Saturday morning in the new German capital and the streets had the air of a small provincial town. It was after 9 and I walked empty sidewalks past tightly sealed shops — dirty, unshaven, my stomach growling. (I had just arrived on the overnight train from Krakow and learned that my room wouldn’t be ready until 2.) I stepped into a phone booth and called the first name in my notebook, the sister of a friend whose husband was the manager of the Hotel Adlon.
“Hello!” the voice on the other end bellowed. “Johnny told me you were coming. Why don’t you meet me for lunch at the Adlon.”
“I’m not very presentable,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll meet you in the lobby at 12.”
A few hours later I was sipping chilled carrot soup (given an unexpected fizz by the curious infusion of ginger ale) in the sidewalk cafe of the elegant Adlon framed at one end by the Brandenburg Gate. In the space of a morning I had gone from short-term homeless person to feted friend of the family. It is only when traveling that one’s fortunes change with such dramatic swiftness.
“We were the first new building here,” Marylea said proudly, with barely a trace of her native Nebraska accent. “It was a sign that the East was open.”
The original Adlon opened in 1907, and soon became to Berlin what the Ritz was to Paris and the Savoy to London. It survived the Second World War unscathed — staying in business throughout — and on May 9, 1945, two days after the Germans surrendered, it burned to the ground. A common theory has Russian soldiers discovering the wine cellar and, either drunkenly or maliciously, setting the building ablaze. The lot, just to the east of the newly risen Berlin Wall, sat abandoned during the Cold War.
Then in 1997, eight years after the wall came down, 90 years after the first grand opening, the Hotel Adlon glittered anew. Though the latest incarnation possesses a cold, corporate stateliness that is relieved only slightly, when a dignitary visits, by the tongue of red carpet sticking out the front door.
Soon Marylea’s husband joined us, a youthful-looking man in blue blazer (a green kerchief erupting from the pocket) and wire-frame glasses. He took a seat and watched the parade on Unter den Linden with a look of proprietary contentment. He occupied the calm, luxurious eye of the storm. Behind the Adlon the British Embassy was going up, and next door, the U.S. Embassy was due to rise, as soon as we convinced the local government to reroute a street (security measures). To the south soared the cranes and freshly sprouted corporate headquarters of Potsdamer Platz; a little to the north sat the Reichstag, with its novel glass hump (the “transparent republic”), and the construction site of incipient government offices. I asked if, despite the upheaval, Unter den Linden had regained its status as the city’s fashionable promenade.
“What you hear,” said Marylea, “is that the people from the East say that the West has spoiled it, and that they don’t want to come here anymore.”
Jean K, taking in the passing crowds, remarked, “You see the worst dressed people in this city.”
I’d heard that Berlin had no sense of style.
“I don’t think they even know how to spell `style,”‘ he said.
My hotel, the Hackescher Markt, was tucked away on a small street with a hefty name (Grosse Prasidentenstrasse) in the heart of the district — Mitte — in the heart of the city. This, too, was the former East, and in 10 years it, along with Prenzlauer Berg to the north, had become Berlin’s hot spot. The buildings were older than in the West, and more dilapidated, providing that atmosphere of urban decay so popular with the young. Yet things were changing: Whole tenements were now shrouded behind curtained scaffolding, and balconies landscaped with neatly boxed flowers. Old cafes had succumbed to the wiles of interior designers, providing modernistic and innovative backdrops, though on the long summer evenings patrons preferred to squeeze into the plain, tightly bunched picnic tables set up on the sidewalks. You felt sort of sorry for the designers, their works abandoned for the open-air equivalent of a beer hall.
Catty-corner from my hotel stood Hackesche Hofe, a collection of art deco buildings and courtyards that was like a Riverfront for adults: stylish high-ceilinged restaurants, bohemian cafes, an art movie house, a small theater offering a summer program — appropriate, in this former Jewish quarter — of klezmer music.
Along Oranienburger Strasse, up past the prostitutes in their thigh-high black leather boots and the armed guards stationed in front of the Neue Synagogue, restaurants flourished. I asked a young man where I might eat, and he said: “There’s a good Italian place on the next block, and a wonderful Thai place across the street. And if you like sushi, there’s . . .”
On Monday I took the S-Bahn train to Schoneberg to meet a friend of a friend at the Cafe Einstein. I peered out the window as we headed west, trying to see where the wall once ran, to locate that moment when socialist gray gave way to capitalist color, but it had all been blurred into an inner city exhaustion of faded tenements and dusty trees.
