BERLIN, BORN AGAIN

We’re surrounded. We stand on an observation deck above the Potsdamer Platz, once among the liveliest intersections in Europe, then one of the deadliest, now a hard-hat zone. Builders’ cranes rise on all sides, like skeletal dinosaurs. Dozens of pink and blue pipes suck ground water from the damp earth and snake through the area like extension cords of the gods.

Soon I will be wandering through top-flight museums, communing with artists in gritty studios and panting at the fresh produce in the KaDeWe department store. But first Kerstin Piontek, city guide and lifelong Berliner, has brought me here to the center of born-again Berlin, Europe’s largest construction site, where the world’s leading architects are at play.

Lured from Italy, England, the U.S. and beyond by historic opportunity and great piles of deutsche marks, they’ve conjured glass towers, zinc-skinned facades, acute angles, soaring domes, inverted cones, green walls and bright red boxes all over town. But most of the new buildings stand here, on territory that was an urban wasteland through four decades of Cold War. And next month, the nearby Reichstag building--recently outfitted by England’s Sir Norman Foster with a 75-foot-high glass dome--regains its status as Germany’s seat of government. In many ways the April re-inauguration will symbolically complete Berlin’s rebirth as Germany’s capital. (Berlin has been the nominal capital since 1990, but the Bundestag, or parliament, has met in Bonn until now.)

Even on a weekday morning in March, the Potsdamer Platz’s temporary Infobox building--the first stop for anyone wondering about the emergent skyline--is crowded with visitors seeking updates. Piontek, my guide, turns from the skyline, casts a glance downward and adds this aside:

“We are now more or less on the former death strip.”

The former death strip: That would be the no-man’s land on the east side of the Berlin Wall, the barrier that separated the frontiers of capitalism and communism from 1961 until communist East Germany’s 1989 collapse.

As an East Berliner formerly barred from entry into the west, Piontek remembers the death strip well. And she also knows what lies under that idle lot about 100

yards from here: the rubble of the bunker where, 12 years after taking control of Germany and steering it toward World War II and a Jewish genocide, Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.

It’s not only the future that surrounds us here, but more than a few 20th century ghosts. For nearly 30 years the leading tourist attraction was a wall erected by a totalitarian state, and now for the first time in most of a century, Berlin’s boosters have a more or less conventional city to sell.

Still, wandering around Berlin in 1999 is like watching three, or maybe four, movies on the same screen. Every time you think you’ve picked out a recognizable figure in one corner of the frame, it’s jostled by a startling and contradictory image. The one constant is a city being crafted anew.

I began my five-day visit exploring those new buildings at the Potsdamer Platz. Here, courtesy of Italian architect Renzo Piano, is a 20-screen cineplex, the largest casino in Germany, a Hyatt hotel and the bright, airy towers of a Daimler-Chrysler office. Built at a cost of about $2.5 billion, most of it opened in October, with neighboring precincts, underwritten by Sony and others, to follow in the next year.

I passed several hours marveling at all these shiny new buildings and their affluent details: the 120-shop Arkaden mall (urinals by fancy china-makers Villeroy & Boch, no less); the stark severity of the new Hyatt’s lobby; the posters promising the June opening of Disney’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” in the development’s new musical theater.

But then I moved to a few other corners of the new Berlin--reconfigured museums, the broad boulevards of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse in the eastern part of the city. At souvenir stands, even after 10 years, purported bits of the Berlin Wall are still a prominent item citywide. Waiting for a sunny day that never came, I didn’t get around to visiting the royal castles and parks at Potsdam, where Frederick II held court in the 18th century, and where Churchill, Truman and Stalin dickered over the spoils of WWII in 1945. So I stayed in the big city, commuting via Berlin’s easy-to-use system of buses, surface trains and subways.

A visitor quickly realizes that the duplicated municipal efforts of the Cold War have given Berlin a remarkable set of cultural assets, beginning with three opera houses, two zoos and museums by the score, from conventional picture galleries to the free outdoor Topography of Terror exhibit, where visitors can walk the ruins of Gestapo Headquarters in the neighborhood known as Kreuzberg 61.

One of my happiest afternoons in the city was spent admiring the staggering collection of 13th to 18th century European paintings at the Gemaldegalerie, in the Kulturforum near Potsdamer Platz.

The Gemaldegalerie reopened in June 1998 after curators reunited hundreds of works formerly split between the Bode (eastern side) and Dahlem (western side) museums. Its Rembrandts, Titians, Brueghels, van Eycks, Durers, Rubenses, Gainsboroughs, Caravaggios, Giottos and Botticellis put it among the world’s top museums. And the Neue Nationalgalerie, a much-admired collection of modern works with rotating shows, stands a short walk away, in a glassy building designed by Mies van der Rohe in the 1960s.

