On the 20th of July 2021, the Humboldt Forum opened its doors to the public. Two palaces, occupying more or less the same location, had been demolished within half a century, and a ghostly pastiche of the first had been constructed in their place. The rapid oscillation between differing political systems have left their mark across the whole of Berlin but perhaps nowhere as dramatically as the centre of the Spreeinsel. The fate of this plot of land has become emblematic of the ongoing battle for the soul of the city in the aftermath of unification. In 1997, Andreas Huyssen wrote that “Berlin may well be on the way to squandering a unique chance” when it came to filling the voids in the city’s landscape and collective memory. Two years later, Daniel Libeskind - who had just completed the Jewish Museum in Berlin and thus knew a thing or two about the difficulty of filling those voids - warned that the pressing of a “historical reset button” would produce kitsch. The Humboldt Forum’s opening within those plastic-Prussian facades confirms both of those concerns.

The art critic Karl Scheffler’s 1910 description of Berlin as a city “condemned forever to become and never be” seems to pop up everywhere - especially when researching bitterly contested city developments in the last 30 years. It’s also something that tour guides tell their clients when they complain about all the construction in the city, in the hope that Scheffler’s wistful words are charming enough to distract from the seemingly constant soundtrack of jack hammers. Unfortunately, it underpins an attitude that is often used as an excuse for city projects that are invariably fraught with budgetary, administrative and sometimes even structural issues. After the initial grumbling comes the collective, defeated shrug - if our international airport can open nine years behind schedule, then anything is (im)possible. This can be partly explained by the economic doldrums the city was in in the years following reunification. Until very recently, Berlin was seen by much of the rest of Germany (or at least the parts of the former West Germany) as an economic disaster zone, riddled with dysfunction. To put it simply, Berliners expect a certain level of teething problems with every major project and the Humboldt Forum had those in abundance.

Subscribe now

An opening that was two years behind schedule and questions over who was actually going to foot the bill for such an ambitious undertaking are the type of issues that are par for the course for any project of this magnitude in Berlin. There was also an embarrassing resignation from a member of the advisory board who suggested that the Forum was being used as a smokescreen for dodging tough questions regarding the provenance of items from Germany’s former colonies. Bénédicte Savoy suggested that there were desperate attempts to stop the “radiation” of these controversies leaking out, describing the project as “like Chernobyl”. None of this is ideal but we should not let those issues get in the way of a more fundamental problem - this building should simply not exist in its current form. It represents a continuation of a clumsy and damaging policy with regards to the GDR and the experiences of its former citizens. Furthermore it represents a turning back of the clock to a supposed ideal time in the city’s history, wiping away the footprints of subsequent eras both good and bad from the landscape and ignoring one of the city’s true strengths - the wild eclecticism of its buildings and the meanings that they impart.

A residence of some kind had occupied the site since the late 15th Century but what is supposed to greet visitors today - unless they approach from the east and are met with Franco Stella’s incongruously contemporary facade - is an approximation of what the palace looked like in 1918, around the time that the wildly unpopular Kaiser Wilhelm II was driven into exile by a population no longer willing to tolerate the wasteful carnage of the Great War. His dynastic ancestors the Hohenzollerns had ruled Brandenburg, Prussia and eventually all of Germany in various forms for centuries, but like many - though sadly not all - old European royal families who had outstayed their welcome at this particularly tumultuous time in history, it was time to go.

Although the palace saw significant modifications in the century leading up to the last Kaiser’s demise, it was Andreas Schlüter’s construction at the beginning of the 18th Century that forms the basis of what was rebuilt in recent years. Schlüter’s baroque design came to dominate and define the centre of what was still at that point a small provincial seat of power but one that was about to go through a great period of growth and change. Particularly in the latter half of the century when Frederick II (‘The Great’) was on the throne, Prussia would begin to emerge as a significant European power for the first time. Around the palace can still be found architectural clues from these subsequent giddy periods in Berlin’s history. Schlüter’s fingerprints are all over the former Zeughaus or ‘Royal Arsenal’ to the north-west of the palace, Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s neo-classical Altes Museum, built in the afterglow of Prussia’s part in Napoleon’s demise lies to the North. Finally, to the north east lies the Berliner Dom, a somewhat garish but undeniably fun neo-renaissance cathedral ordered, unsurprisingly, in a fit of imperial chest beating by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Those last two buildings certainly have their flaws and detractors but what more than makes up for that is the stories they tell, the way it is possible to trace the history of the city through their forms. They fit into the Berlin tradition of statement architecture, of power and aspiration manifested through construction.

To those with even a cursory understanding of Berlin’s history it seems almost redundant to explain why the 18th Century Schloss no longer exists. After a post-imperial period where neither the governments of the Weimar Republic nor the squalid dictatorship of the Nazis saw fit to use the building for any notable official capacity, it was significantly damaged during World War Two and completely levelled in 1950 by Soviet / East German authorities with little appetite for rebuilding a structure emblematic of the kind of Prussian bluster that was widely seen at that time, including within other parts of Germany, as being partly responsible for two world wars.

The GDR government, faced with a gaping void in the historical centre of Berlin, opted to fill it with a new type of palace, one explicitly for the people. Emily Pugh suggests that it was also a resurrection of the pre-Nazi model of the Kultürhaus - a type of community hub for meeting, education and entertainment that was briefly popular among German socialist communities. The Palast der Republik, completed in 1976, was home to the GDR Volkskammer (Peoples or Parliamentary Chamber) as well as a huge congress hall but what brought the crowds - 11.8million visitors in the first year alone, according to one west German media outlet - were the cultural and leisure facilities: the exhibition spaces, numerous cafes and bars, the youth club, the discotheque and the bowling alley. The choice of location was of course, not a coincidence - although the GDR regime would flirt with the appropriation of Prussia’s legacy both near the beginning and end of the state’s existence, there was still a general desire to wipe away the more glaring emblems of the Prussian state. It was also an example of the kind of statement architecture that had characterised the immediate surroundings for centuries but unfortunately for some was a statement made by a type of regime and in a particular style that decades later was deemed to have no place in such a prestigious location.

Subscribe now

There were predictable howls of derision from western media at the time. Despite the often clear overlap of influences and styles with contemporary projects in west Berlin such as the enormous ICC Congress Hall opened three years later, Pugh asserts that “many critics assumed that GDR architects, and thus architecture were utterly cut off from developments in the rest of the world”. Some critics also seemed to ignore the fact that, despite the supposedly radical ideas of its architects, the building was clearly influenced by a loose grouping of styles under the umbrella of modernism that briefly thrived in Berlin decades earlier in the pre-Nazi period. Surely a building that made a link, a historical continuity with such a lauded architectural period from the city’s history deserved pride of place? This was sadly not a view shared by those who were perhaps content to see that brief flourish of modernism be washed away by jackbooted reactionaries in the first place.

These opinions are not restricted to a time when Cold War tensions could perhaps be viewed as mitigating the more extreme responses to the Palast der Republik by western critics. An article in the Economist from 2015 casually describes the building as an “architectural atrocity.” However, the positive description later in the same article, of the upcoming Humboldt Forum as an “agora of globalisation” would perhaps suggest a certain political bias on behalf of the writer in the employ of a grubby neo-liberal pamphlet .

There was another element of criticism of a kind that would come to characterise the uneven East / West German relationship both before and after the unification process. The GDR citizens visiting - and reportedly rather enjoying - their visits to the Palast der Republik were derided by some western critics as being too easily distracted by low-brow pursuits such as drinking and socialising in the bars to even notice how supposedly garish and cheap the building was. This type of reaction is a typically dangerous and unhelpful template of GDR citizens - if they were not shown to be suffering under the supposed unrelenting misery of communism, if they appeared in any way to be making the most of whatever they had, they were often depicted as naive and uncultured. Years after its demolition, there is also an attempt to misrepresent how the Palast der Republik was actually used. Wolf Burchard points out the supposed irony in the fact that “while its architectural style was a clear repudiation of its predecessor’s elitism, it became the stage for all the great celebrations and banquets of the communist elite.”. That it was used by the party officials is correct, but it is of course only half of the truth and deliberately obscures and ignores the popular use of the Palast der Republik.

The Palast der Republik was closed in September 1990, near the end of that chaotic period between the opening of the checkpoints in the Berlin Wall and the unification of the now sixteen German states. The building was not only inseparable from an undeniably corrupt, oppressive and collapsed regime but was also riddled with asbestos. The latter issue was one it had in common with the International Congress Centre, although the hulking congress hall still stands in the far west of the city today, having undergone a hugely expensive renovation in recent years. Scandalously, when it came to Palast der Republik however, the asbestos was carefully removed and only then was a resolution passed to demolish what was left.

When Andreas Huysmann wrote ‘The Voids of Berlin’ in 1997, the debate to rip down the Palast der Republik and build some approximation of the old Prussian palace was very much underway. Huysmann warned that the 1990s rush to remove or change many of the monuments, buildings and symbols of the GDR was often (but not always) unnecessary, arguing that it represented a ”a strategy of power and humiliation, a final burst of Cold War ideology” It would, at the very least, he suggested, create an increase in rose-tinted Ostalgie - the nostalgia for the East (Ost) that many former GDR citizens were beginning to feel in the economic slump of the late 1990s. At the time of Huysmann’s essay, disaffected Germans living in former GDR states were drifting into the arms of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) - a party that emerged from the ruins of the SED, the Marxist-Leninist ruling party of the GDR. If only Huysmann could have seen twenty years into the future when many of those same regions would become the centres of power of a new party that tapped into feelings of resentment, humiliation and fear that have festered in some of those areas since unification. The AFD (Alternative for Germany) party, Germany’s most successful far-right party since the war, has exploited those very feelings to make enormous gains particularly - but not solely - in these areas in recent federal elections. It should be said that the party’s often rabid anti-immigration stance forms the core of their platform but their reactionary populism also seems to have won them a great deal of support from those in the former GDR states disillusioned by the modern German state.

