I was decending on a city my father had come to 45 years earlier, in 1966, he was in West Berlin for a major Jazz festival and then to passed through Check-point Charlie to get to the East to see what the grass looked like on the other side. Well Communism certainly wasn't greener, my dad described the place as dire and poor. Not quite 22 years after the 'Wall' came down and now about 20 years after it is a city that is been fully interspersed into the West, with Capitalism and Freedom of Speech evident. Especially Freedom of Speech, as there is street art sprawled on the walls everywhere!
Ridiculous when you think of the authoritarian regimes that came beforehand, the Third Reich held their headquarters here, and years after this, half the city were forced to worship Stalin’s flawed but truly treacherous ideals. Nonetheless that is why it has this atmosphere about it, because it has experienced all such crazy things and now it is this city that is 20 years young – able to reinvent itself into something better than all its counterparts. It has done just that. It is for Germany's alternative (many gays + other sub-groups flock here), arty hipster city (more artists than anywhere else), where not just alternative Germans go to escape the normality of Germanic culture, but Europeans from everywhere (and even Americans) come to experience something newer, freer and more liberal. The type of people who migrate here, are young, it’s the city for young people!
Case & Point: I went to an 'intimate gathering' which included a host of interns from America, Slovenia, Spain, and Ukraine. At this young apartment, like everywhere else I happened to enter on my short stay there, I was permitted (not because of the wet weather as it didn't rain), to take off my shoes! This Feng Shai symbolism matched the calmness of these large empty chambers, where literally just a computer desk, cupboard, and a futon bed, filled the total emptiness of these 25 metre squared rooms. Despite the empty space there is a warmth that fills these areas - much like the sparsness of Berlin.
And that sparseness of this big city makes it a place where it is everything you cant see by just simply staring and looking, you have to look closer below the surface and immerse oneself to really experience it all. Only then the true phenemonons can come out - I barely scratched the surface, I saw hints or more-like heard stories of it on a occasion but I didnt get that far into Berlin. Unfortunately two different friends bailed on me on two of my biggest nights there for different reasons - so I didnt quite hit up the town or set the underground a-light - there is always next time I guess!
I did experience a good dosage of culture and history though, not so much in the museum form as it is a place that offers so many real authentic visceral things to see around the city, such as: the Communist listening towers in some Berlin forests; Brandenburg Gate; the Parliament buildings; The East Gallery (professional art sprawled on separate remains of 'the wall'); a no-man's land and the turret that guarded that particular area of the wall; Jewish memorial sites such as sets of white empty book shelves in a sterile lit room (representing all the burnt Jewish literature), and pillar cement looking grave-blocks that gained prominence as one decendeded downward with each step taking you deeper into the site; and lastly the museum exhibition I took in was that of legend Helmut Newton a fashion photographer. He returned to Berlin posthumororously with this exhibition as he was born in Berlin but made to flee as a refugee before the war. Now many Eastern European Jews have been granted citizenship into this thriving democracy, and granted the same services as Germans who have worked and lived there for decades. Why? It is effectively guilt, guilt from the war, this is one of Germany's small ways for paying for all the destruction they caused a race of people a few generations ago!
Therefore there is this other side of Berlin, the dark side, where one thinks of all the history - it is mad to think of some of the people that ran this place. For example the surveillance of USSR backed dictatorship may be the result of some weird things I saw, as I witnessed some seriously disturbed characters, and I’ve seen homeless people in big cities, but never so many who had such visual mental deficiencies. And that German strong totalitarian consciessness seems just round the corner. When I took a train to the airport at the end of my stay, the ticket controller asked for my ticket something akin to an SS German Soldier demanding my papers - a chiver went down my spine.
Nonetheless I dont think I can pass judgement on Berlin just yet, a guess another more wilder more intricate visit is on hand!
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