspections of each vehicle with underfloor mirrors and the like greeted travelers. Occupants often had to file through a building for interrogations. Then those procedures were seen as typical for a dictatorship, today we are submitting to them as part of daily routine.

Abandoned and obsolete: Border control-point Marienborn

This island past forms a benchmark with which to compare the contemporary Berlin. Back then the city wasn't the capital of Germany. West Germany had been reigned from increasingly permanent quarters in the small town of Bonn. (There, a brand-new parliament building, designed by the German architect Guenther Behnisch, had been completed right before the wall came down as symbol of an open democracy). In isolation Berlin's economy was difficult; it couldn't sprawl into its hinterlands, and industry shied away from the location's vulnerability. Life in Berlin was cheap and frequently subsidized. Only the really dedicated and those drawn by the low cost settled here, including hippies, artists and immigrants.

Before that period lay another past,one in which the international cultural center of Berlin fell to barbarism and dictatorship. The Mecca of science and art was to be re-incarnated by Hitler and his architect Albert Speer as "Germania, a world capital" only to wind up as a huge pile of rubble. This is another totalitarian benchmark, just as the even earlier time when Berlin and its small satellite town of Potsdam were the headquarters of the Prussians. Prussia and its kings were not only an imperial force but also one that laid many of the foundations of the modern state, such as mandatory free public education, social security and general health insurance. Frederick the Great in his Potsdam residence of Sans-Scouci (French for free of sorrow) had fireside chats with Voltaire and played music with the composer Bach junior.

American soldier next to a monument still
standing in the rubble of 1945 (photo: Noel Shutt)

Without Hitler and World War II, Berlin may have developed similar to Paris, London or Copenhagen. But some historians would caution that it wasn't just an accident or coincidence that the Prussian State degenerated into fascism and that the Nazi dictatorship did not descend on Berlin like the plague, but should be seen as part and parcel of a militant order, no matter how strong the influence of the enlightenment.

Berlin also was the locus of a German revolution in 1918, the birthplace of a short-lived democracy and the city of Rosa Luxemburg, a communist leader later murdered here and thrown into a canal. In the waning hours of the Weimar Republic the battle between communists and fascists took place in the streets of Berlin, with the more moderate center suffering in the middle. Twelve years later, after fascism was conquered, Stalin developed his own communist rule, enduring all the way to the construction of the wall in 1961 and its fall in 1989, famously causing US Presidents Kennedy (I am a Berliner) and Reagan (Mr. Gorbachev - tear down this wall) to address the Berliners on the west side of the wall .

East Germans taking down the still standing tower of the Garrison Church
in Potsdam in 1968

The Russians' radical anti-fascist agenda put a stamp on the eastern sector of Berlin and East Germany by wiping out many symbols and structures of history which represented imperialism and militarism. The Russian occupants went much further with that type of clean-up than the other allies, US, France and England. All blew up statues, monuments and symbols of the Nazis, but the western allies never took down historic structures such as the Altes Stadtschloss or the tower of the Garrison church in Potsdam, both destroyed for poliical reasons. Postwar Berlin suffered losses of historic buildings when western local government accommodated the automobile and glitzed up the western sector as the "storefront of the free West". The east meanwhile leveled entire sections of their sector to create their representation of "the workers and peasant paradise" with parade routes and the socialist monumentality of Stalin Allee and Alexanderplatz. In the battle of destroying symbols of bad power, communism lost: Its Palace of the Republic erected on the grounds of the Hohenzollern castle Altes Stadtschloss was torn down after unification and a replica of the Stadtschloss is almost finished.

Plattenbau in Potsdam (Photo: Philipsen)

To house the liberated workers the east regime built entire subdivisions of Plattenbauten, long rectangles of apartments consisting of prefabricated concrete panels stacked atop of each other. Many western subdivisions, especially those for social (affordable) housing, didn't look all that different. But the West subsidized homeownership, while the east discouraged it and denounced the own homes as a petit-bourgeois and capitalist ploy of tying workers up in mortgages. Since unification, so many of those socialist structures were taken down that there is now a backlash, and even a GDR (East German) museum that preserves socialist artifacts as an art form.