Carol Anne Costabile-Heming sees the decision to replace the Palast der Republik with the home of the Humboldt Forum as symptomatic of a worrying trend “to reject structures and practices from the former East in favour of the perceived ‘better options from the west” which, apart from a further stripping away of the identity of the GDR state and its former citizens, “distorts the memory of the historic space through the erasure of the GDR’s presence.”. Beyond that, she warns that turning the clock back to the final spasms of the German Empire purposely avoids confrontation and discussion not only of the GDR and its victims but also the Nazi period.

As the debate raged throughout the 1990s about whether to preserve the Palast der Republik or to rebuild the royal palace, the motivations of the various interest groups in favour of the latter option began to emerge. Naturally, a subject of this nature attracted a predictable array of fringe fantasists excited by a return of Royal Prussia or Imperial Germany . The most impactful of the interest groups responsible, such as the Berlin City Palace Sponsoring Association claim to be fundamentally concerned with restoring the architectural balance of the area, as if there was a specific moment in time that these buildings, with their disparate styles and meanings all made some kind of harmonious sense. But by turning the clock back to a particular point in time, they are explicitly favouring that era over others. How can this possibly be viewed as an unpolitical act? How is it possible to deride Ostalgie whilst gazing misty eyed into a distant past when the people simply had to cross their fingers and hope that whichever interbred monarch occupied the throne at the time wasn’t one of the mad ones that seemed to pop up with alarming frequency?

Subscribe now

The fundamental problem with nostalgic gestures is that they are almost always grounded in fantasy, which at its most harmless can result in a Disneyfication of place and meaning and at its most dangerous can help to feed the type of nostalgic populism oozing out across the globe at this precise moment. The very idea of a Berlin ‘golden age’ is preposterous in the first place. Even between the two wars during that brief flourish of possibility beloved by many on the left - the Weimar Republic - great swathes of the population were pretty miserable.. The vast majority of Berliners were too busy trying to feed their children to have the time or energy to appreciate the burgeoning artistic, political and sexual revolutions happening around them. At least though, the ideas that were emerging were seeking to improve conditions for the masses rather than to display symbols of wealth and power for their own sake. Walter Gropius in his 1919 ‘Manifesto of the Bauhaus’ promised “the new building of the future…..which will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith” (Kolocotroni et al 302) If we must look into Berlin’s past for inspiration it should be into city’s rich history of revolutionary and avant garde design. Gropius, by the way, was not some kind of fanatical futurist, intent on smashing the old in order to build the new - he notably intervened to stop the demolition of the former Museum of Applied Arts (today’s Gropius Bau), built by his uncle in 1881, showing that it is indeed possible to wish for a broad and representative range of styles in Berlin´s architectural landscape.

The sheer range of possibilities that opened up post-unification was bound to create and foster division. As Lutz Koepnick put it: “In particular the remaking of Berlin into a capital city of both collective memory and trans-national appeal seems to be on everyone’s mind”. Scheffler’s description of Berlin always becoming but never being was of a very different city but it remains useful in understanding the ongoing battle fought over every single one of these contentious locations. It’s worth bearing in mind that two of the most admired buildings to have been completed within that period faced some tough opposition from exactly the same kind of forces that backed the rebuilding of the Schloss.

Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum is a moving and powerful work that speaks to (almost) everyone who enters but it required the Berlin authorities to make a giant leap of faith for it to happen in the first place. The job of building the museum was given to a man who had never actually built anything up to that point and upon being awarded the contract promptly handed back a request for double the budget he had been allocated. More importantly, in the face of suspicion from those appalled by the deconstructivist approach, what Libeskind provided the city with, is a provocative building that refuses to provide either easy answers or redemption. James Young suggests that the aim of the building “is not to reassure or console but to haunt visitors with the unpleasant - uncanny - sensation of calling into consciousness that which has been previously - even happily - repressed” That such a design was accepted and embraced is testament to the fact the tradition of radical architecture and design still has a place in Berlin.

Slightly more recently, the reconstruction of the Neues Museum - a short walk from the Humboldt Forum and tucked behind Schinkel’s Altes Museum - was also a subject of much debate. Of the original five museums on the island, the Neues was the one that suffered the most devastation during the war. Restoration work only began very slowly in the 1980s but it wasn’t until 1999 that David Chipperfield was selected to rebuild the museum. Although his proposal was far less challenging than that of Libeskind’s for the Jewish Museum, it also faced great opposition from similar quarters. Chipperfield’s idea was to maintain and restore as much of the old structure as possible but in an honest and poignant manner, to make no attempt to mask the destruction of the building, whilst never overwhelming or distracting from the collection itself. It’s a masterpiece and widely viewed as such these days but because Chipperfield did not embark on a faithful reconstruction, the Gesellschaft Historisches Berlin e. V. (Historical Berlin Society) contacted Unesco and suggested that Museum Island should be put on the list of sites in danger of losing their Unesco Heritage Status. This same group that had behaved like an apoplectic toddler in this case was predictably one of the key backers of the rebuilding of the palace that now houses the Humboldt Forum.

None of these arguments are going to go away any time soon, and neither should they. It is healthy for a city to have opposing voices making themselves heard - certainly more healthy than the dominance of a mindset that favours rolling back to a fantastical and fictional point in Berlin’s history when everything was just right. Where exactly does that road end? Should we also destroy all of the remaining Nazi era structures in the city because they too are symbols of a brutal regime - one that, let’s not forget, was far, far more brutal than the GDR? We still use the old Olympic Stadium from 1936, for example. Perhaps though, it is allowed to stand because in its ham-fisted neo-classicism it just about fits into the narrow field of styles acceptable to the sort of traditionalists and reactionaries behind the rebuilding of the palace.

I visited the Humboldt Forum a few days after it opened and despite my obvious prejudices found myself rather enjoying the experience at first. Although Stella’s interior is occasionally reminiscent of an airport terminal, it is not without its charms. It was also quite poignant to see such a large number of people (presumably) enjoying the place, especially after such lengthy, bleak periods of Covid lockdown. There are frequent nods to the old Palast der Republik, in the form of displays and even some of the old signage directing people toward the bowling alley and the youth club. It all feels rather tokenistic, I thought, but better than nothing. Tucked away on an upper floor however, was a small terminal where one could watch footage of the events that took place in the Palast der Republik during the strangest time in its history. In the brief interim period between the removal of the asbestos and its complete destruction, the Palast der Republik was used for the staging of wildly innovative performances and exhibitions including one where visitors could explore the temporarily flooded building in little rubber boats. One of the clips that I and a gaggle of frowning German pensioners huddled around was of a concert held there in 2006, by the Berlin industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten (‘collapsing new buildings’). The footage was incredibly raw and affecting not just because of the incredible racket made by Neubauten but precisely because of where it was shot. It represented a brief period when the shell of a people’s palace was being used exactly as it should, as a showcase for all of the variety, innovation and freedoms that Berlin excels at. It represented an opportunity lost forever.

Einstürzende Neubauten in the Palast der Republik, 2004

Subscribe now

Bibliography

• Young, James E ‘Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture’ Jewish Social Studies New Series, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 2000), pp. 1-23 (23 pages)

• Burchard, Wolf ‘Royal Remains’ Apollo Magazine, March 2016

• Huyssen, Andreas ‘The Voids of Berlin’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 57-81

• Pugh, Emily ‘Architecture, Identity and Politics in Divided Berlin’ University of #Pittsburgh Press

• Koepnick, Lutz ‘Forget Berlin’ The German Quarterly , Autumn, 2001, Vol. 74, No. 4, Sites of Memory (Autumn, 2001), pp. 343-354

• Costabile-Heming, Carol Anne The reconstructed City Palace and Humboldt Forum in Berlin: restoring architectural identity or distorting the memory of historic spaces? Journal of Contemporary European Studies Volume 25, 2017 - Issue 4: City Margins, City Memories

• Koloctroni, Vassiliki et al (eds) ‘Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents’ University of Chicago Press

• ‘Berliners Wary as €600 Super-Museum is Latest Project to Overrun’ The Guardian, June 6th, 2019

• ‘What would the Kaiser Say?’ The Economist vol 415 issue 8942, June 13th 2015

Awesome Tapes From Africa - Crellekiez feels like a fever dream - a serene and incredibly well preserved, cobbled gem shoved up between the madness of Hauptstrasse and the rattling of the S Bahn tracks. Many of the businesses (and the numerous community-focused grassroots organisations) seem to have been there a long time, pushing back against the trend of rapid change affecting seemingly everywhere else in the city.

One of the more recent additions to the neighbourhood is the physical HQ of Awesome Tapes From Africa, a blog that became a label that became an institution, run by Brian Shimkovitz.

For over fifteen years, ATFA has helped bring dozens of African artists to a wider audience, whilst maintaining a refreshingly ethical approach - a 50 / 50 split of the profits and the artists retaining ownership of their own music. The store ‘only’ sells music and merch from the label itself, but if you can’t find something that you like amongst a catalogue of this quality, that’s very much a ‘you’ problem. ATFA releases can be found in other shops across Berlin but it’s better (and cheaper) to pick up something straight from the source.

