Goodbye to Berlin, Europe’s self-effacing capital

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As I pack my bags after nine years in Berlin, I leave a city that seems trapped in a story of its own decline.

Veterans say she jumped the shark. Apartments are impossible to find. Stains in day care look like hen’s teeth. Bureaucracy is amazingly similar to the mind. Gentrification has flattened its anarchic spirit. The intensity is gone.

Some of this may be true. But it doesn’t reflect my experience. For me, Berlin is at the top of its game, a city that, if it weren’t so self-effacing, could almost become the capital of Europe.

When I started working as a correspondent for the Financial Times here in 2016, it all seemed a bit regional. Its people were known for being rude and isolated. Every day brings a brush with the “Berliner Schnoz”, the famous impudence of the locals.

In the intervening years, its hard edges have been softened. It has become more international and less trusting of foreigners. As the English language became more widespread, it flourished and turned into something like a global village.

In the past nine years I have seen Berlin welcome tens of thousands of refugees, first from Syria, then from Ukraine. It took a wave of Brexiteers, desperate to maintain their ties with Europe. Then, and especially since 2022, it has embraced Russian intellectuals in exile, artists, writers and human rights activists fleeing Putin’s dictatorship.

She has grown up clinging to her relative innocence. It’s a capital, yes, but it’s not like London, which looms over the rest of the country. The place is not dominated by banks, because they are all in Frankfurt. Major media conglomerates are located in Hamburg, and car manufacturers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Berlin is many things – the seat of government and a thriving technology hub – but it is by no means a slave to money.

This means that public spaces have not been privatized as they have elsewhere, and there are a few dismal chains that make London’s high streets look very public. The strangers you meet at parties still seem less interested in what you do for a living than in your thoughts on an “autonomous leftist” techno club or your latest premiere at the Schaubühne.

However, those who say the city has changed for the worse have a point. A former mayor once described Berlin as “poor but exciting.” Some say it’s now rich and boring.

Exhibit A – Am Tacheles complex on Oranienburger Strasse. It’s a former department store that was half destroyed in the war and then taken over by a group of artists after the fall of the Wall, becoming a symbol of Berlin’s unruly spirit. I remember visits there in the 90s, the giant murals, the graffiti, the strange sculptures in the courtyard, and the raw, mysterious energy of the place. It is now a complex of offices, luxury apartments and high-end shops, all glamorous and smooth, and has its own for-profit photography museum.

Then there is the small matter of the Berlin government cutting €130 million from the city’s arts budget for next year. The cultural elite, long accustomed to receiving generous subsidies, is in an uproar: dozens of fringe theater groups and arts initiatives could close their doors. It is an act of “cultural self-sabotage,” as one prominent director described it.

But something tells me Berlin will succeed. This city, after all, is a city that survived the bombing experience in which the Allies almost died, is on the front line of the Cold War, and has been divided into two parts by a 4-meter-high wall for 28 years.

Despite everything, it is still, in the words of an Irish friend of mine who has lived here for more than two decades, “the largest group of black sheep” in the world. It is a haven for renegades and misfits of all persuasions, who coexist kindly with their more bourgeois followers. Citizens neighbor. Even though the cost of living here is high, it still seems full of creative people doing God knows what, but they always look like they’re having the time of their lives.

As anyone who has navigated countless construction sites knows, it is also a place of vast and unlimited potential. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city “doomed to continue becoming, and never to be.” When I finally get on the plane after spending nearly a decade in this city, it will be that “becoming” that I will miss most.

Email Guy guy.chazan@ft.com

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