Advertising the DDR Museum with a vehicle of the former
Volkspolizei carrying the Hammer and Sickle symbol on the door

The debate about the civil war monuments in US cities such as Baltimore and New Orleans carries some of the purism that East and West Germans used to rid their respective republics of the vestiges that were considered unacceptable and incompatible with current values.
The socialist cleanup of Nazi-era symbols seemed perfectly reasonable at the time but it did nothing to help the eastern population come to terms with their past. To the contrary, while the western side eventually worked its way through various phases of guilt and repentance, the eastern officials and their people saw themselves on the right side of history and were quite smug about it, no matter that they keenly adopted oppression methods from their horrible predecessors. Once the wall came down, it was the westerners' turn to be smug. As a result, a comparably high percentage of easterners did a 180 degree turn to right-wing ideology when suddenly faced with asylum seekers and immigrants of cultures to which the westerners had gradually grown accustomed.

After unification the first intense but very short debate in this minefield of benchmarks and animosities was whether the united Berlin really could once again become the nation's capital. Ultimately there weren't very many good choices and the answer became yes, in spite of all the uneasiness. A massive effort was set in motion to fuse the two Berlins back together and fill the many voids the war and the wall had left behind. A lot of design talent was hired from abroad. Renzo Piano did a masterplan for the vast but empty land of what used to be Berlin's heart, Potsdamer Platz. The US American Chicago based expat architect Helmut Jahn designed a large building there, his first commission in his original home country.

Renzo Piano building on Potsdamer Platz (Photo: Philipsen)

Norman Foster was selected for what may have been the most difficult task: to rebuild the Reichstag, the heavily damaged home of the parliament that Hitler had so hastily dissolved. Architects and planners went out of their way to avoid the monumentality that could be reminiscent of Speer's Germania. Instead the idea was buildings in a park for the structures placed in a bow of the river Spree which were needed to house the chancellor and the various ministries. The color white, the material glass and a Bauhaus inspired architectural language prevailed. Yet, the result is still overpowering and immodest, especially the chancellery, which, with its 64, 413 m² (nearly 700,000 sf), became so huge that it completely dwarfs the White House, not to mention Downing Street #10. It actually dwarfs every government center in the world.

With sprawl having been kept at bay for so long, even today Berlin remains surrounded by pristine countryside in spite of growing pressure on the surrounding towns and villages to grow and provide space for commuters who can't afford to live in the city proper. After all, the metropolis of 3.5 million is growing at a whopping rate of 30-40,000 residents a year. Berlin is now what Prague had been right after the Iron Curtain had come down: A magnet for creatives, investors, innovators, speculators and criminals from all around the world. The modern Berlin is like the biblical Babel in terms of language but the aspiration for tall structures is limited to a few areas, while the rest of the center has to adhere to the historic Berlin "eave height limitation" of 22 meters (66'), which is still based on the limitations of fire ladders and has urban design effects similar those restrictions in DC.

Cranes over Berlin are symbolds of growth (Photo: Philipsen)

Even a dyed in the wool modernist has to admit that the most comfortable streets are those which are lined by low rise historic buildings and that traditional arrangements, like the western Savignyplatz on Kantstrasse or the monumental Gendarmenmarkt in the Stadtmitte (former east), beat the modern tall towers at the bottom of Kurfürstendamm and even of the competition-based design of Potsdamer Platz. These are now a neighbor to Scharoun's famous concert hall and Mies' National Gallery, which went from being isolated frontier posts to embedded puzzle pieces in the tenuous fabric of commercialism.