Subscribe now

Coretex - All the ingredients that punk needed to fester and then erupt could be found in Kreuzberg at the end of the 1970s. Dozens of record shops catering to the local scene would come and go over the years, but by the end of the 1980s, a punk mainstay would be founded in the kiez that would somehow resist more than three decades of change.

Coretex Records has been at its current location on Oranienstrasse since the 1990s, just a few minutes walk from SO36 and Franken, forming a sort of Bermuda Triangle / Troika of punk and hardcore resistance. The shop still has the widest selection of punk (and adjacent) vinyl of any Berlin store and one of the most impressive offerings of band t-shirts I’ve ever encountered. Their own-branded street-wear also remains popular with local snotty crustbags and wide-eyed tourists alike.

There was a sweet spot between the regular riots of the 1st of May in the 1980s and 1990s and the damp squib of recent years where both demonstration and celebration seemed to occur in perfect harmony. The Coretex stage in the middle of Oranienstrasse, known as the ‘Hold Your Ground’ stage, was always the most incendiary - and maybe the most welcome - in a city where other genres, other movements are often pushed into the background by the monolithic presence of techno. It’s been a few years since we were allowed anything quite like this in Kreuzberg on the 1st of May, but the continuing popularity of places like Coretex shows that there is still an appetite for punk in the kiez.

Hard Wax - In 1987, art student Mark Ernestus would open up a hole-in-the-wall boozer in a former brothel in a side street of Potsdamer Strasse. Kumpelnest 3000 would become such a success (even attracting Jean Baudrillard at one point….) that Ernestus was able to open up a second business, importing records from the US and establishing what became known as the Berlin-Detroit axis.

Hard Wax opened in December 1989, during a purple patch of techno and house releases from Detroit, Chicago and New York but also on the cusp of an explosion of new clubs in Berlin. By 1991, Tresor and Planet would be up and running and the resident DJs of both clubs would be clamouring at the counter of Hard Wax on the two days a week that a new batch of bangers would arrive from the US. From then on, there have been few institutions that have had as much impact on Berlin’s dance music scenes as Hard Wax.

From 1996 onwards, Hard Wax could be found in an old industrial hof behind Paul-Linke-Ufer. I’m not exactly sure why they got forced out of there but there’s probably something equally as important in that building now, and definitely not some shite that doesn’t contribute anything to the city. The good news is that their new home is in the same building as Tresor on Köpenicker Strasse. There’s a certain poetry in the fact the club and the records shop that helped define an era ended up in the same building 25 years later.

Sound Metaphors - Although Hard Wax arguably remains as significant now as it did in the 1990s, when it comes to both capturing and shaping the zeitgeist, Sound Metaphors just might have the edge these days. The selection is wide open but veers more towards the italo and murky disco sound that has (mercifully) shunted minimal techno to the edge of relevance in the last few years.

Another thing they have in common with Hard Wax is a recent eviction drama - after more than a decade in a beloved spot on Reichenberger, Sound Metaphors was forced out for the usual, tedious financial reasons. Fortunately, a new home was found on Weichselstrasse in Neukölln and the Sound Metaphors empire, which includes a much sought-after DJ crew and regular parties in Berlin (including the recent, mammoth May Day extravaganza), shows no sign of abating.

Subscribe now

Rock Steady Records - Sleek, carefully curated stores are all well and good, but sometimes all I want in a record shop is dusty, musty chaos. Nestled deep inside Charlottenburg, Rock Steady Records is the only shop on the list that fits that bill. It’s the sort of place where ‘crate-digging’ is an apt and literal description of your shopping experience rather than just a catch-all term for buying records.

There’s a heavy focus on rock and pop but I noticed that both the small Afrobeat and Industrial boxes I found strewn around the place were packed with gems. It’s been in this location for around five years but as a business, Rock Steady has been around for over three decades. There’s the odd bargain amongst the 2nd-hand stock but prices for the new stuff also seem fair (I picked up a Neu! reissue for 25€). Bonus points for the really friendly gent behind the counter who didn’t seem to mind my dog begging for treats. For the real sickos, there’s a basement dedicated to Compact Disks.

For those who aren’t enamoured by a schlepp out to sleepy Charlottenburg just for one shop, I’d recommend adding a pilgrimage to the nearby Memorial to Benno Ohnesorg, whose murder in 1967 was one of the pivotal moments in the era of student radicalism.

Dodo Beach - Although it only opened in 2013, this place feels like an institution. Nestled away in a particularly gründerzeit-heavy bit of Schöneberg, Dodo offers a wide selection of new indie and alternative but it’s the extensive jazz section that makes them stand out (as well as the ‘Metal Dungeon’ in the basement…). Since the recent demise of Koka36 it’s also one of the few surviving places where you can buy actual paper concert tickets without getting shafted by postage costs.

Bonus points for the top lad behind the counter wearing a keffiyeh and passing out glühwein when I popped in just before Christmas. It shouldn’t be a big deal but whenever I see an older white German showing even the most basic gesture of solidarity for the Palestinian people, I get a bit of hope that this country isn’t totally fucked after all.

Soultrade - I feel pretty reverential about this place, like I should be wearing these little plastic bags over my shoes that the murder-polis have to wear on CSI. In all my years feeding my addiction, I’ve rarely encountered such a well-ordered and spotless record emporium. The lads that run it are friendly and helpful but also vigilant when it comes to the ill treatment of their stock. My mate Dave still occasionally brings up the time he was spotted holding a record in there without due care and was given a lesson on how to handle vinyl like an adult (fingertips only touching the edges and the label). Frankly, they were 100% justified in doing so and it was about time someone had a word.

In any case, as the name suggests, soul, funk and a wee bit of disco is the main focus, but the hip-hop section is unparalleled in Berlin. If there’s nothing new that catches your eye, it’s always worth falling back on a Golden Age staple to fill in the gaps of your collection. If you don’t own the first two Eric B and Rakim records, then what are we even doing here?

Subscribe now

• You are new to Berlin and finding the city and its denizens a bit more hostile than you expected. You need a change of pace for a few hours. Just be aware that the residents of Potsdam are almost as hostile as those of Berlin, but at least it has a cutesy, toytown feel that most of Berlin lacks.

• You are dealing with visiting parents / grandparents that are absolutely horrified by the squalor in which you reside in the Haupstadt. Placate them with an afternoon in Prussian Disneyland.

This proposed route can be done in reverse (both directions have their merits….) There is an abundance of snack and / or toilet break opportunities and it’s also possible to avoid stairs or sharp inclines, so as to be accessible to most people. Although I’d recommend around four hours for the route below, with the various side-quests that I’ve included, you can stretch things out to a full day without any difficulty.

Subscribe now

Potsdam Hauptbahnhof is particularly easily reachable from the stations along Berlin’s main transport artery of S-Bahn and Regional lines. It takes around 35 minutes on the S Bahn and 25 minutes on a regional train from Berlin HBF. An ABC ticket is required if you don’t have the Deutschland ticket. Whichever exit you take from the station, start walking over the imaginatively named Lange Brücke and you’ll already be able to experience the three pillars of Potsdam all at once - GDR utilitarianism, Hohenzollern pomposity and natural beauty (the river Havel, in this case).

The pinkish, suspiciously young-looking baroque building on the right is the City Palace, which is unique amongst the Potsdam palaces in two respects: it has a practical purpose beyond merely existing as a museum and, like most of the other buildings around it on the Alter Markt, it’s a reconstruction rather than an original.

In the late 17th Century, the Hohenzollern leader of Brandenburg and Prussia, Frederick William, known as the ‘Great Elector’ (1620-1688) became the first of his family to establish Potsdam as a second, summer home for his family. He had a hunting lodge constructed on the site of where the City Palace stands today, beginning his family’s deep connection with the town and leading to a number of his successors making their mark all the way down to the construction of a final palace in 1917. A series of dysfunctional relationships between Hohenzollern fathers and sons (and uncles and nephews) led to many of these rulers choosing to build their own palaces in their own styles and even in their own parks that popped up around the city over the centuries. Thus, an unremarkable village in Brandenburg became a hunting ground, playground, retreat, summer (and in some cases full-time) residence of the aristocracy, and remarkably, almost every palace that they built survived WW2 intact. All in fact, except the City Palace. What you see today is a replica, completed in 2013 and now home to the Brandenburg Landtag.

Moving clockwise around the Alter Markt starting from the City Palace, there is a row of very recently completed buildings that were built in place of a perfectly fine GDR era construction, recently demolished in a fit of Cold War triumphalism. Despite Potsdam’s embarrassment of historical riches, the town authorities have been of late gripped by a mania which drives them down the path of Disneyfication. Next to these soulless newbies there is the Nikolaikirche - one of the last projects undertaken by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, an incredibly prolific architect perhaps best known for his neo-classical work across Berlin, built during Prussia’s positively tumescent post-Napoleonic era.

Adjacent to the church is the former Rathaus which has been home to the Potsdam Museum on-and-off since 1909. It’s a mildly diverting and free museum but not enough to delay your departure from the Alter Markt.

SIDE QUEST #1 - The Museum Barberini, which completes the reconstructed ensemble on the square, has a passable collection of work by the impressionists but a consistently impressive series of temporary exhibitions over the last few years is what makes a visit worthwhile. It’s almost certainly too early for such a diversion, but if you follow this route in reverse, the Barberini is an ideal, late-afternoon treat before returning to Berlin.

