Berlin Without Walls

After 20-odd years of European traveling, I still can’t think of a city less prepossessing in which to arrive than Berlin. As the ICE train crawls the last few miles, the rich lakes and woodland that ring the city give way to dingy suburbs and colorless high-rise apartments. A sense of excited anticipation mixed with exhaustion overcame my negativity when first I came here. This, after all, was Berlin, where the word decadence was practically invented, where the mad Fuhrer of a mad nation finally blew his brains out, where the pawns of the Cold War played out their intricately futile chess moves. Scrambling down to the street levels of Zoologischer Garten station, I winced at the all-pervading stench. Contemporary Mr. Norrises, rushing to change trains, ignored the 13-year-old punks with pierced faces, and eyes old with a street wisdom I didn’t want to think about. I had come to Berlin to write a travel guide, but not that far in the back of my mind, a voice asked me what I was doing here.

That arrival was 10 years ago. It might well have been a different city. The Wall still stood, the city was still surrounded by a hostile or at least unfriendly East Germany, and things, it seemed, were unlikely ever to change.

Today, the Zoo Station’s aromas are of fresh coffee and the delicate cranberry tinges of Bodyshop products, installed in a new mall of spotlessly clean shops. Security guards descend on undesirables; perfectly made-up women with fixed smiles are busy at the tourist booth. Sometimes I wonder if it really was as I remember it: that feeling of being sealed in a pressure cooker, where everything was pushed, always to the extreme. And, above all, the Wall, that line that cut through houses, across squares and rivers with its own cool illogicality, underlining the city’s schizophrenia and creating its raison d’e^tre--what Berliners called, in their own version of newspeak, “the stabilization of the impossible.”

All gone. Or perhaps buried, another stratum added to the rich loam that is Berlin’s history. The Wall, of course, was the most obvious symbol of the old regime to disappear, in 1990. Hated for so many years, it was gone in a matter of months, and with it the brightly spattered graffiti that covered the western side. The Wall was an ever-changing mixture of slogans and colors, with occasional bursts of bitterness (“My friends are dying behind you”) and unvarnished stupidity (“We should have nuked ‘em in ‘45”). Today, barely anything remains of the Wall. There’s a forlorn stretch near the Potsdamer Platz subway station, south of the Brandenburg Gate, covered by razor wire lest an overeager visitor decide to chip off a memento. All over Berlin, you’ll find street stalls hawking bits of the Wall; they remind me of the medieval sellers of the True Cross--and the stones they sell are probably as genuine.

The demise of the Wall was hailed as the end of the turgid socialism that had bemired the people living on the eastern side. Now, looking out from my office window across the skyline to the former East, it’s impossible to count the number of cranes and scaffolding-clad buildings. In the ecstasy of unification, innumerable projects were commissioned, both by the municipality and by everyone from the Peruvians to the Japanese, each hungry to get a slice of the ex-Socialist pie. By the time the West had noticed its new love’s hidden scars, it was too late: The plans had been conceived, the contracts signed, the money spent. Nothing could prevent glamorous streets of luxury shops that no one can afford, money-draining, tax-raising projects that no one now wants.

It’s one of the many ironies of the unification that central to the view from my office, towering above all the new development, is the Fernsehturm, the TV mast on Alexanderplatz--the wide concrete showcase plaza that formed the center of the eastern side of the city--that, at 365 feet, is the second-tallest structure in Europe. Built by the Communists in the isolationist 1960s, the Fernsehturm is Berlin’s one unmissable landmark, the one leftover of the German Democratic Republic that the West can’t purge. Near the tower lies the Palast der Republik, the glass-sided cube that formerly housed the GDR’s parliament (now officially closed because of asbestos hazards, but in reality because it was an easy target for western officials eager to expunge all traces of the GDR). I always liked this building because it tried, in its way, to be a building of the people: How many other parliament buildings are there with unfettered public access, several restaurants, a theater and (my favorite) a bowling alley? Before the Wall came down, I made a point of going bowling, always hoping to see then-East German President Erich Honecker relaxing from the affairs of state by pitching a few with the boys. Sadly, this was to be another disappointment of the Worker’s Paradise.

It’s important to remember that the wartime destruction of Berlin was almost total. No one in their right mind comes here for light-hearted sightseeing. In its western reaches particularly, Berlin remains a profoundly scarred city, and even in the flashiest, wealthiest sections of its West End--around the gutted tusk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church, a building purposely left in its war-shattered state--it still seems half-built, the modern buildings somehow making the city look less finished and more ugly. It took me time and exploration to realize that the eastern part of the city, cut off from the West for 30 years, is Berlin’s true heart.

