Berlin im Rückblick: Looking Back on Berlin (Day 66)

Viewing Berlin From Afar
Looking West from the Fernsehturm

It is possible that I have enough space and time between myself and Berlin that I can attempt to reflect on the city. It is of course also possible that I have not waited long, but I feel that I had best write down my thoughts before they become lost in the cups of nepenthe they call tea here in the coffee houses of Vienna.

To begin with, I might humbly suggest you visit.

It is a place where things happen, and were people look to the future. Call me an American in an older sense of the world (i.e. before the word started being followed up by various expletives and references to the "World Police"), but I have a tendency to look at what is yet to come for places. Monuments are nice, an appreciation for the past and the lessons it can tell us is important, but what really matters isn't what a city is or once was, but what it has the potential to become. A city appeals to me when it contains some sort of ever-present pulse. When it draws you out in the morning to to rush from place to place, to like that rushing, and to feel a part of some sort of energy pushing at the future.

On The Move in Berlin
The "Ampelman" Somewhere in Tempelhof

There ought also be places in these cities where one can escape this, parks and churches, old cafes and half forgotten places, but one should only have to step outside one's door to feel the pulse again. Without that, there is no sense of city, and the metropolis becomes no more than a collection of people living in the same place. Berlin, I am happy to say has that sense of vibrancy.

Everyone is going somewhere, time is always in a state of being filled, trains are leaving, iron and stone are being put together into buildings, and perhaps most importantly, people are coming. There is a sense of newness and discovery, albeit brought forth from forty years of division, in which people are looking at old institutions and asking, are we doing this right? How can we make this run faster? What about the future?

Pointing The Way?
Church in South Berlin

Part of this comes as it always does from a sense of lack and a constant quest to figure out ones identity. Berlin it has been said is “eine Stadt, verdammt dazu, ewig zu werden, niemals zu sein” ("a city condemned to change eternally, never to be") and I think no sentence can do the city more justice. It has never been allowed to become what what Paris, London, or Vienna have enjoyed, a truly unrivaled European center for power and culture. In its two periods of relative cultural predominance, in beginning of the twentieth century when artists flocked towards it and away from Paris, and later in the 1920s its rise was choked off by the outbreak of war. But yet somehow it has always managed to stay relevant, even as a divided city during the Cold War.

So now, finally given another chance to become something, it is taking on the challenge with enthusiasm. Its trains are superb and ever punctual, the old symbols of its past are being rebuilt, the east is slowly being redeveloped by a generation of young people from its dingy communist past to the hip section of town, and it is trying to compete with the best on every level. It has taken upon itself to attempt to become a continental airtraffic hub, has created a reputation as a fashion center in a matter of five years, hosted the world cup final, and has reorganized its museums in an attempt to take on the Louerve in terms of grandeur. In every sense it is aiming to do what it has briefly done twice before, overtake Paris in terms of importance on "the continent," but this time, it is looking beyond at London, Tokyo and New York, and asking where it can end up.

Alex in "the blue hour"
Alexanderplatz : Looking towards the Fernsehturm

Put more simply, Berlin, at its core, is a young city, a vibrant city, a city which immigrants and artists have flocked to, and a city in the center of the newly expanded European Union. It is in other words, as it has always been, a city in on the verge of becoming.

Looking Forward
A Statues View over the Gendarmenmarkt

But go soon, because in a number of years the Berlin I know will be buried under its own progress.