The cafe occupied an attractive villa — high ceilings, wood floors, the day’s papers (in various languages) spread out in the foyer, large windows giving onto a jungle of green. Matthias led me to a table, a tall, lean, bespectacled man with short-cropped hair softening an intelligent skull. He made his living as a translator, working at home. I asked him how things had changed in the last 10 years.
“People were different,” he said thoughtfully. “West Berliners were a particular breed of people. We were living in this kind of island, cut off from the rest of the world. The culture of West Berlin was imported, brought in from outside. Now there are no walls, no borders. Which is how it should be.”
His wife, he told me, was from East Berlin. They courted while the wall was up; he got permission to visit 30 days a year; she was not allowed to come to the West. “She’d take me to the checkpoint late at night, 12ish, and then I’d go back in half an hour. A different day. You’d see familiar faces, the same people using the same checkpoints.”
There was not much of a dating scene. “There were no places to go. People met at home. We’d go for walks or drives outside the city, which was illegal for me, but OK if you stayed within a certain area. This was ’86, ’87, when the wall was forever.
They eventually got married, in East Berlin, but it took her six months to come join him in the West. Then on Nov. 9, 1989, the wall came down.
“The first few years there was a kind of curiosity on both sides — the East was visiting the West and vice versa. Young people from the West went over and started renting apartments because they were cheap. Now sometimes they’re more expensive than here.
“The good feeling has died down. People don’t clap their hands now that the wall has come down. You make a point of going to the East, you don’t just wander over. You think: I haven’t been there for awhile, I should go and see what’s happened.”
Matthias himself rarely went. “I don’t want to. They complain. They have a different way of thinking. My wife works in the East and even now she comes home in the evening and says, `It’s good that I’m back in the West again.”‘
Yet he felt there had been an “Easternization” of Berlin. “It’s difficult to pinpoint, but there are times when you definitely feel that we have become more Eastern.”
Even while taking on the trappings of a great city. “Now you have poverty, and great wealth. Before, if you wanted to talk to a millionaire, you went to Frankfurt or Stuttgart. West Berlin was not a place to make money.”
He found the architecture of the new Potsdamer Platz mediocre at best. “It is dictated by concepts other than esthetic. The Arkaden (the new mall) has no connection to anything around it. It is as if it was dropped down with no reason.”
And he did not rejoice in the city’s new role as capital. “Berliners as a whole don’t want to have much to do with government. Most politicians, when they come here, get a bad reception. Kennedy was the exception. Berlin was the only German city that wasn’t Nazi; they never got a majority here. Berliners have always been very critical of authority.
“It shows in the language. The local dialect, the local accent, is associated with disrespect, a kind of roughness. It’s a harsh place. My friends from the south come and they all complain about how impolite Berliners are.”
We headed out, walking toward Nollendorfplatz, which had been the center of gay life in Berlin in the ’20s and ’30s. “It is still very much a gay area,” Matthias said, as we strolled down the quiet, tree-lined Nollendorfstrasse. At No. 17, a yellow stucco building with carved wooden doors, we found a plaque to Christopher Isherwood, who had lived there from 1929 to 1933. We seemed a long way from the days of “Cabaret.”
The next morning, on my way to the Jewish Museum, I stopped by the Arkaden and experienced that strange sense of dislocation that is becoming more and more common in travel. It was a classic, airy mall, with Beanie Babies in shop windows, gargoyle bookends in the Museum Company store, a life-size cardboard cutout of Troy Aikman standing outside the Playoff Diner.
I left quickly and headed down to Kreuzberg, the neighborhood that, before the opening of the wall, and the ascension of Prenzlauer Berg, had been popular with the young, many of whom came to Berlin looking for an alternative to the materialism of other West German cities. (Also, military service was not required of Berlin residents.) Here they cohabited with the country’s largest community of Turkish immigrants.
On Linden Strasse I found the new Jewish Museum, its severe, zinc-covered walls rising in dramatic contrast to the baroque Berlin Museum next door. Cut seemingly randomly across the facade were a few thin lines, like fissures, that constituted small windows. From one angle they resembled a fractured Star of David; elsewhere they looked like random defacements. The effect was one of dissolution.
Inside, the feeling continued. (Though it is not scheduled to open until October of 2000, guided tours are available, making this perhaps the only museum in the world to be viewed devoid of exhibits.) The plan showed a long, narrow, jagged runway on four levels; walking it you found slanted floors and stark, haunting spaces, some pitifully, tantalizingly lit by the smallest of skylights. The architect Daniel Libeskind has written that the building “links architecture to questions now relevant for all humanity.” And you understand, wandering through it, how the rumor spread that exhibits were never going to be included because the architecture alone made an eloquent statement.
