It is 20 years this November since the Berlin Wall fell. And it is 24 years since I, as a naive 19-year-old, worked in an old people’s home right next to it in the city memorably described by playwright Michael Frayn as an opulent ocean liner stranded in the Eastern Bloc.
West Berlin in those days was a weird and heady place. It was at the bleeding edge of the Cold War but was a pawn rather than a player in European politics. Berliners paid less tax and enjoyed more investment than other West Germans, and the city’s three universities were oversubscribed because it was the only place in Germany exempt from national service. It was a nexus of counterculture politics, artistic experiment, sexual liberalism, consuming post-war guilt and seething nightlife. In short, a brilliant place to be an expat English teenager.
Of course, the Wall was always there, an implacable monument to bureaucratic inhumanity erected in 1961 by the Russian satellite state of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) to isolate the sectors of the post-war city still occupied by the British, French and Americans.
I boggled at the spots where the Wall sliced through buildings, jinked around monuments or ran, ridiculously, down the middle of the Spree river. I absorbed the stories of escapees shot by their fellow Germans in no-man’s-land. But it was also easy to forget the Wall when cycling through West Berlin’s surprisingly abundant woodland, or swimming in its many rural lakes.
The last time I was here, ten years ago, Berlin remained a confused building site as it struggled with the physical and emotional complications of reunification. Now I’m back for a whistle-stop weekend to see how the city I loved is faring.
It’s still a surprise when my taxi sweeps me past the Brandenburg Gate and up the grand Prussian avenue of Unter den Linden to the five-star Hotel de Rome. In my day, the Wall cut both this ceremonial gate and the street off from the West, before swerving around the Reichstag government building.
Westerners could visit the East back then on day trips via the notorious Checkpoint Charlie, and gawp at the majestic but derelict Unter den Linden. Its 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century museums, university, cathedral and opera house were marred by war damage and neglect. Beyond lay Alexanderplatz, the Stalinist square created by the DDR and dominated by the brutalist TV tower, a globe on a vast spike.
Alexanderplatz is just as soulless and bleak as ever, although there is now a viewing platform in the TV tower and casinos and shopping malls around the square. But the opera house and other public buildings are completely refurbished and buzzing, and there are now Ferrari dealerships on Unter den Linden.
Crossing the Spree, I’m surprised to see tour boats chugging along. Bisected by the Wall, it used to be a dead river. And the Hotel de Rome has been beautifully restored, reincarnated from its former life as the shrapnel-scarred Dresdner Bank. There’s now a rather lovely swimming pool in the former vault.
I pay my first visit to the bombastic Dom (cathedral) with its lavish woodwork and crypt full of monolithic Teutonic sarcophagi, and the Pergamon Museum, home to the spectacular Pergamon altar and blue-tiled Ishtar Gate.
The adjacent Old National Gallery has been exquisitely restored, its scalloped alcoves and gently curving rear rooms showcasing classical German art. These buildings, like much Berlin architecture, are grand and imposing rather than beautiful, and are now being ‘tweaked’ to show them in their best light.
Go to the next page to find out how the joined-up Berlin became a leading world city for arts and culture.