Next stop: Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. The Pergamon, set on Museum Island with the Spree River rolling past, was built to house a set of archeological wonders that researchers spirited out of distant lands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most famous is the Pergamon Altar, from what is now western Turkey. It was built in about 165 BC, its two-story-high steps flanked by life-size human figures of amazing precision and expression.

But for every clean and well-lighted room in Berlin, it seems, there’s a darker, more disheveled one with its own insights to offer. The Kunsthaus Tacheles, for instance. From the curb, the Tacheles building looks more like a crime-ridden, vandal-scarred ruin than a haven for art. But Tacheles is another happy aesthetic legacy of the Cold War.

It stands on the former east side, one of several neighborhoods now billed as the Greenwich Village of Berlin. (Prenzlauer Berg, to the northeast, is another.) Many of the walls at Tacheles have been ripped away, leaving rooms open like hellish dollhouses, and most of its brick exterior is encrusted with grime, graffiti and posters.

But inside are about 30 artists’ studios, a cafe, even a cinema.

The building dates back to the early 20th century, and current occupants say that it has housed Nazi SS offices, French prisoners of war, a communist army barracks, a travel agency and an art school. In 1990 it was targeted for demolition, but instead, a band of defiant artists took up residence and turned it into a celebrated cause. Now, artists inside say, its immediate future seems secure.

Upstairs, I found artist Tim Roelofs working with a dog and tennis ball at his feet, a television blaring cartoons and a KFC cap on his head. His specialty was collage, usually cynical cityscapes, and for $17, he sold me a just-completed homemade folio of color photocopies of recent works.

“To Cristopher,” he wrote on the back, “who bought the first copy of Tim(e) magazine and therefore saved the night . . . (because no money for beer).”

Now I was getting to like Tacheles. Down the same hall I found Andreas Schiller, a 35-year-old painter, bent over a palette facing a wall of oddly alike still lifes. “This building has a very long and bloody history,” Schiller said. “And that’s what makes it interesting. Nobody knows what will happen next month.”

Despite the disorder around him, Schiller turned out to be perhaps the most orderly artist I’ve ever met. In 1997 he painted 1,998 apples on 222 canvases, using a time-consuming, multilayered varnish technique that he says dates back many centuries. In 1998 he painted 666 lemons on 333 canvases. This year, in a subtle departure, he will paint 333 bottles on 333 canvases.

Go ahead, giggle. But Schiller has exhibited at galleries in London and New York and several German locales, and I couldn’t afford his fruit or his bottles.

Just as Tacheles made a disorderly counterbalance to the spick-and-span Gemaldegalerie, the Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie complemented the Pergamon.

Checkpoint Charlie itself was a passage point in the Wall where communist authorities allowed visitors from the west, under closely controlled circumstances, to enter the east. The Checkpoint Charlie museum, open since the early 1960s, is less than a block from the old checkpoint, and its collection rambles from room to room (an expansion is in the works), showing off communist artifacts and watershed moments in the Cold War, including tales from successful and failed escape efforts over the Wall’s 28-year history. The artifacts include an improvised aircraft (from 1984, it used a motorcycle gas tank and measured no more than 7 feet long) and photos of the Frenchman who in 1970 smuggled his fiancee past a checkpoint by fitting her 5-foot 7-inch, 143-pound body into two adjacent (and highly customized) suitcases, where she stayed for 70 minutes. She made it out of East Berlin.

A few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, I also took a walk around the Jewish Museum, a daring zigzag concoction of metallic walls and sloping roof line that is designed to suggest a fractured Star of David. The exterior looks complete, but the museum isn’t due to open until 2000.

The formal German term for the dismantling of the Wall is Mauerfall, but Berliners call it the “Wende” (the turning point). By 2003 public agencies and private companies will have invested about $120 billion in post-unification urban redevelopment. That doesn’t mean the living is easy: Unemployment remains substantially higher in Berlin and the east than in western Germany. And in a city of 3.4 million spread over an area nine times larger than Paris, nothing is simple. East Berliners say they often sense scorn and condescension among their brethren from the west.

Yet amid all this, and despite all the gravity of history here, there are corners of Berlin that can make a visitor downright giddy. One is the sixth floor of KaDeWe.

The KaDeWe (short for Kaufhaus des Westens, or Department Store of the West) stands in one of West Berlin’s old business zones at the Wittenbergplatz subway station. It claims to be the biggest department store on the European continent, and its sixth level is the gourmet floor. This floor offers 33,000 different edible products--400 kinds of bread, 1,300 cheeses and, in the cold cuts department, 1,200 selections. I inspected a dozen kinds of eggs, noted the tasting bars for Mumm’s Champagne and Warsteiner beer. The produce department beckoned with all the hues of an Expressionist painting, from Belgian tomatoes to Italian carrots to Costa Rican cantaloupe. On a table by the escalator, displayed under glass and measuring about 4 feet by 4 feet, stood the Reichstag in marzipan.