But the museum will house objects, whose main thrust, according the director, Tom Freudenheim, will be “the history of Jews in Germany” and whose compilation will probably make this the largest Jewish museum in the world. An American who has experience ranging from the Art Museum at Berkeley to the Smithsonian Institution, Freudenheim said, “This is a totally unique project that doesn’t compare to anything else.”
My last evening in Berlin I went across to the Hackesche Hofe to hear a concert of klezmer music. In Krakow I had met a Californian who told me she was now living in Berlin and playing with a klezmer band — one of 25 that she knew of. This in a city whose Jewish population, according to Freudenheim, numbered probably no more than 20,000.
But Jewish culture is experiencing a wave of interest in Berlin, as in Poland, especially among young non-Jews, and klezmer music is an accessible and, in Germany at least, intelligible aspect. The crowd bunched into the small theater was a mix of young and old, with jeaned twenty- and thirtysomethings predominating. The musicians were American — Jeff Warschauer on guitar and Deborah Strauss on violin — and they moved masterfully from searing melancholy to foot-tapping joy. Warschauer introduced numbers in a combination of English and Yiddish. “It’s a great pleasure to play in Berlin,” he said at one point. “We live in Brooklyn, a place with a fairly large number of Jews, but Berlin is the only city I know where you can go out six, sometimes seven nights a week and hear klezmer music.”
After the concert I struck up a conversation with Detlef, the boyfriend of an American I’d met in Krakow. He, too, was a musician, played the tuba and lived with a free-floating international group in a communal flat in Prenzlauer Berg. Unlike them, however, he had grown up in East Berlin.
“Even when the wall was up, Prenzlauer Berg was a place for artists and other creative people,” he said. “Now there’s all these strange people coming in — lawyers and stuff. They put elevators in the buildings.”
Klezmer also constituted a change. “I used to play underground music. It was forbidden. So what? We played in churches. The churches were always there for the people the government didn’t approve of.
“I never liked East Germans,” he said. “They’d go around without smiling. But I didn’t want reunification with West Germany. I wanted a revolution within East Germany.”
He reflected a moment, this ex-revolutionary tuba player turned klezmer musician with a California girlfriend. “But I wouldn’t change what happened for anything. I’ve never felt so good. Every day I feel better. Tomorrow I’ll feel better than today.”
IF YOU GO
– Getting there
There are very few intercontinental flights into Berlin. Probably the best way to get there is to fly to Frankfurt and get a connecting flight, or take the train (about a four-hour journey).
– Getting around
Berlin is a huge city with excellent public transportation that includes buses (No. 100 is popular with tourists because it passes many of the major attractions; pick it up at the Zoo Station) and trains that go above and below ground.
– Lodging
If you want to splurge (and get a room overlooking the Brandenburg Gate) there’s the Hotel Adlon (Unter den Linden 77, D-10117 Berlin; 011-49-30-22-610; fax 011-49-30-22-612-222). Doubles start at $283.
The Hotel Hackescher Markt (Grosse Prasidentenstrasse 8, D-10178 Berlin-Mitte; 011-49-30-280-030; fax, 011-49-30-280-031-11) is an elegant boutique hotel, with bar and restaurant, right in the heart of the Mitte district. Despite its proximity to nightlife, it’s tucked away on a side street and is wonderfully peaceful. Rates start at around $100 a night.
– Dining
Berlin is a very international city, with every ethnic food imaginable, which is nice if you are not into heavy meals.
For quick, cheap sidewalk fare, it’s hard to beat kebabs, which come topped (in a nod to national taste buds) with red cabbage, and all the homemade sausages, including knockwurst, bratwurst and currywurst (the former eaten with a kind of curry-flavored ketchup).
– Sights
The Reichstag (parliament; you can walk up inside the new glass dome); Checkpoint Charlie (a guard tower still stands and there is a good museum); the Tiergarten (huge expanse of woods, lakes and zoo in the center of the city); the Info Box (with displays on the future of Potsdamer Platz); the Jewish Museum and countless others, including the Pergamonmuseum and the Gemaldegalerie (early European paintings); the remaining section of the wall, which is covered with paintings.
Two great streets for strolling are Unter den Linden and Kurfurstendamm and, for a feeling of what East Berlin used to be like, a walk through Alexanderplatz is a must, preferably on a cold, overcast day.
– Information
Contact the German National Tourist Office, 122 E. 42nd St., 52nd Floor, New York, NY 10168-0072; 212-661-7200.