Subscribe now

Leave the Alter Markt in the direction of Bassinplatz which is roughly a 5 minute walk. The square is dominated by the walloping St Peter and Paul’s Catholic church, the size of which reflects the changing population in otherwise fiercely Protestant Prussia by the mid-19th century. Every day except Sunday there are a handful of stalls alongside the church selling fresh produce and the like, which seems to be aimed towards actual local consumers rather than tourists. It might also be your last chance to get a bratwurst for a fair, rather than tourist, price for quite some time.

Behind the church is a small cemetery for members of the Red Army. Potsdam had survived the war almost entirely intact until the air forces of both Britain and the US, for reasons best known to themselves, decided to flatten the centre of the city in April 1945. The Soviets were able to march in shortly afterwards and took the city in something more akin to a scuffle than the apocalyptic battle that was raging on in Berlin. Nevertheless, it was far from a bloodless liberation and many of the Soviet soldiers killed in the taking of Potsdam were buried here.

The Soviet authorities in 1945 quickly began to see the potential that Potsdam offered as a setting for a post war conference between the major Allied powers. The youngest palace in the city, Cecilienhof was chosen for the meeting between Stalin, Truman and Churchill (although the British Prime Minister would be replaced half way through the conference by Clement Atlee, after an utter humiliation at the hands of the electorate). The palace is worth visiting in normal circumstances but is 1. Currently undergoing the latest in what appears to be a never-ending cycle of renovations and 2. Too far a diversion to take from this route.

Around the church are a few streets of striking red-brick buildings known as the Dutch Quarter constructed at the beginning of the 18th Century by King Frederick William I (1688 - 1740). He came to be known as The Soldier King despite the fact that the only physical altercation that he was ever personally involved in was when he regularly beat his own children and the odd passing peasant who caught his eye. By all accounts, The Soldier King was a miserable but effective ruler, pulling back from his own father’s extravagant spending habits and building up a military that would help establish Prussia as one of the great European powers by the end of the 18th century. He was also the instigator of Potsdam’s Dutch Quarter, a project that attempted to attract the sort of hard-working calvinist immigrants from the Netherlands that he personally approved of.

With St Peter and Paul’s at your back, walk up Brandenburger Strasse to the crossroads with Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse. From this vantage point you can make out two of the three surviving city gates, both commissioned by Frederick II (1712 -1786) The grey, faintly cartoonish looking gate at the end of Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse is the Nauener Tor, one of the very few examples of the neo-gothic revival to be found in Potsdam, and a few minutes walk up the main commercial precinct of Brandenburger Strasse is the city’s Brandenburg Gate, which predates its wee brother in Berlin by around two decades.

Before hoofing it up the strasse towards the Brandenburg Gate, it’s worth bearing in mind that there are scant snacking (or even toileting) opportunities once you leave the old city limits and head towards Park Sanssouci, so make the most out of Brandenburger Strasse before you continue.

SIDE QUEST #2 - About half way up Brandenburger Strasse, take a right on Lindenstrasse. A white line on the pavement marks out the path to the Gedenkstätte Lindenstraße, an 18th century municipal construction which was ultimately utilised by the elements of three different dictatorships. In reverse chronological order the building was used as a prison by the Stasi, the NKVD (a precursor to the Soviet KGB) and the Gestapo. During the Nazi era, it also hosted the local Hereditary Health Court, which was responsible for the forced sterilisation of over 3,000 individuals deemed to be physically or mentally undesirable. Many of those sterilised would later be murdered under the Nazi’s ‘euthanasia’ programme. There is a free museum documenting the incredibly dark history of the site although donations are of course accepted.

Potsdam’s Brandenburg Gate was constructed by Frederick II at the end of the seven years war (1756 -1763), a complex and multi sided conflict that ultimately spilled over into three continents. At one point, Frederick’s Prussia, backed by Great Britain but taking on a fearsome coalition of Russia, France and Austria, seemed to be heading for certain defeat but the sudden death of Tsarina Elizabeth helped trigger the collapse of that alliance and the eventual end to hostilities. This gate was built as much an expression of relief as a gesture of triumph by the Prussian king in the following years. Prussia’s emergence as a major European power during this period after a series of military victories based on skill as well as luck would lead to Frederick II gaining the title, ‘The Great.’

Walking through the gate and crossing the road brings you to Luisenplatz, a fairly unremarkable square that at least offers the best view of the Brandenburg Gate. The side of the gate which faced outside the city was designed by Georg Christian Unger who opted for a much more lavish design than that of his teacher Carl von Gontard, who was responsible for the other side.

Luisenplatz also features a small monument for the protests that took place here in 1989, in the lead-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Demonstrations against the GDR dictatorship sprung up throughout the county that year, putting enormous pressure on the state and resulting in the opening of the checkpoints in a structure that had, in some form, surrounded west Berlin for 28 years. Western-centric narratives in the aftermath tended to focus more on the failings of the regime (and of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc as a whole) as the key reason for the fall of the Berlin Wall but this understated monument is a reminder of the agency of the East German people themselves.

Leaving Luisenplatz via the north-west corner takes you to Allee Nach Sanssouci, which leads to the oldest and largest of the royal parks that surround Potsdam. Upon reaching the entrance to the Park Sanssouci at the end of the street however, it’s worth taking the more modest entrance through the little arch on the right rather than the larger, more eye-catching gates in front of you.

Although the park was first developed in the 18th Century by Frederick the Great, a number of additions were made by Frederick William IV in the mid-19th Century, including the Church of Peace and the Romanesque cloisters. If it’s open, the church is worth a quick look inside, primarily for the apse mosaic, salvaged by the Prussian king from a crumbling church he had visited in Venice.

Adjacent to the Church of Peace is an even later addition to the park. Over its short history as an Empire (1871 - 1918), Germany was ruled by three Kaisers and because the 2nd of them (Frederick III) only lasted 99 days before succumbing to throat cancer, we end up with all three on the German throne at some point during the year 1888. The copper-domed Mausoleum alongside the Church of Peace was built in the months following Frederick’s death and contains both his remains and those of a smattering of Hohenzollerns of varying degrees of importance. For many German historians, Frederick represents one of the alternative paths that the country might have taken. As the least militaristic and most progressive of the three Kaisers, it’s certainly likely that he would have steered the country onto a different course than the one taken by his volatile shambles of a son, Wilhelm I.

Subscribe now

With the church and mausoleum at your back, take the path that runs alongside the crumbling brick wall on your right and continue through the low wooden gates. Regardless of which time of the year you choose to do this, it’s likely that by now the murmur of crowds of visitors will already be palpable, because coming up on your right, is the Schloss Sanssouci. Frederick the Great had this summer palace constructed in the 1740s and it remains Potsdam’s biggest draw for domestic and international visitors. Truth be told, the best way to view Sanssouci is from some distance, from near the fountain at the base of the steps. The palace in and of itself is deliberately modest in size and is most impressive when viewed alongside the terraced gardens covered in vines and fig trees. Although the interior of the palace has been through an extensive restoration in recent years, the peeling exterior walls are in need of something of an overhaul.

SIDE QUEST #3 - Visiting the Schloss Sanssouci. Generally speaking, and certainly during high season, it’s advisable to book tickets in advance if you want to actually go inside. All of the palaces and royal gardens in Potsdam are administered by a typically creaky public foundation called the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg (SPSG). The types of tour on offer seem to shift from year to year for largely opaque reasons but at present, visits inside the palace are only possible using an audio guide. For the more dedicated Prussophile, I’d recommend getting the ‘Sanssouci +’ ticket which not only gives access to Frederick’s rococo man-cave but all of the other palaces, follies and extravagances under the SPSG banner that happen to be open on the day of your visit.

If you choose to skip the palace however, I’d suggest standing for a moment with the fountain behind you and the Sanssouci itself on your right. The enormous building visible in the distance is today’s final objective, also built by Frederick the Great but at a much later stage in his reign and for a very different purpose. This walk to the Neues Palais (completed in 1769) should take around 15 minutes if you walk straight up Hauptallee, unless you sneak in one last diversion…..

SIDE QUEST #4 - The Chinese Tea House is accessible from most of the paths branching off the left side of Hauptallee and is absolutely worth the extra few minutes of your time. The late 17th Century saw goods from China reaching Europe via Dutch traders, instigating a fashion for ‘Chinoiserie,’ which began in the court of Louis XIV before spreading across Europe to all the other aristocracies that were in thrall to the Sun King. Frederick the Great (a real Francophile right up until he fought against them in the 7 Years War), was thus inspired to build this Tea House, one of Potsdam’s more flamboyant curios. Something to look out for are the gold leaf-covered statues surrounding the building, depicted in traditional Chinese garb but with distinctly non-traditional facial features. The lack of diversity in 18th Century Prussia meant that the sculptor had locals dress up in the costumes - an early and faintly hilarious example of cultural appropriation.

If the Schloss Sanssouci was built by Frederick the Great as place of internal peace, a quiet bolthole for himself and the small coterie of officers and intellectuals that he surrounded himself with, the Neues Palais was intended to make a loud and powerful statement to his friends and enemies alike - despite the odds, Prussia was still standing after the 7 Years War.

The colossal building contains over 200 rooms including a ballroom and a (recently restored) theatre and is built in a baroque style that was already deeply unfashionable by the 1760s. Although Frederick utilised the palace on occasion, he continued to spend much of his time at the Sanssouci, right up until his death there in 1786.

