Berlin: 1 August, 2017
There is so much in this city that
still remains so broken, so scarred. This city is rapidly changing, getting a
facelift, some therapy, plastic surgery – yes, artificially. The old Tacheles
is boarded up, its artists and squatters pushed out of the former shopping
arcade beneath a shattered dome of dirty glass. Cranes and flashy property ads
take the place of weeds, colonising the deserted parking lot that once stood
square in the heart of Berlin. Echoes of the bombs that once devastated this
city can barely be heard, drowned out by the honking of impatient taxi drivers
in shiny Mercedes on Friedrichstraße. Traces of graffiti – public art that once
graced the walls of these war-torn skeletons – are being cleaned away; the bars
of former East Berlin being razed one by one, rubbing out the Soviet past of
Berlin-Mitte. Few seem to notice: cyclists whizz past, cars speed by, trams
ring their bells, tourists (in hoards) take their silly selfies. After all, the
city’s most expensive homes are right next door. Berlin’s gotta grow, no?
Growth is good, growth is needed, desired…? Growth…?
I finish up a meal of organic vegan
dumplings in a minimalist café that runs fully on renewable energy. Rather, I
sit on the benches outside this shining exemplar of sustainability, studying
this curious junction in the heart of the city. It has four corners, vastly
different: one, a magnificent 1700s baroque building in gilded gold housing a
Scandinavian furniture store; two, a shoddy 1900s structure in dirty brown with
its brick cracks patched up with careless white streaks, an old Italian bar
below with glaring red neon lights flashing; three, a newly-built structure of
concrete and glass, home to an advertising agency; four, nothingness – a plot
of weeds with aged and splintered billboards feebly attempting to keep nosy
tourists out, the flat walls of the buildings around lucky enough to have
survived the bombs covered in severe graffiti.
I tire of this disjointed scene and
mount my bike grudgingly (I have always lamented the lack of bike lanes in this
European capital, but what would one expect in a city once so divided, each
half wildly organically growing, spreading, multiplying beyond capacity? But
let us not lose our focus). I live in the north of Berlin-Mitte – former East,
formerly socialist, formerly Soviet. I live in a brand new structure of glass
and steel, next to the BND, next to Daniel Libeskind – chic, coveted. This
street was once by No Man’s Land – international oblivion, belonging to no
nation, no human. Not today. No trace of that exists, save for a double brick
line across the asphalt marked ‘Berlin Wall’. I often tire of this area – it
has no character, a missing soul.
So I take my bike on a little
10-minute detour behind my apartment – ‘Kieler Weg’ reads the sign. I am
stopped in my tracks by a dystopian landscape just a few minutes away: a
hulking tower of raw concrete flanked by apartment blocks at the end of the lane
overlooks a silent canal separating me from a desolate landscape of cranes and
weeds. The hulking turret has a plaque: ‘in memoriam: to all who were killed
attempting to cross the Berlin Wall’. Where I stand, where I walk freely, once
a site of death and separation. Sickened, I move on along the canal. A faded brick
structure stands alone on the opposite bank, dressed in graffiti, its windows
long-since boarded up. A pool of weeds threatens to consume it, as do the
cranes. They work in unison for nothing else exists here. Few know of this
place, so well marked out for the remembrance of posterity.
As the sun bleeds red across the
night sky, I cycle northwards. Berlin-Wedding, once a capitalist Western
district, now mostly undesired by the people of this city. A
hastily-constructed eyesore of TV dishes, Turkish flags, and sex shops looms
before me. Funny how things work. 25 years ago, risking one’s life jumping the
Wall from East to West, Mitte to Wedding. Now young dreamers and old men strive
for the opposite, for the ‘chic’, the ‘fashionable’ – to afford the rents in
the former East, now masked. Confused and a little sad, I turn back, away from
the impending storm, to Mitte and my soulless modern structure of a home.
