Goodbye to Berlin, Europe’s self-effacing capital

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As I pack my bags after nine years in Berlin, I’m leaving a city that seems to be trapped in a narrative of its own decline.

Veterans say it has jumped the shark. Flats are impossible to find. Spots in day care are like hen’s teeth. The bureaucracy is mind-numbingly analogue. Gentrification has flattened its anarchic soul. The edginess has gone.

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

When I started out as the FT’s correspondent here in 2016, it all seemed a tiny bit provincial. Its people were notoriously surly and insular. Every day brought a brush with “Berliner Schnauze”, the locals’ famous rudeness.

In the intervening years its hard edges have been smoothed down. It’s become a lot more international and less mistrustful of foreigners. And, as English becomes more prevalent, it has blossomed into a kind of global village.

In the past nine years I’ve seen Berlin welcome tens of thousands of refugees, first from Syria, then from Ukraine. It took in a wave of Brexit émigrés, desperate to preserve their ties to Europe. And then, especially since 2022, it embraced the Russian intelligentsia-in-exile, the artists, writers and human rights activists fleeing Putin’s dictatorship.

It grew while holding on to its — relative — innocence. It’s a capital city, yes, but not like London, looming over the rest of the country. The place isn’t dominated by banks, because they’re all in Frankfurt. The big media conglomerates are in Hamburg, the carmakers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Berlin is a lot of things — the seat of government and a thriving tech hub — but it’s by no means a slave to Mammon.

That means public space hasn’t been privatised the way it has elsewhere, and there are few of the dreary chains that make London high streets look so generic. Strangers you meet at parties still seem less interested in what you do for a living than your thoughts on a certain “left-autonomous” technoclub or the latest premiere at the Schaubühne.

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

Exhibit A — the Am Tacheles complex on Oranienburger Strasse. It’s a former department store that was half-destroyed in the war and then taken over by an artists’ collective after the Wall came down, becoming a symbol of Berlin’s unruly spirit. I remember visits there in the 1990s, the giant murals, the graffiti, the weird sculptures in the courtyard, the raw, scuzzy energy of the place. Now it’s a complex of offices, luxury apartments and high-end shops, all glitzy and smooth, with its own private for-profit photography museum.

Then there’s the small matter of the €130mn Berlin’s government has slashed from the city’s arts budget for next year. The cultural elite, long used to a drip-feed of lavish subsidies, is in uproar: dozens of fringe theatre groups and artist initiatives could close. An act of “self-inflicted cultural vandalism”, one prominent director called it.

But something tells me Berlin will get through. This is, after all, a city that survived the near-death experience of Allied bombing, and being on the frontline of the cold war, split in two by a 4-metre-high wall for 28 years. 

Despite everything it is still, in the words of one Irish friend of mine who has lived here for more than two decades, the world’s “largest collection of black sheep”. It is a sanctuary for renegades and misfits of all persuasions, who benignly coexist with their more bourgeois Bürger neighbours. Despite the rising cost of living here, it still seems to be full of creative people doing God knows what but always looking like they’re having the time of their lives.

And as anyone navigating its countless construction sites knows, it’s also a place of sheer, unbounded potentiality. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city that is “damned to keep becoming, and never to be”. When I finally board the plane out of here after nearly a decade in this city, it will be that “becoming-ness” I’ll miss most.

Email Guy at guy.chazan@ft.com

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