This is the style of contemporary Berlin, a style characterized by compulsiveness and fear, a style forged from economic calculations and returns on investment. It has produced buildings with the charm of a cash register, such as the O2 World indoor arena in eastern Berlin. And, in the west, there are wobbly papier-mâché variations of a self-assured Chicago style of capitalism, such as the 32-story "Zoofenster" high-rise, which is home to the city's new branch of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel chain. In between, there are countless facades of overwhelming cowardice.
The new architecture of Berlin (Photo: Philipsen)

The result is an urban wasteland that leaves observers baffled by or enraged at the couldn't-care-less attitude with which this city is being sold off cheap. And this couldn't-care-less attitude has a name: Klaus Wowereit.The mayor's urban-planning legacy is a city in investor style. It is his Berlin that can be seen here (Georg Diez in Spiegel online, March 22, 2013)

Nearby Potsdam, with its largely intact historic Altstadt and its world famous Schloss Sansscouci, is quickly becoming a destination for tourists that prefer the almost Disney like setting there over the hustle in Berlin. A few unimproved vestiges of the recent socialist past provide a stark contrast to the neatly restored old town. Potsdam is also the place where one can find one of the few widely accepted historic reconstructions of a previously completely destroyed building, the Barberini Palace. The project, designed by the architects Hilmer, Sattler und Albrecht Architects, finds cautious acclamation from the architectural cognoscenti. By contrast, the rebuilt Stadtschloss on the Museumsinsel in central Berlin mostly attracts scorn with its fake historic front and its giant post office look in the back.

The reconstructed Barberini Palace in Potsdam (Photo: Philipsen)

A few modern functional pieces of infrastructure stand out as instant hits that promise to easily pass the test of time. One of those is the marvelous new Central train station designed by the architecture firm of Gerkan and Marg. Gerkan won a court case because Deutsche Bahn had defaced his design by shortening the hall and changing ceiling panels, reportedly to save cost. Gerkan defended his work:

"This is not about dented pride," he said in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung... "It is a botched job. Today I know it was a grave mistake to believe I could soften the rail company's rigid stance by being obliging and open to compromise. How wrong I was."
Gerkan main station Berlin (Photo: Philipsen)

The station is Europe's largest, accommodating perpendicular track sets on three levels all under a gigantic cross shaped glass dome. Berlin's other big infrastructure project, the new Berlin airport slated to supersede the Tegel airport and originally scheduled to open in 2011, has become a monument to modern incompetence. In 2017 it remains a modern ruin prevented from operation because of massive problems with smoke evacuation systems.

GERMANS are not renowned for their sense of humour, but that has not prevented one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects from becoming a joke. Originally set to open in October 2011 at a total cost of €2bn ($2.15bn), Berlin Brandenburg Airport is still lying unused in the countryside south-east of the capital. Projected construction costs have risen to more than €6bn. The company that runs the airport, which is owned by the city of Berlin, Brandenburg state and the federal government, spends €17m each month in maintenance for the empty terminal building, while forgoing some €13m in rental income. Nobody was surprised when the airport’s boss announced last weekend that it would miss yet another deadline—its sixth so far. The airport is now scheduled to begin operating in 2018. (The Guardian, Jan 2017)

Gentrification and bifurcation are topics of ardent debate and complicated bills passed by the City Senate, its council. Renters are highly protected, Uber is highly regulated and rent control persists similar to New York City. The fight of the poorer segments of the population to hold on to their Berlin is overlaid by the fight of the East Berliners to maintain some pieces of their GDR identity against the western thoroughness of eradicating any trace of that past down to changing out templates for pedestrian traffic signals. A"victory" of that battle is that the east pedestrian symbol can be used by the various district (borough) DOTs as they like, and that a new souvenir enterprise has sprung up that is called Ampelmann. (Signal man). At times the victories are more significant, as in the case of the historic Tempelhof airfield. It was ripped from the hands of developers via referendum and is now Berlin's largest park, bigger than Tiergarten, the large traditional park that used to be the royals' fenced in hunting ground. Tempelhof now allows biking, hiking, kite flying and sunbathing on runways and the green strips in between, and has become Berlin's permanent cyclovia.

