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As I pack my bags after nine years in Berlin, I leave a city that seems trapped in a narrative of its own decline.
Veterans say it jumped the shark. Flats are impossible to find. Day care spots are like hen’s teeth. Bureaucracy is an analogue of the mind. Gentrification flattens its anarchic soul. The danger is gone.
Some of this may be true. But it doesn’t reflect my experience. For me, Berlin is at the top of its game, a city that, if it hadn’t been able to hold its own, would have been the capital of Europe.
When I started as an FT reporter here in 2016, everything seemed like a small province. Its people are notoriously cruel and insular. Every day brings a brush with the “Berliner Schnauze”, the famous rudeness of the locals.
In later years its rough edges were smoothed. It has become more international and less dependent on foreigners. And, as English became more widespread, it developed into a kind of global village.
In the past nine years I have seen Berlin welcome tens of thousands of refugees, first from Syria, then from Ukraine. It has drawn a wave of Brexit émigrés, desperate to preserve their ties to Europe. And then, especially since 2022, it has adopted the Russian intelligentsia in exile, the artists, writers and human rights activists who fled Putin’s dictatorship.
It grows while holding on to its — relative — innocence. It’s a capital city, yes, but not like London, which reaches out to the rest of the country. The area is not dominated by banks, as they are all in Frankfurt. The big media conglomerates are in Hamburg, the carmakers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Berlin is many things – the seat of government and a thriving tech hub – but it is not a slave to Mammon.
That means public space isn’t privatized like it is in other places, and there are some of the deplorable chains that make London’s high streets look ordinary. The strangers you meet at parties seem less interested in what you do for a living than in your thoughts on a “left-autonomous” technoclub or the latest Schaubühne premiere.
However, those who say the city is changing for the worse have a point. A former mayor described Berlin as “poor but sexy”. Some say rich and boring.
Exhibit A — the Am Tacheles complex on Oranienburger Strasse. It’s a former department store that was half-destroyed in the war and then taken over by a collective of artists after the Wall came down, becoming a symbol of Berlin’s unruly spirit. I remember visits there in the 1990s, the giant murals, the graffiti, the strange sculptures in the grounds, the raw, scuzzy energy of the place. Today it is a complex of offices, luxury apartments and high-end shops, all bright and orderly, with its own private for-profit photography museum.
Then there’s the small matter of the €130 million the Berlin government deducted from the city’s arts budget for next year. The cultural elite, which has long been used to a drip-feed of lavish subsidies, is in turmoil: dozens of fringe theater groups and artist initiatives may close. An act of “self-inflicted cultural subversion”, one prominent director called it.
But something tells me Berlin will pull through. This is, after all, a city that survived the near-death experience of Allied bombing, and was on the frontline of the cold war, divided in two by a 4-meter high wall for 28 years.
Despite all this it is still, in the words of an Irish friend of mine who has lived here for over two decades, the “biggest collection of black sheep” in the world. It is a sanctuary for the rebellious and misfits of all persuasions, who get along well with their more bourgeois counterparts. Citizens neighbors. Despite the rising cost of living here, it seems full of creative people doing God’s work but always looking like they’re having the time of their lives.
And as anyone who has navigated countless construction sites knows, it’s also a place of immense, limitless potential. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city “damned to continue to be, and never to be”. When I finally boarded the plane from here after nearly a decade in this city, it was the “being-ness” that I missed the most.
Email Guy at guy.chazan@ft.com
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