These days, most tourists seem to agree with Frederick, that of the two 18th Century palaces, the Sanssouci is most worthy of a visit, but for over-the-top, garish nonsense (a massive room with an ‘underwater grotto’ theme, a ballroom upstairs with a marble floor that kept threatening to collapse because Frederick the Great didn’t want any supporting pillars below….) the Neues Palais is hard to beat.

There is a small visitor centre between the palace and the exit of the park. There you will find the first public bathroom in quite some time and a terrible and overpriced cafe.

The closest train station is Park Sanssouci which is around a five minute walk from the visitor centre. Although there are far fewer trains stopping here than at the Potsdam Hauptbahnhof, if you have to wait, you can console yourself with a pint at the Augustiner im Bürgerbahnhof.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

It follows the efforts of historian Peter Keup to understand why his brother (and, as it transpires, several members of his extended family) ended up working for the Stasi as informants. Keup, who spent 10 months in prison after an escape attempt in the early 1980s before he was ‘bought’ by the West German government, interviews a number of former members of the Stasi on camera, with mixed results.

The film is at its weakest in the opening ten minutes, where we are treated to a somewhat slapdash introduction to the history of the division of Germany and the establishment of both the GDR state and the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or ‘Stasi.’ Certainly by this point in the cultural discourse, one should be able to use the descriptor ‘Netflix’ and no further explanation should be required, but just in case: the ominous, increasingly invasive, cello-heavy score, the cliched visual effects copied from the opening credits of a dozen made-for-streaming espionage docs - the warning signs were all here.

And then Peter Keup appears, and quite suddenly the film becomes something else entirely. Keup is a quietly charismatic presence, a former dance instructor turned historian. outwardly calm but, certainly at the beginning of his journey, inwardly seething with a sense of injustice and treachery. Keup is certain that it was information provided to the Stasi by his brother that resulted in his arrest and imprisonment for an attempt to flee the country. As per German regulations, he is now permitted to view his Stasi file, and uses it as a key to unlock the mystery of his brother’s betrayal.

What follows is a series of interviews conducted by Keup with former stasi officials, who offer up varying degrees of defiance and contrition, depending on the individual. An initial sit down with Heinz Engelhardt is a visibly nerve-racking experience for Keup. As one of highest ranking Stasi officers at the point of its dissolution in 1990, Engelhardt is in an almost unique position to provide Keup with vital information regarding the recruitment of informants like his brother but perhaps unsurprisingly, is an uncooperative, prickly subject, leaving Keup as much in the dark as he was before the interview.

More forthcoming is the casually apologetic Bernd Roth, a former Stasi Major, who helps Keup decipher some of the often euphemistic jargon within his Stasi records. Roth spots something in Keup’s file that begins to shift his perspective on his brother somewhat, leading to a greater understanding of the blurred lines between victims and perpetrators.

Most remarkable however, is the relationship which begins to emerge between Keup and Jochen Girke, a former instructor in ‘Operative Psychology’ at a stasi training academy. Girke is a haunted figure, perfectly aware that the methods that he taught were used to break subjects during interrogations, and to cajole and bully people like Keup’s brother into becoming informants. Decades after the fact, Girke is both repentant and at pains to ensure that others gain a greater comprehension of his motivations during his time with the Stasi. In contrast to the deluded, defiant Engelhardt, who provokes the loudest response from the cinema audience when he claims that the stasi “never hurt anyone,” Girke provides clear, honest explanations of the disconnect between the mission and its execution. Every dictatorship has its opportunists and its believers, and when Girke explains that all he wanted was to live in “a world without capitalism” it’s clear that he belongs in the latter camp. This imagined end, as he now accepts however, did not justify the means.

After the screening I attended there was a short discussion with both directors as well as Keup and Girke in attendance. Keup explained that he is now firmly of the belief that the vast majority of Stasi informants should also be considered victims. He and Girke are still very much in touch - Keup explains that he invited Girke to his office to discuss his PhD thesis. Keup’s office, as happens, is in Berlin’s Stasi Museum, the former Ministerium für Staatssicherheit headquarters, with Engelhardt’s old office one floor below.

After a shaky start, The Spies Among Us turns into a captivating story of redemption and forgiveness that smartly eschews definitive conclusions, allowing the audience space to form their own opinions on Keup’s subjects, whilst very much remaining in opposition to the idea of a surveillance state.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Disclaimer: This was supposed to be snappy, clickbait-friendly list of places that have closed or disappeared since I moved to Berlin, but with lots of time on my hands over the festive period, it gradually became something else - a sprawling account of not only some of those places but of my first few years living here. I also chose to avoid doing any research whatsoever and to rely on memory alone. For that reason, it’s almost certainly the case that the text is riddled with inaccuracies, half-truths and outright fibs.

Tresor (Original Location).

In early December 2004 I made my first visit to Berlin. Although my taste in techno had become more refined (snobbish) in the preceding years, to the point that I believed the Tresor sound to be passé, the venue itself still occupied a totemic position in my imagination, and as such, I insisted to my companions that it should be top priority upon arrival. We were staying with a friend in Prenzlauer Berg and even in the dark and through a blizzard, I couldn’t quite believe how beat up it looked compared to where I was living in Munich at the time. After hopping on the U2 down to Potsdamer Platz, we trudged through the rugged tundra of a still-undeveloped Leipziger Platz towards a throbbing concrete lump that had helped define Berlin as a techno city for more than a decade.

The line-up was unremarkable, (so much so that I can’t remember it). What I do recall is the smell of rust and damp and the feeling that my ribs were vibrating from the bass. We scored pills in approximately 5mins from a man who looked a bit like the giant from Twin Peaks. They took about 2 hours to kick in but seemed to last for about 10, which I suppose is value for money.

It wasn’t the best night of my life but it still felt like stepping into history in its final days. Tresor would close at this location within a few months of my visit - the Mall of Berlin would be built in its place.

Freies Neukölln

The first time I’d ever heard of Neukölln was in a David Bowie song. The second time, a number of years later, was in a hysterical article in a racist Bavarian newspaper. The early 2000s saw an avalanche of dog-whistle media coverage of how supposedly out of control the multicultural district was but also the first rumblings that Neukölln was on the verge of becoming desirable. The cultural pendulum which had been decisively in the east throughout the 1990s was finally swinging back into the west. Kreuzberg already had an established scene going back decades by this point and was a little too cramped for any dramatic development - the next most likely candidate for hype was its massive, neglected and misunderstood neighbour.

My first WG in Berlin was near Karl-Marx-Strasse Ubahn, in what was considered to be ‘deep’ Neukölln in 2008. I was delighted to be there but at first it was hard to shake the feeling that I had jumped the gun somewhat and that maybe I might have been happier in the more sparkly east Berlin districts that I had haunted on my first visits to Berlin. One of my flatmates was something of a Neukölln evangelist and was having none of my sadsack longing for Kastanienalle. She gave me a copy of Tip, the Berlin cultural listings magazine that she’d presumably saved for exactly this eventuality. My German was rudimentary back then but I think the headline of the article she thrust at me was something along the lines of “Neukölln - It’s Not That Bad”

The gist of the article was that, whilst it might not feel like it now, there were big things coming. A short list of bars were provided as evidence, including one on the corner of Weserstrasse and Pannierstrasse called Freies Neukölln. It was a roomy, high-ceilinged place that actually bothered to open up during the day. It had the feel of a slightly polished old kneipe and whilst it didn’t seem to actually attract the local working-class population, it at least didn’t appear to be too hostile towards them, keeping prices reasonably low and having actual German speaking staff.

A year or two later an article written by the proprietor of Freies Neukölln came out in some local paper that sparked huge debate about the direction of the neighbourhood. The main argument of the article was a. That he was the first to open a pub like this in Neukölln and b. He was really pissed off about all of the other pubs that were opening up in that area because it was driving up rents and threatening his business. In a nutshell, the gentrifier was complaining about gentrification.

Freies Neukölln would shut down around 2015. Last time I checked, there was still an unremarkable Indian chain-restaurant at that address.

Around a year after I read that article about Neukölln, I picked up a copy of the magazine which had a very different take on the district on its cover. There was an image there of some young people, glossy of skin and hair, crammed into what looked like a basement room. A woman at the centre of the image was playing the saxophone to the visible, finger-popping delight of those around her. The headline was something along the lines of “Neukölln - Berlin’s Lower East Side”

Subscribe now

Tacheles

Just as I was settling into life in Neukölln, I did something inexplicable - I moved to Mitte. I think my rationale was twofold - 1. I had friends all over the city because The Great Western Migration was still not complete. Mitte seemed to make practical sense if I didn’t want to spend 45minutes getting from NK to PB, for example 2. I had found work in the most cliched, abject manner - in a pair of Irish pubs that were both located in Berlin’s central district, just a short walk from my squalid new dwelling.

Both pubs were owned by the same man but offered dramatically different vibes, if ‘vibes’ is the correct word. The ‘Irish Times’ was on Leipzigerstrasse, directly across from some high-rise apartments that were built in the 1970s by the DDR and reportedly reserved back then for party members and officials. This, plus its proximity to a number of embassies and the brand new Federal foreign ministry meant that the clientele was an interesting mixed bag of bitter Ostalgics, drunken diplomats, liars and losers.

The second, more infamous, boozer was at the north end of Friedrichstrasse. The ‘Oscar Wilde’s’ had been open at the beginning of the 1990s, the first of several Irish Bars to be opened in the former east, hoping to capitalise on the huge numbers of Irish construction workers in the city. By the time I got there, the building boom had dwindled and the clientele were, for the most part, lonely British expats, slightly terrified at the prospect of interacting with the city on anything other than a basic level. This bleak mood plus the weekly invasion of stag night troglodytes made working there such a genuinely harrowing experience that it’s a miracle that I lasted so long.