Ampelmann souvenir store (Photo: Philipsen)

Workers from throughout Europe are flooding into cafes and rehabbed Soviet-era buildings (Bloomberg News, July 28, 2016)

Even though the 28 years after Germany's unification exceed the reconstruction period after WWII (counting it to the point when the first oil crisis hit), Berlin remains a construction site. New mixed- use centers are rising everywhere.
Economically Berlin is not yet as thriving as all the cranes and hype about the hip capital would suggest. A 2016 report about Eurpes capital found that Berlin is still a drag on the nation's GDP.

Former Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit famously called Germany’s hip capital “poor but sexy.” Indeed, according to a new study, Berlin is the only major capital city in Europe that depresses its country’s per capita GDP.
The Cologne Institute for Economic Research set out to see how GDP would be affected if a country had to cope without its capital city

Subway construction and endless utility digs mar the pedestrian experience of this principally very walkable and very dense city. However, handicap access and complete street principles have not been a big focus. Time and again pedestrians are forced to cross the streets without marked crosswalks, or to dodge railings that interrupt what would otherwise be a straight path across intersections.

Berlin is still car centric in spite of its extensive transit network (Source)

Biking is hugely popular, but accommodations are similar to what they have been for decades. Bike lanes are either part of wide sidewalks, part of bus lanes or marked directly adjacent to traffic lanes. In 2017 seventeen bike riders died in Berlin traffic accidents. Pedestrians and bicyclists painstakingly obey the signals. That is a good thing, especially when drivers of high powered cars "burn rubber" upon their light turning green, seemingly a popular sport for those who want to give their luxury vehicles a quick exercise.

Bicycle path are frequently part of the sidewalks as
here in Potsdam (Photo: Philipsen)

Transit is a joy to use except for the high fares ($3.10) for a couple of miles and the complicated vending machines and zone structures, which are hard for visitors to penetrate even if they understand German. To compensate, buses offer onboard vending machines (Potsdam) or simple cash payment with change at the driver (Berlin). All-door boarding is allowed.for those who have passes, and many bus stops have real time displays showing that bus bunching and late buses are not entirely unknown here either, even in the heart of Prussian punctuality.

The regional trains, S-trains, subways and trams offer a 4 tier rail network, allowing one to get around easily and quickly, as long as one is not mobility impaired. Even large stations lack elevators or functioning escalators, and entry into trains is frequently not barrier free (at least not by US standards), but transport of bikes is possible even during rush hour. The trains are modern and clean, electronic displays of the upcoming stations standard, service frequent and very reliable.

Berlin's crime rate is low compared to Baltimore or Chicago. With 1.8 homicides per 100,000, it is only a third of New York City's rate (2012). About 100 murder or manslaughter victims the City per year is far below most comparable US cities. Various gang, turf and political battles are being carried out on the grounds of the capital, often originating from conflicts abroad. Not all are as peaceful as a group of demonstrators in front of the Russian Embassy observed earlier this week.

Police, barricades at the Brandenburg Gate (east side) (Photo: Philipsen)

And then there is the fear of terror attacks. Berlin experienced last year's IS inspired Christmas market attack on Breitscheidplatz. There is still a memorial for those victims on the steps of the church which stands nearby as a ruin dedicated to the memory of the last war. The area around the Brandenburg Gate had more police than there had been Volkspolizei during the times of Checkpoint Charlie. The avenue Unter den Linden was closed to traffic. The United Berlin is trying to wall itself off against an enemy who already lives within. The new wall is made from submersible bollards that, when in the up position, flash a red light.

In protection against terror the new Berlin is becoming quite like London and Paris. But on the hipster scale it beats them both by far. In this list Berlin is globally the second hippest place, right after Brooklyn, New York.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA