From Granta #165, Deutschland, November 23:
These sad encounters happen all the time in Berlin: first-time visitors make the mistake of booking their hotel at what appeared on the map like downtown. Culture buffs drawn to the city by films, books, art and music – one of the world’s greatest orchestras, some of the world’s best techno clubs – expect some kind of volcano, only to find themselves in an extinct crater.
Why does the centre of Berlin look like an abandoned shopping mall on the edge of Omaha? Empty pavements, vacant stores, unoccupied office buildings: high-end blight. Why is Potsdamer Platz so bleak, so ugly, so dead? How did Friedrichstraße, Berlin’s most fabled thoroughfare, become so lifeless?
The historic centre of Berlin was in East Berlin. It was walled off – quite literally – from the ambitions of Western investors, contractors and real-estate developers for decades. When the Wall came down in 1989, the two acres became a site of frenzy. Nowhere was this more palpable than on Friedrichstraße. The street was already legendary long before its glamourous rival Kurfürstendamm was anything more than a riding trail through the swamps far outside the city. The Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich III, named the street after himself to celebrate becoming the King of Prussia in 1701. Over the course of the next three centuries, Friedrichstraße became home to Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie, as well as craftsmen and workers from Berlin’s budding entertainment industry.One hundred years ago, passers-by jostled together along the whole 3.3 km length of Friedrichstraße. The street ran through Berlin’s newspaper district, the business district, the banking district, the night-life district with restaurants, theatres and cabarets, and, finally, at the northern end of the street, the red-light district. Even someone as professionally jaded as the critic Siegfried Kracauer delighted in the ‘glitter and excitement’ along the narrow piece of land that must have seemed, to a train driver looking down from the railway bridge, ‘like the world’s axis’.
Shortly after writing this, Kracauer, a Marxist Jew, had to flee Berlin for his life. Twelve years later, the Nazis were defeated. Most of Berlin-Mitte lay in ruins. For the next half-century, Friedrichstraße was cut in two by the checkpoints between the Soviet and the American sectors. It became a border crossing for foreigners, a mainstay in spy thrillers and in the real spy business too. The Americans called it Checkpoint Charlie. The rest of the world would learn this nickname when American and Soviet tanks rolled up on both sides for a sixteen-hour staring competition in October 1961 in what appeared to be the beginning of World War III.
During the Cold War, life went on in Berlin – but elsewhere, not in the old centre. Even after the Wall was brought down in 1989, an astonishing number of Berliners, especially in the west part, wanted little to do with a city centre that was not the centre of their city any more. On the brink of the country’s unification, West Berlin’s then Green Party environmental minister wanted to create a park on the grounds of Potsdamer Platz, which had once been Europe’s busiest traffic joint. The minister proposed that with this new park – right next to the already existing Tiergarten – Berlin should host the Federal Garden Exhibition in 1995.
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Hanno Klein was not prepared to tolerate such naiveté. As Berlin’s chief bureaucrat responsible for channelling foreign investment into the infrastructure of the soon-to-be capital, he had grand plans to Manhattanise Berlin. Klein was a Social Democrat who, like many Social Democrats, was reputed to be dialectically inclined towards the upper-middle class. In 1990, he coordinated a competition for a dense cluster of new high-rise buildings by world-famous designers for Berlin’s new downtown. He was dealing with designs from celebrated international architects such as Renzo Piano and Helmut Jahn. A gardening zone was out of the question. As he made painfully clear to journalists, Klein couldn’t believe how Berliners were simply unable to grasp the potential of their city. Foreign capital, in all its abundance, was ready to be sown in Berlin-Mitte. It wanted to grow and, of course, become more money. The sheer numbers were evidence enough. East Berlin and West Berlin put together had around 3.5 million inhabitants, and their count was expected to rise fast. Soon it could be 5, 7, 11 million. Berlin lay halfway between London and Moscow, a natural hub between the West and the East. Phenomenal growth seemed inevitable. And if some Berliners didn’t like it, it didn’t matter. Investors were coming in from America, from France, from Scandinavia – from everywhere – and they didn’t care. In a feature film made by local TV station Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) in the spring of 1991, Klein sits in his office, conveying the enormousness of this change, seemingly incredulous himself, but careful to convey that he is only the messenger, that he did not call for all these investments: his job is merely to funnel them. But in spite of this, Klein became a symbol of the new hot-money Berlin – an association that may have cost him his life.At around 10 p.m. on 12 June 1991, Klein opened the explosive package that had been propped against the door of his apartment in the genteel neighborhood of Wilmersdorf. The apartment was so spacious that his partner didn’t hear the detonation in his study from her bedroom. She didn’t find the body until the next morning....
....MUCH MORE
Also in #165:How Lustig is It
‘Germans don’t really have a word for ‘funny’, which seems appropriate enough.’
A Very German Coup
‘The suspected ringleader was a 71-year-old real-estate developer with an engineering degree.’