Whereas the Allied sectors of postwar Berlin demolished buildings wholesale, perhaps in an attempt to expunge the stain of nazism, the Soviet zones restored and rebuilt. The result was that the former East Berlin has the city’s most magnificent streets, including most famously the Parisian-style boulevard Unter den Linden (literally Under the Lime Trees). A walk west from here starting at the Palast der Republik reveals all that’s best in the city, an antidote to nondescript streets of shoddy shops that seem to compose much of Berlin’s western side. Here, amid the neoclassical buildings of Karl Friedrich Schinkel--such as the resplendent Altes Museum and the vast monoliths of the Pergamon Museum, home of treasure plundered from all over the ancient world--you get a sense of how great and how civilized a city this once was.

Like other European capitals, Berlin is a city of cafes, a place to take kaffee und kuchen--rich, strong coffee (decaf is unheard of here, which may explain why no one here ever seems to sleep) accompanied by cardiac-busting slabs of cholesterol-packed cake. Cafe Einstein is always a favorite because of its immaculate staff members, who glide through the wood-paneled dining room to serve the movers and shakers of the art and media world. (Berlin movie director Wim Wenders, famed for “Wings of Desire,” his magical paean to the city, and for his terrible tempers, also seems to direct the staff here on his many visits.)

Art in its various forms has always been important to the Berlin, and its practitioners are respected. Before unification, the annual sum given to the city by the government (about $377 million ) for the arts was more than half the federal arts budget for the entire United States. Despite huge cutbacks, Berlin still has three magnificent opera houses, one of the world’s best symphony orchestras and a reputation as a leader in the avant-garde, especially in performance and dance.

It is, I think, this sense of experimentation and exploration that keeps me hooked to the city. That and the growing sense of living in the true center of Europe, a meeting place for east and west and a hothouse where ideas grow, flower and die quickly--or mutate into weird perversity. The Prussians have always had a soft spot for the degenerate and lascivious, as a glance at the paintings of George Grosz and Otto Dix, the plays of Brecht and the Dadaists of the Weimar years attest. Writing in the 1920s, R. Landauer described the weird night life of Berlin thus: “Its grotesqueness destroyed for many of us younger men all the illusions about sex that some people retain throughout their whole lives. One year in Berlin revealed more of the perversions in which man’s lower nature can indulge than a normal lifetime spent elsewhere.”

This quotation came back to me a while ago when I was sitting in one of my favorite nightspots, Boudoir, on Brunnenstrasseuin in the Mitte district. The activities of the nightclub, situated down one of the shabbiest back alleys in the eastern part of the city, revolved around a large, red silk-draped bed on which visitors were allowed to randomly disport themselves as they saw fit. The evening’s entertainment was a feminist-lesbian interpretation of belly dancing performed by a young German woman.

Sometimes, Berlin seems as tawdry as Times Square. Its newfound accessibility from the former Eastern Bloc countries has caused prostitution to increase markedly. Along the grand boulevard of Strasse des 17 Juni, once part of the Via Triumphalis that Hitler designed for the city, Lycra-clad women, economic refugees from Poland and Russia, sell themselves for hard currency, giving rise to tasteless jokes about Poland’s only successful export to Germany (syphilis).

But the opening of Berlin to its long lost hinterland in the East gives the city a true sense of that overused word, cosmopolitan. Cafes and subways now ring to a Babel of eastern tongues, while Cyrillic newspapers sit alongside the long-standing Greek and Turkish ones on the newsstands. There’s a sort of dualism concerning foreigners here. The Turkish Gast Arbeiter (“guest workers”), here since the early 1960s, are accepted officially, with all kinds of city offices protecting their interests. Yet even those generations born in Germany who speak only German are still referred to as Auslander. The word means “foreigner,” and when spoken in a certain way, it has a sneering, pejorative, almost hateful undertone. I remember my neighbor Frau Haase complaining about all the Auslander who were taking over the flats around us, even though she knew I was a foreigner. As a white Anglo-Saxon German speaker, the term somehow didn’t apply to me.

Nevertheless, Berlin desperately desires to become a cosmopolitan city. A few months ago, the Tagesspiegel, one of the city’s leading newspapers, ran a whole week of stories dedicated to showing how similar Berlin is to New York. Believe me when I say that to those who know both places well, such sentiments are laughable. I witnessed artist Jeanne-Claude, partner of Reichstag-wrapper Christo, fending off an enthusiastic journalist on the subject. Visibly wincing, Jeanne-Claude replied that Tokyo was the only place that had ever reminded her of the Big Apple.

