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Say goodbye to Berlin, the self-service capital of Europe


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

Veterans say it jumped a shark. Flats are not available. Sun care stains are like hen’s teeth. The bureaucracy is the analogue of the mind. Gentrification has flattened its unstable atmosphere. The edginess is gone.

Some of this may be true. But it doesn’t reflect my experience. In my opinion, Berlin is at the top of its game, a city that, if it wasn’t so isolated, could be the capital of Europe.

When I first started as an FT writer here in 2016, everything seemed to be a small province. The people there were notorious for being rough and tumble. Every day brought a brush with the “Berliner Schnauze”, the famous mischief of the locals.

Over the years, its rough edges have been smoothed. It has become more international and distrustful of foreigners. And, as English becomes more widespread, it has become a global village.

In the past nine years I have seen Berlin take in tens of thousands of refugees, first from Syria, then from Ukraine. It took a wave of Brexit émigrés, who are eager to keep their ties to Europe. And then, especially from 2022, it received Russian intellectuals in exile, artists, writers and human rights activists fleeing Putin’s tyranny.

It grew as it held on to its – lineage – innocence. It’s a capital, yes, but not like London, which covers the whole country. This area is not controlled by banks, because they are all in Frankfurt. The main media conferences are in Hamburg, the car manufacturers of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Berlin is many things – the seat of government and a thriving technology center – but it is by no means a slave to Mammon.

That means public space has not been privatized in the way it has been elsewhere, and there are fewer chains that make London’s high streets look ordinary. The strangers you meet at festivals still seem less interested in what you do for a living than your thoughts on some “left-autonomous” technoclub or the latest Schaubühne premiere.

However, those who say the city has turned ugly have a point. The former mayor once described Berlin as “poor but fun”. Some say it is now rich and boring.

Exhibit A – Am Tacheles building on Oranienburger Strasse. It is the first department store that was half-destroyed in the war and taken over by a group of artists after the Wall came down, becoming a symbol of Berlin’s unrestrained spirit. I remember visiting there in the 1990s, the giant paintings, the paintings, the amazing sculptures in the courtyard, the raw, vibrant energy of the place. Now a mix of offices, luxury apartments and high-end shops, it’s shiny and sleek, and has its own private photography museum.

Then there’s the small matter of the €130mn Berlin government has dropped from the city’s arts budget for next year. The cultural elite, once used to subsidizing the elite, is in turmoil: many theater groups and artists’ projects may be closed. An act of “destroying the culture of selfishness”, one famous director called it.

But something tells me that Berlin will pass. In fact, this is a city that survived the bombings of the Allies, and is on the front line of the cold war, separated by a 4-meter wall for 28 years.

In spite of everything there is still, in the words of an Irish friend of mine who has lived here for over twenty years, “the greatest collection of sheep black” in the world. It is the sanctuary of apostates and people who do not conform to all influences, who live well with their bourgeois. Citizens neighbours. Despite the rising cost of living here, it still seems to be full of creative people doing God knows what but they always seem to be having the time of their lives.

As anyone who has traveled through its many construction sites knows, it is also a place of immense potential. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city “condemned to be, and not to be”. When I finally get on the plane from here after almost ten years in this city, it will be a “being-ness” I will miss dearly.

Email Guy at guy.chazan@ft.com

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