Another morning, I popped into Cafe Wintergarten in Literaturhaus, a haunt of intellectuals in a 100-year-old building a few blocks off Kurfurstendamm, the west’s main drag, on high-toned Fasanenstrasse. At the tables, serious men in goatees frowned at their morning newspapers, bow-tied, white-shirted waiters tending to their coffees. Down the block, Berlin’s most privileged citizens browsed at Bulgari, Cartier, Gucci and Louis Vuitton shops. Just across the garden, the Kathe Kollwitz Museum would be opening in a few minutes. It was a noble, calming scene. I ordered cornflakes.

Still, history was never far away. One day, walking near the Humboldt University campus, I came upon Neue Wache, an old stone building, built as a guardhouse in 1818 and used as one for about 100 years. After World War I it was converted into a memorial to victims of that conflict. For a while under Hitler it celebrated Nazi heroes. Then, under the communists, it served as a memorial to victims of militarism and fascism. And in 1993 it was rededicated again, now to all victims of World War II. The gray stone room, starkly lighted and largely empty, includes tombs of an unknown soldier, a resistance fighter and a concentration-camp victim, along with a sculpture in black stone, “Mother and her Dead Son,” and flowers left by mourners.

For most of the visit I stayed at the small, stylish Hotel Art Nouveau, a small, stylish lodging that opened last year in the western part of the city, on the fourth floor of a building in the lively Savignyplatz neighborhood. With wood floors, high ceilings and black-and-white photographs on the walls, it’s an artsy place for guests who don’t need all the amenities. At less than $100 nightly for a single room, it was a good value.

And what of that notorious Berlin night life? There’s plenty, especially in the realm of all-night, techno-pop rave havens for the young and tireless. For those who speak German, there is Kabarett--that’s political satire in sketches and monologues, found at half a dozen spots around the city. My favorite nightspot, though, was Ewige Lampe, a small, casual jazz club near the Savignyplatz where for $10 I passed a few hours in full contentment. The band featured mandolin, cello and didgeridoo, the audience seemed all local except for me, and the music was all original. It was a pleasure to listen, sip a German beer and savor a Berlin that for once seemed neither new nor old.

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GUIDEBOOK

Berlin Basics

Getting there: Restricted coach-class fares for connecting flights from LAX to Berlin begin at $1,048 on Lufthansa, British Airways and KLM.

Where to stay: Hotel Art Nouveau, Leibnizstrasse 59; telephone 011-49-30-327-7440, fax 011-49-30-327-7444-0; opened last year with 12 rooms (three more coming soon). Double rooms $115-$140.

Hotel Bleibtreu, Bleibtreustrasse 31; tel. 011-49-30-884-740, fax 011-49-30-884-7444, Internet https://www.savoy-hotel.com; opened in 1995, has 60 rooms and an eco-bent. The hotel claims it’s built of all natural materials (no plastic), down to the carpet glue. Each room had an organically grown apple on the nightstand. Double rooms $170-$235.

Art’Otel Ermelerhaus Berlin, Wallstrasse 70-73; tel. 011-49-30-240-620, fax 011-49-30-240-62-222; opened in 1997 with 109 rooms, two restaurants and about 300 works by contemporary artist George Baselitz, displayed in guest rooms and public areas. Atmosphere is theatrical, arty and modern, in the center of Berlin. Double rooms $165-$215.

Where to eat: Reinhard’s Restaurant, Kurfurstendamm 190, local tel. 881-1621; a high-toned bistro on the main drag. Dinner main dishes up to $23, English menus available.

Carpe Diem, 576-77 Savigny Passage, tel. 313-2728; a stylish place offering continental cuisine under barrel-vaulted brick ceilings. Every few minutes, you sense the rumble of a passing train on the elevated tracks to the Savignyplatz station nearby, but it’s atmospheric, not bothersome. Entrees up to $23, but many diners choose tapas combinations.

Cafe Wintergarten in Literaturhaus, Fasanenstrasse 23, tel. 882-5414; a prime breakfast spot. Champagne breakfast about $16. 31, restaurant of the Bleibtreu Hotel (address and phone above), specializes in organic fare served in arty, modern dining room. Dinner main courses up to $20.

For more information: German National Tourist Office, 122 E. 42nd St., 52nd Floor, New York, NY 10168; tel. (212) 661-7200, fax (212) 661-7174, Internet https://www.germany-tourism .de.