Berlin may wear its recent history like a thick blanket of guilt, but looks to the future with chutzpah and irreverence.
Checkpoint Charlie is sandwiched between American fast food outlets, wartime bunkers are wittily re-purposed as art installations, the futuristic new Hauptbahnhof building sits on the bank of the Spree river like the Borg ‘cube’ from ‘Star Trek’ and fragments of the former wall on Potsdamer Platz and elsewhere are festooned with anti-war slogans. I swear if you stood still long enough you’d likely be tagged, as I’ve not seen graffiti like it since New York in the 1980s.
The city feels like a metaphor for the new Germany- young, multicultural and comfortable in its own skin and if in the process some of the country’s legendary efficiency has been lost in translation, on balance it feels the better for it. Our receptionist at check in was wryly sympathetic when we recounted our tragicomic experience travelling here on German Railways from Prague “I know whenever people say they’ve come by train that they’ve had a terrible trip. The railways just do whatever they like! Don’t worry, you’ll be able to laugh about it tomorrow…”.
Charlottenburg, where we are staying used to be the old centre of West Berlin, losing that status to Mitte after the re-unification. Still one of the wealthiest suburbs, it’s the only place that appears to consider itself above using the cheery East German ‘Ampelmãnnchen’ cross walk signs on its traffic lights, that the rest of the city has so enthusiastically adopted and which has become an informal symbol of re-unification.
Image: Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Sour grapes or not, Charlottenburg is a world away from the brutalist Soviet blocks found on the likes of Karl Marx Allee, Leipziger Strasse and Friedrichstrasse, where street vendors sell DDR and USSR military memorabilia and other Cold War artifacts are incorporated into the streetscape. An intact and apparently still operating vintage phone booth, was a practical touch, but the ironic self drive ‘Trabi’ tours, belching two stroke engine fumes in their wake, must make East Berliners of a certain age cringe.
Having had our fill of Soviet Monumentalism from living in Warsaw, we were keen to see if we could find a slice of intact pre-war East Berlin. So after lunch at a traditional restaurant on Unter den Linden, a street whose vastness is such that it makes the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag seem disappointingly small, we set out to find it, (in my case, already regretting the absurdly large Curry Wurst and Berliner Pilsen I’d consumed, but still laughing about a loud exchange between a briskly laconic waiter and an octogenarian American tourist: “What’s a decent tip?”; “10%, but I give nothing if I don’t like the food!”).
Hard by Friedrichstrasse railway station and the Spree river there’s a small four block pocket of lovely period apartment buildings, restaurants and independent stores centred on Reinhardstrasse, which somehow survived the bombing and Soviet ‘modernisation’ programmes- an untouched fragment of the beautiful city this must once have been. Taking to the water on one of the many Spree cruise boats we find that at 4pm on a Tuesday the city is already out at play sunning itself and enjoying drinks on the riverbank, which was not a surprise to us as we’d already passed a group of nudists in a Tiergarten clearing on our way East this morning!
Berlin is justly famed for its diversity and tolerance of minorities and we love it for that, but there was mayhem as we returned to our hotel one evening to find Ku-dam and Kant Strasse lit up with flares and a cacophony of car horns and cheering from a traffic jam of exotic vehicles that wouldn’t have looked out of place in London’s Knightsbridge or Beverly Hills Rodeo Drive, while the police looked helplessly on.
The cause of all this pandemonium, we were informed by two Syrian teenagers was that the Istanbul team Galatasaray had just won the Turkish Football Super League for the 23rd time “It’s always like this”, they said. “Where do these rich Turks get their money from?” I asked the hotel doorman. “Black market!” he replied, quick as a flash.
Berlin is vast, and while it’s a rite of passage for Sabrina and I to master the public transportation system in every city we visit, here it’s a matter of necessity for getting to beyond the obvious. The S Bahn and U Bahn system works well enough and has some of the city’s wittiest and wickedest graffiti.
So, leaving the centre we first travel north eastwards on the U Bahn to Eberswalderstrasse in the newly gentrified suburb of Prenzlauer Berg, passing over neat green grids of rent controlled fruit and vegetable allotments or ‘Kleingarten’ (little gardens)- a boon for the less well off which dates back to the 1820s, and which are now ubiquitous outside the centre of so many German cities. Our destination- tea and gluten free cakes in the charming if rather ferociously priced, ‘Boulangerie Jute’, that counts among its neighbours the ‘Yummy Mummy Café’, which tells you all you need to know about this part of town!
I can’t think of another city on this planet that would turn over 355 hectares of recently vacated open land into a vast recreation ground which is open to all, rather than sell it off to real estate developers, but that is the wonder of today’s Berlin in a nutshell. Templehof Field where the Berlin Airlift saved West Berlin from almost certain starvation due to the Soviet blockade of 1948-1949 and was finally mothballed as an airport 60 years later is also a silent reminder of the scale of Nazi ambition, as the vast, still standing terminal designed by Hitler’s architect of mass construction, Albert Speer was built as a symbol of world domination and was designed to resemble an eagle in flight, with its semicircular hangars mimicking spread wings.