Whether or not Berlin can become as cosmopolitan as the dreamers in the Tagesspiegel would wish, there’s no doubting the unusually broad range of cuisines represented in the city’s restaurants. Traditional German food has always been higher in caloric content than imagination. I’ve been leery of it since I saw my first Eisbein--a grotesque, fatty boiled pig knuckle (connoisseurs say the more lard around it the better). Thankfully the Neue Deutsche Kuche--a German version of nouvelle cuisine--and regional cooking can be found here. Abendmahl on Muskauerstrasse combines regional German fish and vegetarian cooking magnificently. At my last meal there, I had Maultaschen--literally “little pockets” (a kind of oversized ravioli originating from Swabia in southwest Germany) in gleaming lobster sauce. And the sweets. Try Kaiserschmarrn: fractured pieces of omelet and scrambled eggs bathed in sugar and served with plums; or, more traditionally for Berlin, Kartoffelpuffer, a kind of sweet potato pancake served with apple mousse, cream and sprinkled with sugar. (Kartoffelpuffer are often eaten here as a main course by office workers.)

Just about every world cuisine can be found in Berlin, often with intriguing twists: La Maskera is the only vegetarian Northern Italian country restaurant I’ve experienced outside of Italy, and there are excellent Turkish, Russian, Czech, Polish and Egyptian eateries, all run by emigres. Der Agypter is just the thing for a jaded palette, with adventurous falafel-type meals. For a real boost, though, I head for Kurdistan, on Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse, whose exotic Kurdish delicacies are unlike anything else you’ll find in the city. It’s simple to find more familiar cuisines such as Italian or French, and these can be an inexpensive choice for lunch. I would recommend Osteria No. 1, a classy, inexpensive and, therefore, highly popular pizza and pasta place; or Publique, a friendly cafe-cum-restaurant of high quality. Though not strictly French, Storch presents Alsatian food, rarely less than superb, at long wooden tables in what it claims was once a brothel. And despite the strength of the mighty deutsche mark, it’s difficult to spend more than $80 on a three-course meal for two (with wine) in any of the city’s better restaurants.

Berlin tries hard to outdo New York in its multiplicity of restaurants. Perhaps the desire to emulate New York and the enthusiasm for all things American began during the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, when Allied air crews saved the city from a Soviet blockade. Americana has always been popular here, especially among the young people who elsewhere in Europe strive to reject American MTV culture.

Perhaps, too, it’s a legacy from America’s role as defender of Berlin’s freedom--sententious words that took on real meaning when armed Warsaw Pact troops were a stone’s throw away. Even during the Vietnam War years, occupying American troops were regarded with respect, and American fashion, American TV and even American architecture are commonplace now. Just a minute’s walk from Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary crossing point from West to East and site of several standoffs during the Cold War, building is well under way for one of the biggest new projects in the city: the American Business Center. This complex of offices, a shrine to all that the city fathers pray Berlin will become economically, was designed in part by octogenarian architect Philip Johnson, the world’s most famous architect. I didn’t hear the speech he gave last year when he was treated like a visiting god by city authorities. Time, it seems, has softened memories of his dalliance in the ‘30s with quasi-fascist groups.

But some memories will never heal over in this city. Wherever you go, there are reminders of Berlin’s Jewish community that was destroyed during the war. Signposts have been erected where Jews gathered to check the list of camps to which they were later taken and killed. Stones set into walls recall atrocities that took place against the Jewish community on Kristallnacht, the evening of Nov. 9-10, 1938, the “night of broken glass,” when Jewish shops and businesses were destroyed throughout Germany.

One day while reading about resistance activities, I came across the story of how a man’s ashes had been returned to his wife, along with a bill for his execution and cremation--this was the first his wife had heard from the authorities concerning his disappearance. The story--shocking in itself--leaped out from the page as I read the letter addressed to her at Manfred-von-Richthofen-Strasse 24, next door to the apartment in which I lived and was at that moment reading the account.

“It’s impossible as a Jew not to be aware of the burden of history in this city,” says Andrew Roth, author of a guide to Jewish Berlin past and present. “Many friends and family both back home in the States and in Israel ask me how I can live here. But there was a Jewish presence in this city in the 13th century almost before there was a city, and the heritage of Germany’s Jews can’t simply be allowed to disappear.”

