Wall Gone, Berlin’s Freedom Pains : Germany: Five years later, construction cranes silhouette the skyline. But danger unknown in Cold War days lurks by night, with robbery and murder on the rise.

“You’ve learned what freedom is. Don’t forget it.”

The artist’s inscription appears on the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall still standing--a 1.3-mile collection of murals.

Five years after the Wall opened, the city that once symbolized the divide between Western democracy and Soviet autocracy has learned freedom is a messy chore.

Construction cranes 20 stories high now silhouette Berlin’s skyline. But danger unknown in Cold War days lurks by night, with robbery and murder on the rise.

A bicycle tour along the wall’s former route tells the story of a city in flux.

The “East Side Gallery” of murals and slogans on the Wall section has lost its luster. Paint is chipping. Graffiti mocks the art.

Nearby is a BMW dealership, its shiny symbols of west German manufacturing prowess parked against a background of prefabricated, Communist-era apartment houses.

The East German everyman’s car, the two-stroke Trabant, is all but gone. But easterners couldn’t trade in their drab apartments or save jobs in closed factories.

Some 175,000 east Germans now work in west Berlin, compared to 20,000 west Berliners commuting to jobs in former east Germany.

Behind the East Side Gallery, on the Spree River’s eastern bank, a few hundred squatters live in ramshackle trailers, tolerated by the same city officials who evicted them from the Kreuzberg district three years ago.

Across the river is Kreuzberg, once a low-rent western district in the Wall’s shadow. Now it borders a booming city center and property values have shot up.

“A lot of penthouse apartments around here were refurbished and are standing empty because the prices are too high,” said Oliver Schattel, who helps run a small farm that Kreuzberg squatters started along the wall in 1980. City officials want to bulldoze the farm.

In 1993, the yuppie influx prompted Kreuzberg extremists to bomb an upscale delicatessen and a few developers’ luxury cars.

Cars sometimes seem useless in the city of 3.47 million people. Traffic crawls as streets are torn up and rebuilt, subway lines renovated, long-severed bridge and rail links re-established.

About $30 billion in building projects are in the works, most slated for completion by 2000, when the government’s move from Bonn should be in full swing.

Russian and Allied soldiers left Berlin last fall, and as they moved out, the world moved in. Eastern Europeans account for most of the 25% rise to 395,000 foreign residents since 1989.

Some of the new arrivals are burglars and car thieves blamed for much of an alarming rise in crime. Murder and attempted murder nearly doubled to 735 cases in Berlin in 1993 from 1992. Police say Russian mobsters are a key factor.