The reason that I did is more to do with a specific time in Berlin’s history - there was a sweet spot in the mid 2000s when it wouldn’t take too long to find both an affordable apartment and a part time job that allowed you to live well enough. Long term career prospects still seemed a rarity, but most of the people I met around then seem to have no such ambitions. To ‘live well enough’ meant to have enough money and time to go out and live the Berlin life I had sought out and as long as I was doing that enough, I could convince myself that prospects didn’t matter. It was a shallow and mostly enjoyable existence and all I cared about back then. As such, the ‘Oscars’ became a place that I was locked into in some capacity for almost four years.

The pub was actually part of a huge block of real estate that included a brothel, a poseur pub called Kingsize, and most significantly, a former squat by the name of Tacheles.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the history of Tacheles and truth be told, it deserves an essay all to itself, but the bare bones of the story are these - the ruins of a former department store, near the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Oranienburgerstrasse were squatted in the months following the opening of the Berlin wall. The occupiers saved the building from demolition and eventually came to a (very, very cheap) rental agreement with a new owner. The crumbling building grew into artist studios, galleries, and a frequently shifting offering of clubs and bars. It was absolutely filthy and stank of piss. Toward the end of its existence it was often a genuinely sketchy place that had become a magnet for tourists looking to buy hash and dealers happy to take their money in exchange for lumps of cardboard wrapped in clingfilm, but it still felt exhilarating every time you stepped through the doors. Even by the time I was hanging out there after another depressing shift at the Oscars, it was long past its best, but it still seemed somehow incredible that it had existed that long - a huge beast of building right in the centre of the new capital of Germany that might not have actually been a squat for most of its existence, but certainly looked, felt and smelled like one.

New owners and an aggressive policy of evicting some and paying off others, would see the slow demise of Tacheles within a few years. The new owner was forced, due to denkmalschutz, to incorporate the building into a new construction - an uninspiring blob of outrageously expensive apartments and ghostly offices that have become difficult to fill. Its owners describe it as “The most exciting urban planning project in the metropolis.”

Bar 25

Before Berlin, daytime, outdoor raving was something I avoided. Techno was made for darkness, I believed, and moving to Berlin, I felt that I wouldn’t have to compromise too much on this stance - there was what seemed like an endless array of dimly lit voids in old warehouses, factories and apartment buildings across the city. But then I heard about Bar 25.

A week or two after moving here, I went to an after hours party in an old theatre on Pappellallee and met a DJ who had taken what appeared to be an irresponsible dose of ketamine. He was a bulky man who was shaking and sweating uncontrollably and somewhat hard to restrain but somehow, I ended up taking care of him, repeatedly making sure he sat down before he fell down and topping up his water. As he emerged slowly into something resembling lucidity, he began to ramble on about a club that he occasionally played in. I was dubious at first because of the repeated mentions of ‘sunshine’ and ‘sand’ - but his fever-dream, spittle-flecked ranting, his absolute conviction, convinced me to give Bar 25 a chance when it re-opened at the end of that Spring.

A friend introduced me some time ago to the idea of the concrete & glitter dichotomy in the Berlin party scene. A club can be one or the other but certainly not both. Berghain and Golden Gate, for example, lie firmly in the former category whereas Bar 25 was very much an archetype of the latter.

The area that lay on the east side of the Spree, somewhere near the dividing line between Mitte and Friedrichshain had opened up with the fall of The Wall in 1990. Prime riverside land like this would have been snapped up within weeks in any other time and place but in the chaotic post-unification era things moved slowly. The early autonomous wagenplätze were mostly swept away within a few years but what replaced them were ramshackle, semi-permanent operations with limited rental contracts.

Bar 25 was essentially a group of shacks and cabins built around a man made beach, with open access to the fetid river. It was run by a collective of sinewy party veterans, many of whom actually lived on site in the wagons parked on the periphery. In both the branding and decor there was a prevalently playful approach, especially with regards to the realistic looking ‘confessional booths’ that were a canny way of allowing almost public drug consumption without falling foul of over-zealous undercover polizei.

There was also a pervasive self-satisfied air amongst many of the staff, something that was exemplified by the vicious doorwoman who would stalk the line, sneeringly dismissing normies. The punters initially also seemed a bit too shiny and happy for my taste, a world away from the grim, ‘serious’ scene that I thought I wanted. All in all, it felt like a cult of some kind. It took me 3 or 4 visits before my own mild resistance began to crumble and I fell under its spell. It seemed more a product of the acid-house era of Berlin’s recent cultural past, something of a sparkly, day-glo holdout against the encroaching forces of minimal techno and a joyless Berghain aesthetic that would come to dominate too many dancefloors for the next few years. It was something that I didn’t know I was looking for and even something that I had actively tried to avoid but despite my misgivings, I was blinded by the light.

Although the nucleus of the club was still a fairly traditional dance floor set-up there was a constantly shifting amorphous aspect to the rest of it, an adult playground with a revolving circus of performances but if for any reason that wasn’t enough, the novelty of boats gliding past the club, packed with tourists bug-eyed at the sight of the place, never really wore off.

Someone I met there told me that she had once watched a boat that had been hired for what seemed like a fairly well-heeled child’s birthday party meander down the Spree, directly across from the club. For some reason, a pony that had been provided as part of the entertainment on the boat fell overboard, much to the horror of the screaming children and their chic parents. As the pony began to struggle in the current however, not a single adult on the boat seemed willing to jump in after it. Much less hesitant were a handful of wasted club patrons who stripped to their underwear and swam over to rescue the poor animal, delivering it to the comparative safety of the Bar 25 beach.

Bar 25 was well established by 2008 but like Tresor before it, rumours of its imminent demise would abound every year, especially towards the end of its summer season. leading to fears that if you didn’t make it for its last party of the year, you may never get another chance. This made the closing party, which lasted the best part of a week without closing, a particularly rabid affair. There was always a suspicion that these rumours were unfounded, that it would reopen at the end of the following spring, as always.

Very shortly after it closed forever and the land was bulldozed flat, the collective began work on a new location directly across the river, that would become known as Kater Holzig. A few more years would pass before a previously unthinkable announcement in the press - the Bar 25 owners had got their hands back on the original property and as Kater wound down because of encroaching construction on that side of the river, something like the old Bar 25 would be reconstructed in its old location. Except, that’s not exactly how things would turn out. Those in charge were, to be fair, transparent from the very beginning. Although they had raised some of the money needed to obtain a lease for the land, much of the rest came from corporate sources that certainly seemed at odds with the ethos of the crusty-acid-circus of the original endeavour. The new project, Holzmarkt 25, would be a sleek, more family friendly initiative, a club-bar-street food hybrid with all of the rough edges shorn off, more contemporary London than Berlin. Without this kind of compromise, it’s impossible to imagine the funding appearing or the city agreeing to the lease in the first place, but it still feels like a pale facsimile of its former self.

Cuvrybrache

This struggle for the land by the Spree would extend into the former west by the mid 2010s. A long strip of buildings stretching from near the Oberbaumbrucke to the Landwehrcanal had more or less survived the war, with one major exception - a large tract of pitted and overgrown land between Schlesiche Strasse and the Spree, fringed by a couple of hundred metres of Cuvrystrasse had lain empty for decades.

After my Mitte experiment had failed, I had moved to a sleepy corner of Treptow where very little seemed to be going on. Just across the canal was Wrangelkiez however, which after decades of being the penned-in edge corner of west Berlin was beginning to bloom. Empty shop units were being filled and the first whispers of a start-up boom were being heard.

The empty plot of land, known as Cuvrybrache, was a barometer of how the district was changing - every spring and summer, it would be taken over by a patchwork of crusties, punks and lost souls, initially pitching tents but as the years progressed, building something more akin to a miniature shanty town. On warmer nights, there would be a steady stream of people coming there to drink and smoke weed, watching the sun rise and set from the waterside. It was one of the last truly untamed spots in the kiez.

Gradually, the mood darkened - the constant ebb and flow of temporary residents began to seem a little more permanent and for the first time, very young children (who would canvass customers of nearby restaurants for spare change) seemed to be living there now for the foreseeable future, in the most unsanitary conditions. Tensions between the more desperate residents of Cuvrybrache and the steady stream of party kids became commonplace.

The word was out that the land was finally up for sale. At some point, just as discussions about the feasibility of a peaceful eviction of the dozens of residents was underway, a huge fire would tear through the shacks, allowing the police a convenient excuse for the complete demolition of the site. The building that eventually appeared on Cuvrybrache would block access to the river as well as blotting out the light that used to fall in the late afternoons on the bars and cafes across the road. Its principal tenant is an allegedly exploitative company named Lieferando, one of those start-ups that were being wooed by Berlin politicians all those years ago.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Between 1955 and 1956, 348 high school students were sent to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) for a high school education. This began a complex relationship between these two countries with an unintended result - a sizable, permanent Vietnamese community in modern Germany.

The official names of both countries were rarely used in the west. East Germany as it was known colloquially, had been founded as a socialist republic in 1949, only a few months after the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) or West Germany had come into being. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam had been declared a few years before this but in 1954 the country was partitioned into a Marxist-Leninist north and a capitalist south that sought to maintain links to imperialist western governments.

