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As I pack my bags after nine years in Berlin, I leave a city that seems trapped in the narrative of its own decline.
Veterans say he jumped the shark. Apartments are impossible to find. Stains in daily care are like hen’s teeth. Bureaucracy is mind-numbingly analogous. Gentrification flattened his anarchic soul. The tension is gone.
Some of this may be true. But that doesn’t reflect my experience. For me, Berlin is at its peak, a city that, if it weren’t so self-deprecating, could almost be the capital of Europe.
When I started here as an FT correspondent in 2016, it all seemed a bit provincial. His people were notoriously infamous and insular. Every day he brought a brush with the “Berliner Schnauze”, known for the roughness of the locals.
In the years that followed, his hard edges were smoothed over. It has become much more international and less distrustful of foreigners. And, as English becomes more widespread, it has blossomed into a kind of global village.
In the past nine years, I have seen Berlin receive tens of thousands of refugees, first from Syria, then from Ukraine. It took in a wave of Brexit migrants, desperate to preserve their ties to Europe. And then, especially from 2022, he embraced the Russian intelligentsia in exile, artists, writers and human rights activists fleeing Putin’s dictatorship.
She grew up clinging to her — relative — innocence. It’s a capital, yes, but not like London, which towers over the rest of the country. The place is not dominated by banks, because they are all in Frankfurt. Large media conglomerates are in Hamburg, car manufacturers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Berlin is many things – the seat of government and an advanced technological center – but it is by no means a slave to Mammon.
This means that public space is not privatized in the way it is elsewhere, and there are few dreary chains that make London’s high streets look so generic. Strangers you meet at parties are still less interested in what you do than in your thoughts on a certain “left-autonomous” techno club or the latest premiere at the Schaubühne.
However, those who say that the city has changed for the worse are right. A former mayor once described Berlin as “poor but sexy”. Some say it’s rich and boring now.
Exhibit A — Am Tacheles complex on Oranienburger Strasse. It is a former department store that was half-destroyed in the war, and was then taken over by an art collective after the fall of the Wall, becoming a symbol of Berlin’s unruly spirit. I remember visiting there in the 1990s, the giant murals, the graffiti, the strange sculptures in the courtyard, the raw, creepy energy of the place. Now it’s a complex of offices, luxury apartments and high-end shops, all shiny and sleek, with its own private for-profit photography museum.
There’s also the small matter of the €130 million the Berlin government cut from the city’s arts budget for next year. The cultural elite, long accustomed to lavish subsidies, is upset: dozens of fringe theater groups and artistic initiatives could be closed. One prominent director called it an act of “self-inflicted cultural vandalism.”
But something tells me that Berlin will pass. This is, after all, a city that survived the near-death experience of Allied bombing, and was on the front lines of the Cold War, divided for 28 years by a 4-meter-high wall.
Despite everything, it is still, in the words of an Irish friend of mine who has lived here for more than two decades, “the largest collection of black sheep” in the world. It is a haven for renegades and misfits of all persuasions, who benignly coexist with their bourgeois Citizens neighbors. Despite the ever-increasing cost of living here, there still seem to be a lot of creative people doing God knows what, but always looking like they’re having a good time.
And as anyone who navigates its countless construction sites knows, it’s also a place of pure, limitless possibility. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city that is “damned to keep becoming, and never will be”. When I finally get on the plane after almost a decade in this city, it will be the “becoming” that I will miss the most.
Email Guy at [email protected]
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