Berlin is the modern, law-abiding, dynamic, and multi-colored capital of a large, modern, law-abiding, dynamic, and multi-colored state (with all of the limitations of a city or earthly state, of course). The enthusiasm surrounding the end of the two Germanys twenty-eight years ago produced a fresh sense of hope and found itself accompanied by an immediate and frenetic spate of new and spectacular construction projects. Indeed, during this time, Berlin has done a lot to once and for all overcome the painful wounds of the last war and its shameful aftermath while looking to the future with a sense of optimism. World-renowned architects have come here to express themselves splendidly and thereby honor the city with functional, luminous, and ecologically sustainable works. At the same time, large, small, and medium-sized investors have all licked their lips at the idea of funding the greatest reconstruction of the century. For years tourists have been streaming into the city to see these modern marvels: the dome of the Reichstag, the Hauptbahnhof, Potsdamer Platz, and the renovated splendor of the Hackesche Höfe, or, if you will, those courtyard forefathers of the modern shopping center…This is a city where even the young feel older than what surrounds them and it’s not uncommon to hear a thirty-something laconically sigh, “At one time there was nothing here…”
Over the last number of years both young singles as well as families have been moving en masse to this new European Eldorado offering everything (or, at least, seeming to) their original places of origin no longer can. Such enthusiasm echoes from blog to blog, from guide to guide, and through the millions of encyclicals flying about the web preaching Berlin’s beauty and all promise the visitor or transplant some kind of seventh heaven. Today Berlin is positively bustling with tourists, new residents, and just plain happiness.
A trendy city, however, is just like a celebrity in that it no longer enjoys any sense of privacy. People continuously and morbidly spy on all of its nooks and crannies. This buzz is palpable throughout the capital’s famous places and even throughout those which weren’t famous at all until someone decided to make them so. Places which up until just a little while ago weren’t considered even worth presenting are suddenly and arrogantly announcing themselves as a new cult complete with its enthusiastic proselytes. Fashion, as we know, is simply a matter of collective and ephemeral phenomena sustained by the incredible power of mass suggestion. We also know that the capital cities of all the great empires of the past always flaunted their own greatness through colossal works. Just think of the Flavian Ampitheatre, otherwise known as the Colosseum, which was paid for with the spoils of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and today is still respected as a symbol of power and even beauty.
Berlin is a little bit in some way – with all due respect, like Jerusalem, Mecca and the Eternal City. Now, in the new castle being constructed in front of the cathedral – the immense Schloss-to-be – presumably there will not ever be any gladiators fighting wild animals nor will those who refuse to recognize God in the head of state be sacrificed, but there is an undeniable sense of déja vu surrounding this particular need to ostentatiously flaunt one’s wealth. It’s a legitimate sense of splendor, sure. But even splendor can get out of hand and turn into a compulsive need to build just in order to celebrate who knows what.
Berlin was devastatingly bombed during the last war and it took decades just to remove all the rubble. When East Berlin was the capital of the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet-oriented governments concerned themselves with giving the city the convincing and proud image of being a Socialist capital. And they were successful, even if to the detriment of a sense of proportion and harmony. The regime needed to have immense streets for their parades, gigantic apartment blocks to house the people, enormous statues to remind that same people of the stature of the founding fathers of Socialism, and towers stretching up into the sky. And this is all still there, even if obscured by new symbols and new myths.
If we look back to the Berlin of the 1910s we still can see an imperial capital, the extremely powerful economic heart and happy cultural lungs of an expanding empire.
Therefore, over the course of only three centuries a certain idea of architectural grandeur arose here in Berlin, beginning with a late Baroque and continuing, above all, in the neo-Classicism of Friedrich Schinkel through to Jungendstil, Art Nouveau, Nazi architect Albert Speer’s abominable plan for a new capital city (which thankfully was never realized), Stalinist Baroque, and the first functional architecture of the post-war which prepared the way for the transparent and essential, but always immense, lines of contemporary works. Therefore, you could easily say that the city’s structures have always been thought of on a grand scale, or in any event, with the idea of large numbers of visitors in mind.
In today’s Berlin both the young and eternally young swarm about here and there feeling freer than ever and without any apparent sense of agoraphobia, while enjoying, to put it mildly, a rather casual lifestyle.
But not everything that glitters, of course, is gold.
Within this great movement of works of genius and power and intelligent avant-garde flourishes, however, a number of crude movements having little to do with art have underhandedly insinuated themselves. In these cases, the powerful ex-Prussian and ex-imperial Berlin has little time for the subtle. It leaves everything to dance wildly and move into new adventures in a half-baked and homologous way. The Zeitgeist transmits a great energy and in that all make their way through together passionately happy with wind in their proverbial sails.
Naturally, it’s exciting to live in a place like this, but it’s also easy to get lost in these powerful waves breaking across the attractive spaces of the new capital. Keeping the intrinsic nature of this large city in mind – constructed over a few centuries with the intention of astonishing and, most of all, persuading itself as well as other nations of its powerful role and intellectual worth – we shall move through these pages, in contrast, like crabs: a bit in reverse, a little bit below the sand, ignoring the refulgent myths which expose themselves in the bright glare of the sun in order to listen instead for the soft whisper of smaller things. If you are used to the ear-splitting decibels of the tourist throngs and the lights of crowded places, here you’ll have to adjust to almost imperceptible sounds, the opaque, and the solitary; paths that unwind within the light of the moon, rather than that of the sun. Here we shall attempt to go against the tide in the search of the lesser known, the smaller, and overlooked traces of a former – and by many mostly forgotten – Berlin which, however, is still undeniably present. The city we have never experienced is well preserved not only in writings and museums, but it lives and breathes in certain secret places that, though apparently inert, shadowy, and silent, still know how to make an impression and tell a good story. And when these secluded and melancholy places begin to express themselves, you’ll realize that it’s not only possible to get to know Berlin a contrariis, in other words, by means of its humble reserve, but that all of that which Berlin doesn’t advertise is often much more interesting than that which it makes plain for all to see.
Taking just such a trip through the shadows all alone risks exposing us to being overcome by an overwhelming sense of disquiet, but with the right guide we will have no trouble at all. And, naturally, the only possible travelling companion for a trip of this kind is a poet, one of those part-human, part-extra-terrestrial creatures who constantly live within the spleen, that seat of an often cosmic melancholy. A poet in flesh and blood is extremely hard to find and, when you do, they always seem to slip away at the first hint of practical use. For our purposes, therefore, we will have to content ourselves with imagining an otherworldly figure materializing next to us now and again. This subtle creature will kindly speak to us in our own language albeit colored by the slight ripples of a slightly English accent. He will be a peripatetic poet, threadlike and pale, bespectacled and serious, one who has travelled throughout history and come from afar to accompany us along the meditative paths of this Berlin of minor vibrations.
Translated by Alexander Booth