The Vietnamese children who were sent over in two groups were 10 and 15 years old. During their time in the GDR, they lived in Moritzburg, a short drive from Dresden and were educated in two purpose-built schools. The plan was always for those children to return after their education - and that plan was adhered to. The modern, dominant narrative regarding Vietnamese people in the GDR was that they were a cheap and exploitable labour force, invited by a crumbling dictatorship as a mutually beneficial favour to a newly unified but devastated Vietnam, but the early example of the ‘Moritzburg Kinder’ introduces a more complex motivation.

In the afterglow of Cold War triumphalism, there is a tendency to ascribe a cynical or sinister motivation behind every action taken by former socialist states. For instance, women in the GDR legally had to be paid the same as men performing the same job, but instead of this being lauded as a progressive aspect of life in the GDR it is often waved away by those in the west as a desperate solution to the labour shortages that plagued the republic. Even the vague possibility that this approach to gender equality might have emerged because of ideological reasons and simply because it was the right thing to do is utterly dismissed. A black and white view of the GDR has become the norm but for those able to muster even the most basic critical thought, it’s just possible to accept that sometimes the motivations of the GDR could be found somewhere in the shades of grey.

The ‘Moritzburger Kinder’ programme benefited the DRV because of the high standard of education those children received in the GDR. Many of them went straight into careers in government upon their return. A superficial look at the motivations of the GDR would suggest pure altruism - a manifestation of the internationalist principles of socialism, one advanced albeit still struggling economy offering a leg-up to a brother nation. It would be an example of a process repeated again and again between the GDR and nations that had recently thrown off the yoke of colonialism or overthrown western-backed regimes. Cuba, Angola, Mozambique and Algeria would be some of the countries that the GDR would reach out to over the decades.

If there is a remotely selfish motivation for these early programmes, it is that the GDR was hoping to secure international markets - developing nations that would trade much needed crops and raw materials for goods manufactured in the GDR. For much of the Cold War the FRG would pursue a policy of isolating the GDR, using their economic muscle to bully any country considering trading with the GDR into submission. Making links with newly independent, socialist countries was a way of circumventing this. The other reason (although this would rarely have been openly admitted in the GDR) was that reliance on the economic power of the USSR came at a cost, an unequal partnership which naturally favoured the senior partner. This became increasingly apparent when during the oil crisis of the 1970s, the USSR drastically jacked up the price of essential crude oil exports to the GDR. If the GDR was to survive, it needed to establish markets of its own.

The first US bombs landed in the DRV in 1965, marking the first major escalation in the American War of Aggression. Within a couple of years some of the Moritzburger Kinder were back in the GDR along with hundreds of other young Vietnamese people to continue vocational or university education. Again, the programme was on a short-term basis and the vast majority would return after their training was complete. They were treated well but one of the young students who arrived in 1967 remembers not only the frequent attentions of the Stasi - monitoring these young outsiders - but also a level of suspicion from the authorities back home. Incredibly the DRV felt that the GDR had deviated too far from strict Marxist-Leninist principles and were concerned that the young, future potential leaders they were sending over would get somewhat corrupted during their stay. Nevertheless, despite the misgivings from the Vietnamese side, thousands of young students would come to the GDR throughout the 1970s with an understanding that they would return after their studies.

The next wave of Vietnamese people to move to German towns and cities would arrive at the very end of that decade but it would be in very different circumstances. At least half a million refugees fled Vietnam - now united and victorious but utterly devastated by the war. The method that many of them used to leave the country, packing themselves onto often flimsy wooden ships, lent them the name ‘boat people’. The refugees were often people who had been part of or connected to the defeated South Vietnamese regime. They were hoping to reach nearby countries like Thailand or the Philippines and either settle there or use those countries as stepping stones to elsewhere. The FRG would accept around 38,000 of these refugees by the end of the decade. An important distinction between them and their North Vietnamese counterparts who arrived in the GDR both before and after them was that from the very beginning it was assumed that their stay in Germany would be a long term or possibly even permanent one and as such they would be helped to integrate. They were provided with language classes and were settled in many different west German cities as to avoid the creation of ‘ghettos’. At least a third of Germany’s present day Vietnamese community originated from this group.

Almost immediately after this the GDR would begin a programme that would be responsible for bringing the largest group of Vietnamese people to either Germany. An agreement was signed with the Vietnamese government in 1980 that would involve tens of thousands of guest workers staying in the GDR on short-term contracts of around five years. The understanding was that the workers would be given a high standard of vocational training which would allow them to not only contribute to the GDR economy but also to return to Vietnam with a new skill. German classes were offered in the early days of the guest worker programme but only to make communication between the workers and their German supervisors easier rather than out of any intention to integrate the community.

A second recruitment drive toward the end of the 1980s would see thousands more guest workers arriving in a GDR that was in its final stages - it’s perhaps worth noting how many large projects with an eye on the future the government were undertaking in those last few sclerotic years. Massive social housing developments, expensive reconstructions of historical buildings and ambitious guest worker programmes like this were being instigated by a regime that didn’t think they were going anywhere.

The major difference between those Vietnamese workers who arrived in the early 80s and those that arrived in the second and final stage of the programme was that the level of training, both vocational and linguistic, deteriorates dramatically. In the early 1980s there was at least a pretence that these workers would return to Vietnam having gained important skills that would be of great benefit to their recovering homeland. Rather than being sent to the GDR to simply work in menial, unskilled factory work, individuals were usually selected by the Vietnamese government as something of a reward or a gesture of gratitude - military veterans or and war widows were heavily represented in those early years.

Those who made the journey from Vietnam in the final stage however, encountered a rather different set of circumstances - a GDR that was still plodding away but where the cracks in the system were more visible than ever. A much smaller percentage of those guest workers would receive any high level of training and language classes more or less evaporated. The vast majority were now employed in factories using skills that they already had before leaving Vietnam.

It begs the question why the GDR continued the programme with Vietnam and several countries all the way through to the end. The obvious answer, and one that dominates the narrative after reunification in 1990, is that it was seen as a source of cheap and plentiful. While it’s true that the GDR had a labour shortage throughout its history however, the guest workers only made up around 1% of the total workforce by the late 1980s, which suggests a minimal impact on that labour deficit. Regarding the supposed economic exploitation of those workers, the GDR generally paid them the same as their German colleagues and also took on the cost of any training that was offered. The most likely explanation is once again a mixture of pragmatism and idealism - Vietnam, just as Cuba, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique and even North Korea in the late 1980s were seen both as brother nations who needed a leg-up from a comparatively strong economy like the GDR and could function as potential new markets for the GDR to rely upon in the coming decades.

Sadly, this does not mean that those guest workers were always treated as equals during their stay. The GDR state, for all of their internationalist idealism, were absolutely not trying to create anything like a multicultural society, so much so that the Vietnamese guest workers generally slept in dormitories kept some distance from members of the public and fraternisation between Vietnamese people and Germans was frowned upon. The GDR state was explicitly proud of how they had supposedly built an antifascist state that had nothing in common with its Nazi predecessor - this rather murky approach to the separation of people of different ethnicities and cultures is, at worst, an awkward echo of former times. Perhaps the most disturbing detail is that if a Vietnamese woman became pregnant during their time in the GDR they were offered a choice between abortion and repatriation.

German reunification saw the near complete removal of the GDRs institutions, systems and programmes and the new government - unified in name but western in practice - had no interest in taking on responsibility for the GDR’s guest worker programmes. This would have disastrous consequences for many individuals from Mozambique who were callously deported right back into a civil war which was tearing their country apart. The Vietnamese people who had come to the GDR found themselves now jobless, in some cases homeless and often abandoned by their own government’s reluctance to accept their repatriation given the still dire economic situation back in Vietnam.

The German government revived an old tactic for unwanted guest workers - they paid them to leave. Thousands of Vietnamese people would accept the 3,000DM payment to leave the country in the early 1990s. Those who remained found themselves in legal limbo, initially without permanent residency or the right to work. In desperation, many got involved in the smuggling and sale of cigarettes. In the 1990s and right up until the mid 2000s, Vietnamese people selling cigarettes out of plastic bags near the entrances to train stations was an incredibly common sight - initially the supply came from Polish refugees who had come across the border after the fall of the Iron Curtain, as well as some of the remaining Soviet soldiers who were going through their own financial catastrophe but later the supply of illicit cigarettes was increasingly coming from connections back in Vietnam itself.

The lucrative trade resulted in tension between gangs involved in the cigarette racket. With increasing and embarrassing international attention on Germany’s lack of sympathy for the former guest workers, a couple of high profile deaths due to violence between those gangs was exactly what the German government needed in the early 1990s to try to sway public opinion towards deportations. A community forced into illegal work was now habitually demonised in the German media as criminals.

Another post-unification challenge for the Vietnamese community merged almost simultaneously (and not uncoincidentally). The early 1990s saw a surge of extreme right violence across the former GDR. While it’s tempting to blame this entirely on the failures of unification to stabilise the economy, the GDR had in fact had a growing problem with neo-nazi skinheads going at least back until the 1980s.The rare times the GDR politicians ever acknowledged this as a problem was when they blamed its existence entirely on fascist ideology seeping in from the west. Their lack of honesty and failure to confront a growing problem allowed for a huge swell of far-right sentiment well before the Berlin wall came down.

The remaining Vietnamese community found themselves targets throughout this period - most notably in the race riots in Lichtenhagen in Rostock in 1992. A group of hundreds of right wing extremists (not exclusively from the former GDR, it should be stressed) were involved in a violent stand off with the woefully unprepared local police. The principal target was a tower block housing thousands of mostly Romanian asylum seekers that the authorities had allowed to become a slum but a neighbouring block of flats that was home to over 100 Vietnamese people ultimately became collateral damage. Inhabitants had to barricade themselves in to stop neo-nazis armed with molotov cocktails gaining access to their building. Miraculously, no-one was killed but the riots exemplified the precarious position that the Vietnamese community found itself in at the time.

