Beverly Hills’ Sister City? It’s Hardly a Distant Cousin

You head out to the northeast side of Berlin on Konrad Wolf Strasse, a thoroughfare named for the brother of the East German spy chief. Pass Sandino Strasse and turn right on Simon Bolivar, and you’ll come to the mayor’s office.

“This is quite a revolutionary neighborhood,” says the West Berlin-born cabdriver, peering at the unfamiliar street signs.

In East German days, the name “Hohenschoenhausen” was invariably linked with that of the Stasi, the notorious secret-police force that obsessively monitored and controlled the words and deeds of the public, all in the name of fulfilling the goals of Marx.

Today, the power equation has changed, even if the street names haven’t. Today, there are new goals to fulfill.

Like making Hohenschoenhausen the sister city of Beverly Hills.

“It could be very exciting to help these two communities communicate,” says Mayor Baerbel Grygier, who was elected on the ticket of the former East German Communist Party, now doing business as the Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS. “Easterners could be even more exotic to some Americans than the tribesmen of New Guinea.”

Normally, the international sister city program is used by municipalities and civic boosters who want to promote cross-cultural understanding through exchange programs and other goodwill initiatives. Cities tend to be paired because they have something in common: a similar population size, perhaps, or the same economic base. Hohenschoenhausen, with a population of 120,000, has neither in common with Beverly Hills, population 36,000.

And this suburb is about as far in spirit from the palm trees and privilege of Beverly Hills as a place can be.

“How do I put this delicately?” asks the mayor, who stocks the candy dish on her desk not with bonbons but with a big fistful of condoms. “This is a ‘red borough.’ ”

The Mayor Hopes That Opposites Attract

With her well-cut blond hair, winter tan and flamboyant faux-diamond earrings, Grygier in fact evokes Rodeo Drive better than the grim concrete canyons of a socialist model city. But even now, with the Berlin Wall but a memory, there’s no question where Hohenschoenhausen’s heart lies. In addition to electing Grygier and the others on the PDS municipal ticket, voters here have sent a communist to Bonn as their parliamentary representative.

“Of course, not too many partner cities might want to cooperate with a city that is governed by a majority like ours,” Grygier admits.

Still, she says, “we’re a young borough. About one-third of our population is under 20. I can imagine that these kids and their parents would really like to see how people in Beverly Hills live. Different lifestyles. Different values.”

But for all her enthusiasm, Beverly Hills doesn’t seem to know much about Grygier’s project.

Hohenschoenhausen came into being in the mid-1980s as an instant “satellite city” of East Berlin, designed and hurriedly constructed on pastures at the edge of town. The planners were eager to provide egalitarian and politically correct housing for huge numbers of factory workers; style, charm and architectural detail were all deemed “bourgeois decadence” and excluded from the designs.

The result: block after block of functional, rectangular apartment buildings with flat roofs. The planners’ color of choice was a muddy gray. So dreary were these apartment towers that, from day one, the people who lived in them called them “worker-lockers.”

Grygier’s office is in such a worker-locker, a gray box that was used by the secret police as a logistics center in the Stasi’s heyday. Just down the street is a former Soviet prison, now being turned into a historical museum.

‘Pretty Houses, Like in Beverly Hills’

In fairness, however, it must be said that much color and life have been breathed into Hohenschoenhausen since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Some worker-lockers have been given face lifts and coats of cheerful, pastel paint. Bridle paths are being laid out for the many horses left over from the days when this area was farmland. There are also a large shopping mall, a McDonald’s and a Coca-Cola bottling plant.

“You can’t compare this to Beverly Hills, but people are trying to have pretty houses, like in Beverly Hills,” says Manfried Hoehne, Hohenschoenhausen’s official spokesman, pointing out the various renovations and construction sites during a tour.

Hohenschoenhausen even has its very own minor architectural jewel: the last private home designed in Germany by the pioneering Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe before he fled the Nazis. Built as the country retreat of a rich Berlin printer, it stands on choice land next to a small lake with a necklace of weeping willows. In East German times, the occupying Red Army first used it as a garage; later, the Stasi tore out the interior walls and turned it into a laundry for a nearby state guest house.

“Maybe this house can be some sort of bridge to Beverly Hills,” suggests Wita Noack, who helped restore the house and is now running a small gallery in it.

Grygier, a psychologist by training, is the first to admit that it was just a happy accident that this “red borough” is now reaching out to Beverly Hills. The mayors of Berlin’s 23 boroughs meet once a month, she explains, and at the end of one meeting last year, the chairwoman was riffling through her papers looking for unfinished agenda items.

“Would anyone be interested in becoming the sister city of . . .” the chairwoman began.

Grygier’s hand shot up, for young Hohenschoenhausen is the only Berlin borough with no such partnership.

”. . . Beverly Hills?”

“Everybody laughed,” Grygier recalls. “But I consider it a challenge.”

Grygier filed a formal application. Silence. She called Beverly Hills and asked for news. No one knew what she was talking about. Still, although Beverly Hills already has two sister cities--Cannes and Acapulco--Grygier was invited to resubmit her application. She did. More silence.

Berlin Goes to Bat for the Project

By this time, the mayor wasn’t about to let her project fizzle. She tipped off Ingo Roessling, a reporter from the conservative Berlin daily Morgenpost. He called the Berlin protocol office, expecting to be told that the Beverly Hills initiative had been shot down. Instead, he says, he was told that Berlin liked the idea and the promise it held for bridge-building.

“Especially on the West Coast of the United States, people don’t know much about the former East and German unification,” Roessling says.

When asked about the sister city plan, MeraLee Goldman, the former Beverly Hills mayor and current city councilwoman, said she remembered Mayor Les Bronte saying something about having received a letter from Germany. But she didn’t know details.

Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen, on a trip this week to Los Angeles, is supposed to be pushing the Hohenschoenhausen initiative. The thought of the conservative Diepgen, a member of the ruling Christian Democratic Union, stumping for her borough fills Grygier with glee.

“It’s strange and bizarre for him,” she says. “He has to speak on behalf of a ‘red borough,’ with a PDS mayor and a PDS government. And when he comes back and says, ‘I’m sorry, but this just isn’t going to work,’ he’ll have to explain why. It’s a very interesting moment for us.”