There are other poignant public reminders of atonement everywhere you go in this city from the Jewish, Sinti and Roma Holocaust Memorials near the Brandenburg Gate to the New Jewish Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, which was almost destroyed on ‘Kristallnacht’ (‘night of broken glass’) by the Nazi Party’s ‘Sturmabteilung’ (SA), suffered further catastrophic damage from wartime bombing and was only properly re-constructed (albeit on a much smaller scale) after the wall came down. It seemed only right to eat lunch on the terrace of the beautiful Grand Café a couple of doors down and I’m happy to report that it was the most enjoyable of our stay. No ‘stunt’ eating required, like my Curry Wurst of a few days earlier, just a Gorgonzola fever dream.
Chicken Breast fillets in a Gorgonzola cream sauce: Serves Four
This richly indulgent sauce is normally served over a pork schnitzel, but is equally delicious (and a whole lot healthier) in this guise.
4 half chicken breast
2 cups heavy cream
2/3 cup crumbled Gorgonzola cheese
240g baby spinach, washed leaving some water on the leaves
Heat a frypan (large enough for all the chicken) with 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and 1 tablespoon of butter. When the butter has melted and bubbling, add the chicken breasts, brown lightly on both sides. Remove and set aside.
In the same pan add the cream and Gorgonzola on medium heat until the cheese has melted, taste and adjust the seasoning. Return the chicken to the pan and cook gently until done. While the chicken is cooking, heat another pan on medium heat and add the spinach cooking until just wilted; lightly season.
To plate: divide the spinach on four plates then top with a chicken breast and spoon the sauce over.
Serve with boiled new potatoes, then sautéed in butter and finely chopped rosemary.
Tomorrow morning we leave Berlin for Copenhagen, so to steel myself for another adventure on German Rail, I leave Sabrina to her packing, which I prefer to postpone to the last possible moment, and stroll down to the tony neighbourhood of Savigny Platz, arguably the most fashionable enclave in already fancy Charlottenburg. I sat down with the beautiful people enjoying beautiful drinks as the sun set down Kant Strasse and was just getting ready to become irritated with the pretension of it all when I noticed the cutest Berliner Curry Wurst stand we’ve seen these past few days, on the opposite corner of the pocket park from where I was sitting. Berlin had done it again, proving that even in Charlottenburg its heart is unerringly in the right place!
Berlin is a city I used to know well, having spent over a year there in the 70s when the Wall dominated everything. Today's vibrancy has its roots in that post-war period when West Berlin, whose inhabitants were exempted from national service, became home to many of West Germany's radical thinkers and creatives. It made for a heady mix.
For the functioning of the city, the Wall had its benefits too. With no rush hour (the nearest place to 'rush' in from being some 3 hours away), traffic was minimal and public transport operated perfectly. Movement around the city was so easy, reliable and stress-free. It's a lesson no city planner appears to have learned.
But even transport was complicated by Berlin's politics. The rather dilapidated S-Bahn ran almost empty, largely boycotted by West Berliners as it was run by the GDR (ostensibly as a means of earning Western money, but undoubtedly at a cost to the authorities there).
Friedrichstrasse station , a main interchange for many U-bahn and S-bahn lines, was located in the East, but accessible only to Westerners - an island within an island. The eagle-eyed could spot signs of an eternal game of cat and mouse being played out between smugglers from West Berlin , their GDR enablers and West German Customs. Smugglers used the station to swap their empty bags for ones filled with cheap East German cigarettes and other contraband for wads of West German marks or US dollars. Every encounter with the GDR always involved an exchange of much needed currency.
Several of the stations, when approaching Friedrichstrasse from the north on line 6, were in East Berlin. Trains would slow to half speed as they passed through, perhaps so passengers could gawp at the forlorn-looking GDR guards posted at intervals along the platforms 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, motionless beside their Alsatian companions, adorned with trench coats and sub-machine guns. With each passing, occasional passengers amused themselves by waving wads of cash in the window or raising their hands in mock surrender, but most just let the moment pass unmarked as they contemplated their daily business.
Besides the transport, one thing few people realised about West Berlin was just how green it was. I was frequently asked if it didn't feel claustrophobic living there, yet over half the area within the Wall was given over to the Wahnsee and the woodland surrounding it. So treasured were these lungs of the city, that fires were banned and police were regularly seen patrolling the pathways to ensure compliance.
The Berlin of today is a very different beast - a modern, thriving and energetic city. For the fact that families, once cruelly separated by the failure of their leaders, can see each other as often as they wish, we must be thankful. But West Berlin, too, had much to commend it. Indeed, I have never since spent time in a city where the living was so easy.
Berlin is full of memories with the young citizens of 24 hour culture dancing on the graves of a fading past