It would not be until the next year that first temporary residence and work permits would be very selectively handed out by the German state. Permanent residency for many former guest workers would finally become possible in 1997.

The economic gap between the two very different (and still today rather divided) Vietnamese communities has closed quickly since the end of the 1990s. The boat people who came to the FRG and their descendants initially had a huge advantage over their mostly North Vietnamese counterparts who found themselves adrift in the GDR at the end of the 1980s - access to German language classes as standard, the right to look for work almost immediately after arriving and their children having been given access to the German education system gave them a massive head start. Somehow though, the former guest worker community has almost caught up economically.

A higher than typical proportion of children from former guest worker Vietnamese communities attend Gymnasium high schools and go on to further education, leading to them being seen as a ‘model’ immigrant community in some quarters. Back in 2010 an SPD politician named Thilo Sarrazin began to make a name for himself as a race-baiting author who claimed that multiculturalism was a disaster. The Vietnamese community however were singled out by Sarrazin as model immigrants especially in contrast to the other minorities that he chose to demonise.

One of the many reasons that the former guest workers are punching above their weight economically is that many of them still maintain strong links with Vietnam itself, which went on a path of rapid economic recovery throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Money saved from hard work in Germany could be invested back in an increasingly free-market Vietnam, creating complex and mutually beneficial economic links between the two countries. Decades after the GDR embarked on an at least partially idealistic relationship with Vietnam, it has borne fruit in a manner far different from what either country could have imagined.

Subscribe now

.

.

The rapid growth of Berlin in the late 19th century, propelled by Prussian industrialisation, had shifted the alignment of the city’s centre. The street running north-south through the platz was once the location of a customs wall, connecting the old city gates, including the Brandenburg Gate to the north.The explosion in the city’s size throughout the century eventually necessitated the removal of those walls. The new centre, geographically and arguably the new heart of the city, would become known as Potsdamer Platz.

When I first expose visitors to the platz these days, I find myself almost apologising for it as if I can sense their disappointment. Whilst it cannot compete with the abject misery of Checkpoint Charlie, it shares with that place a kind of intangible quality - both beg the question “What exactly am I supposed to be looking at here?.” In the case of Potsdamer, I usually explain that the ‘Platz’ element of the name might be part of the problem - there is no ‘plaza’ to speak of in the new Potsdamer, but then again, there never was in the old one either. The other translation of the German word ‘Platz’ is actually more appropriate; ‘Space.’

The ‘space’, then and now is an intersection, a meeting point of 5 streets. The original collision of asphalt was, over roughly half a century, complimented by examples of every architectural trend to sweep through the city, from the thumping Wilhelmine bulk of the Hotel Fürstenhof to the sleek modernism of Erich Mendelsohn’s Columbushaus. As the city grew, its new centre became a hub of transportation, tourism and nightlife all rolled into one. By all accounts it was a tremendously intense experience, trams slicing through the platz from all directions, competing for space first with the horse-drawn cart and later, the arrival of the car.

In 1927, the director Walter Ruttmann released ‘Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt’ - a silent love letter to the new metropolis. It arrived in that sweet spot of the mid 1920s, between the financial disasters that would bookend the decade. The film covers a day in the life of the city, and when Ruttman looked for a place in Berlin that typified that frenetic Weimar-era energy, Potsdamer leapt out as the obvious choice. Just as Wenders, almost 60 years later, would use it to exemplify the near death of the city, Ruttmann would utilise Potsdamer Platz to show Berlin at its most alive.

Berlin for much of the latter half of the 20th Century was a city both defined and plagued by voids. The destruction of at least half of Berlin’s buildings during WW2 had left tens of thousands of empty lots across the city. The west Berlin authorities were often quick to fill these gaps produced by the war. Their GDR counterparts - for a somewhat complex and shifting combination of economic and ideological factors - were less proactive in this sense. This helps explain the abundance of empty land often taken over by scrub and weeds which could be found until quite recently all over central parts of the former East Berlin.

The GDR state of course went on to create a void of its own - when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, a fortified ‘death strip’ would be constructed alongside it, and consistently improved upon over the 28 years of the wall’s existence. Although the authorities could make use of existing spaces - building fences alongside lakes and rivers, digging trenches on the bombed out wastegrounds - they often had to resort to demolishing structures to make way for those fortifications. Both of these approaches help explain the vast cold emptiness of the east side of Potsdamer Platz during the cold war era.

The west side of the platz would also remain bleak and undesirable for the entirety of the wall’s existence. There was naturally nothing to stop the people of West Berlin walking right up to the wall itself, but the authorities in that side of the city felt understandably unmotivated to build anything so close to such a grim structure, a daily reminder of the uneasy, unsettling position that West Berlin found itself in.

One of the only surviving structures on the west side would be the Haus Huth. Previously owned by a family of wine merchants, it had somewhat miraculously survived both the bombing of the city by the western Allies and the final battle waged by the Red Army upon the remnants of the SS and the Wehrmacht.. The West Berlin authorities subsequently bought the building and converted it to social housing. Being assigned an apartment here must have been quite the poisoned chalice - a building surrounded by pock-marked wasteground on the west and the death strip just a few metres from the front door. The circumstances that the building found itself in would see it popping up again and again in ‘Himmel Uber Berlin’ as Wender’s protagonists patrol the surreal landscape of 1980s Berlin. Few buildings in the city could compete when it came to bad vibes - loneliness, absence and perhaps even the occasional rat-a-tat of a kalashnikov rifle behind the adjacent Berlin Wall.

There would be 11 months between the opening up of that wall in 1989 and what most (but certainly not all) Germans regard as Reunification. Access to the death strip became possible in the meantime and by the summer of 1990, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters would perform ‘The Wall’ live in the sprawling gap left by the former fortifications running through Potsdamer Platz. It was, truth be told, a bloated display of pomposity, of dated rock-dinosaur excess, but The People seemed pleased enough. In a rather more exciting development, within weeks of the concert and no more than a few metres away, a small group of East and West Berliners would come together to found Tresor, a nightclub in a former underground vault on the edge of the death strip. After decades of nothing, of stasis, it seemed like suddenly everything was happening.

Thirty five years later, it’s hard to pinpoint where it all went wrong, although gesturing vaguely at ‘capitalism’ is, as is often the case in these situations, a pretty good start. Land was sometimes sold at suspiciously low cost and buildings were once again covered in scaffolding within a few years because of apparently cheap, crumbling facades. After the initial plans were announced there were demands from Berlin politicians to include more residential units and a shopping arcade in an ultimately futile attempt to stop Potsdamer dying a death once the office workers had gone home.

That’s not to say that it is entirely without merit. The Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano collaboration that embraces the previously lonesome Haus Huth is an absolute riot. It was often claimed that the post-unification Platz was intended to be the most American-looking part of the new Berlin but Rogers and Piano seem instead to have been reaching towards 1980s Shinjuku in this case. The Kollhof tower has just enough neo-expressionist flair on the upper levels to keep things interesting and I have to confess a sneaky admiration for the silhouette of the Sony Centre (if only all the interesting tenants hadn’t left…).

The problem is that it is less than the sum of its parts. Granted it doesn’t help that some of these parts are so utterly devoid of joy and inspiration - Kolhoff’s Beisheim Centre full of miserable 5 star hotels and rotten ‘event locations’ is a case in point. There should still be enough there to pull it together, but somehow it remains the last word in (presumably) accidentally hostile urban planning. With the departure of the superlative Arsenal Kino and slightly creaky Film Museum there are even less reasons for people to visit. It somehow manages to be even more charmless than Alexanderplatz on the other side of Mitte. At Berlin’s ‘other’ least appealing platz, there is the possibility of seeing the police waddle ineffectually after a pickpocket or two - a sign at least of some life.

Every few years, someone comes along with a pile of money to throw at the problem - new interactive art installations, street food markets, even a smattering of new trees being planted in order to take the edge off - most of these ideas seem individually to come from a good place, but one by one they are all pulled into the black hole of Berlin’s Times Square. Nothing, it seems, can achieve purchase on this desert of the real.

There is of course a possibility that this place was doomed as soon as the districts of Mitte and Tiergarten were parcelled off respectively to Soviet and British authorities in 1945. Rebuilding became an increasingly distant prospect as the Cold War raged on, and the people on both sides of the divide began to lose any sense of connection to the place. Two or three generations would pass before the rebirth became possible and by that time, the city and the people had moved on. The old platz grew up over decades, rather than years, and the population back then had a chance to grow along with it, to establish an affinity with the new heart of the metropolis. Maybe this new project never stood a chance.

In ‘Der Himmel Über Berlin’ Damiel’s love for Marion offers him a path out of his gray, lonely existence (in exchange for his immortality). Damiel’s monochrome view of humanity - literally depicted in black and white by Wenders - is ultimately replaced by technicolour as he awakens in the rugged streets of Kreuzberg and Schöneberg. The city seems all at once alive and vibrant as we see it through the eyes of the former angel. Although the wall would stand for two more years after the film’s release, the path of Damiel and Berlin itself seemed to point towards a bright future. The city would in fact be reborn sooner than Wenders could have imagined, but Potsdamer Platz would nevertheless remain empty in its own way

.

Subscribe now