Goodbye to Berlin, Europe’s self-effacing capital

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

Veterans say it jumped the shark. Apartments cannot be found. Day care spots are like hen’s teeth. Bureaucracy is imperceptibly similar.Gentrification has flattened its anarchic soul.

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

When I started working as an FT reporter here in 2016, it all seemed a bit provincial. Its people were notoriously insular. Every day a brush with the Berliner Schnauze brought the notorious rudeness of the locals.

In recent years, its rough edges have smoothed out. It has become much more international and less distrustful of foreigners. And as English becomes more popular, it has blossomed into a kind of global village.

Over the past nine years, I’ve seen Berlin take in tens of thousands of refugees, first from Syria, then from Ukraine, a wave of Brexit migrants desperate to maintain their ties to Europe, and then, especially since 2022, embraced it exiled Russian intellectuals, artists, writers and human rights defenders fleeing Putin’s dictatorship.

It grew while maintaining its relative innocence. It’s a capital city, yes, but not like London. It’s dominated by banks, because they’re all in Frankfurt. The big media conglomerates are in Bavaria and Baden – In Württemberg. Berlin is many things—the seat of government and a burgeoning tech hub—but it is by no means a slave to Mammon.

That means public space hasn’t been privatized like it has elsewhere, and there are some sad chains that make London’s high streets look so generic that strangers you meet at parties are even less interested in what you’re doing for a living rather than your thoughts on a certain “left-wing” techno club or the latest Chaubeune premiere.

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

Exhibit A. Am Tacheles complex on Oranienburger Street. It is a former department store, which was half destroyed during the war, and after the demolition of the wall became a symbol of the unrestrained spirit of Berlin. I remember the visits there in the 1990s, the giant murals, the strange sculptures in the courtyard. , wild raw, tangled energy. Now it’s offices, gorgeous is a complex of apartments and high-end shops, all shiny and sleek, with its own private for-profit photography museum.

Then there’s the small matter of Berlin’s 130 million euros being cut from the city’s arts budget for next year. dozens of fringe theater groups and artists’ initiatives could be shut down, an act of “self-indulgent cultural vandalism,” one famous director called it.

But something says Berlin will pass. This is, after all, a city that survived a near-death experience of Allied bombing and was on the front lines of the Cold War, divided in two by a 4-meter-high wall for 28 years.

Despite everything, in the words of an Irish friend of mine who has lived here for over two decades, it is still “the world’s largest collection of black sheep.” It is a sanctuary for renegades and misfits who co-exist gracefully with their more bourgeois counterparts. Citizens neighbors Despite the rising cost of living here, it’s still full of creative people doing god knows what, but always looking like they’re having the time of their lives.

And as anyone who has navigated its countless construction sites knows, it is also a place of absolute, limitless possibilities.As art critic Carl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city that is “damned to keep becoming and never to be.” When I finally get on a plane from here after nearly a decade in this city, it will be the “becoming” that I will miss the most.

Send to Guy guy.chazan@ft.com:

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