The city has tried, often successfully, to atone for the evils of the war. Roth pointed me to Oranienburger Strasse, which until unification was one of East Berlin’s more desolate streets but has since become a major strip for bars and cafes. This was the heart of the city’s prewar Jewish district, an identity that Nazi actions, wartime bombing and GDR indifference have almost erased.

But not quite. Halfway down Oranienburger Strasse is the Neue Synagogue, inaugurated in 1886 in the presence of Prince Otto von Bismarck. This gesture of official recognition to the highly assimilated Jewish community was impressive: At a time when Jews in Russia were enduring officially sanctioned pogroms, the Berlin community must have felt that its position was finally secure. It was this sense of security that caused many to disbelieve the threat of nazism until it was too late. Damaged on Kristallnacht, the synagogue suffered wartime bombings and was left as a shell until 1988, when restoration began. Today, its golden dome gleams. The synagogue was rededicated last May in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Next door lies the headquarters of the Jewish Community Organization and a superb restaurant, Cafe Oren, which sells traditional Jewish vegetarian and kosher food. It’s a sad point that a 24-hour police guard, armed with machine guns, defends the synagogue--a reflection of the continuing threat from terrorist attacks and the home-grown far right.

In a city that is changing as quickly as Berlin, there are no givens, no fixed points of reference. With the pending transfer of government from Bonn, apartments are becoming increasingly difficult to find and civic authorities seem to be swallowing much of the office space. By the time the massive building projects are complete, the Berlin I saw 10 years ago will be as distant as the Berlin of the 1930s.

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GUIDEBOOK / BERLIN ESSENTIALS

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Germany is 49. The city code for Berlin is 30. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 1.46 deutsch marks (DM) to the dollar. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only, unless otherwise noted.

Getting there: Delta and Lufthansa airlines have daily flights from Los Angeles to Berlin, connecting in either New York or Frankfurt. Lufthansa has daily service to Berlin via Munich.

Where to eat and drink: Abendmahl, Muskauerstrasse 9, Kreuzberg, telephone 612-5170. Sublime vegetarian and fish dishes; about $35 per person. La Maskera, Gustav-Muller-Strasse, 1 Schoneberg, tel. 784-1227. Italian-country vegetarian cooking; $25. Cafe Oren, Oranienburger Strasse 28 Mitte, tel. 282-8228. Middle European Jewish cuisine; $20. Der Agypter, Kantstrasse 26 Charlottenburg, tel. 313-9239. Egyptian-falafel type meals; $25. Kurdistan, Uhlandstrasse 161 Charlottenburg, tel. 883-9692. Iranian-Turkish cuisine; $30. Osteria No. 1 Kreuzbergstrasse 71 Kreuzberg, tel. 786-9162; straightfoward but excellent Italian food; $30. Publique, Yorckstrasse 62 Kreuzberg, tel. 786-9469. French bistro-style; $32. Storch, Wartburgstrasse 54, Schoneberg, tel. 784-2059. Alsatian cuisine; $40. Cafe Einstein, 58 Kurfurstenstrasse, Schoneberg, tel. 261-5096. German nouvelle cuisine in a slick and select atmosphere; $20.

What to see: The Pergamon Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. On Mondays and Tuesdays, only architectural collections of the Antiquities and Middle Eastern sections are open. Admission is $3. The Altes Museum is open Wednesday to Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission fees vary, depending on the exhibit. A half-hour subway ride out of the center of Berlin are the Dahlem Museums, which house collections of ethnographic objects (including a marvelous group of boats from the South Pacific) medieval sculptures, Byzantine and early Christian art, Islamic, East Asian, Asian and Indian art and, most remarkably, the Gemaldegalerie, or Picture Gallery, with a world-class collection of medieval art. Days and hours vary. Admission, $3.

Where to shop: Berlin’s most upscale shops are along the Kurfurstendamm, a mile-long stretch that begins at the Memorial Church. The KaDeWe is a vast store similar to Macy’s, with an immaculate food hall. Schlossstrasse in Steglitz has the second-largest shopping center in the city with designer stores. Otherwise, designer-style shopping in the city is pretty limited. Try the antique stores around Savignyplatz, in the former West Berlin, and in the railway arches of Fredrichstrasse S-Bahn, one of the major railway stations of the former East Berlin, for something different.

For more information: The German National Tourist Office, 1176 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 750, Los Angeles 90025; (310) 575-9799.