Most visitors may head straight for the high culture and trendy nightspots to the east, but West Berlin has an attraction all its own, says William Cook
In the middle of the busy road that runs between the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, there is a curio that sums up the schizophrenic history of Berlin. Barely a foot across, a narrow strip of cobblestones follows a zigzag path right across the city. This is the route of the Berlin Wall, which encircled the western half of the city from 1961 until 1989, making over a million Germans prisoners in their own country. Of that 160km barrier, this little line of cobbles is virtually all that remains.
Berliners do not tend to set much store by anniversaries, and with good reason. Most dates in this city’s history do not provide much cause for celebration, but 2009 promises to be different, for this year marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What began as a 40th birthday bash for the German Democratic Republic in 1989 ended with the reunification of Germany, and Berlin is now gearing up for another big street party. Yet, ironically, the focus of these celebrations is almost entirely on the east.
Shut off from Western eyes for more than a quarter of a century, East Berlin has become this city’s must-see destination. The tour buses disembark outside the Brandenburg Gate and the sightseers all head east. Yet it was West Berlin that the Wall enclosed, and though most visitors ignore it, it is West Berlin, not East Berlin, where you can still catch a flavour of the Cold War.
East Berlin was a fascinating place, but it was not all that different from other communist capitals – pompous and decrepit, like a scene from George Orwell’s 1984. West Berlin, on the other hand, was unique – there was no other city like it, a capitalist enclave 160km behind enemy lines. And, while East Berlin has been transformed, from a barren mausoleum into a brash, self-confident metropolis, West Berlin has hardly changed.
This is what I was telling the Englishman in the penthouse bar high above East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, but he was not really listening. It was his first visit to Berlin, and he seemed disappointed and perplexed.
‘Where’s the centre of the city?’ he kept asking, as we looked down on the dark streets below. ‘It’s over there,’ I told him, pointing west, but I could tell he was not really interested. Tourists do not want to know about West Berlin, and that is what makes it so intriguing. And so on my last visit I left my room in the Hotel Adlon, about 60 metres into East Berlin, and got on my borrowed bicycle and cycled through the Brandenburg Gate, from east to west.
Do take this journey is to pass from high-rise to forest. Hard up against the site of the Wall, the Tiergarten is the green heart of West Berlin. Now that the locals are no longer confined to the city limits, it has become a lot less crowded, and apart from a few earnest joggers in DayGlo Lycra, I had the whole place to myself. The centrepiece of this huge park is the Siegessäule (also known as the Berlin Victory Column), an ornate gold column that commemorates Prussia’s victories over Denmark and France in the 19th century. With its vainglorious past and peaceful present, it feels like a fitting symbol for West Berlin. Moved from its original position outside the Reichstag to make way for Welthauptstadt Germania – the vast new city Hitler planned to build once he had won World War II – today it is familiar to film buffs as the setting for Wim Wenders’ poetic movie, Wings of Desire.
Passing through the south-western end of Tiergarten you come across the shattered spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche (Kaiser William Memorial Church). ‘A sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town,’ wrote Christopher Isherwood, before World War II.
Wrecked in an Allied bombing raid in November 1943, the Gedachtniskirche no longer sparkles, but the shabby town around it has lost none of its cheap lustre. Sex shops and kebab stalls jostle with cafés and chain stores in the centre of West Berlin.
For 40 years, this was the only place within 160km where you could buy a pair of jeans or watch a blue movie or drink a decent cup of coffee. Today it is almost quaint, in a rundown, seedy sort of way. Unlike East Berlin, there has been hardly any new building here since the 1970s, but though it looks the same, it feels different from before.
Zoo Station used to be the hub of West Berlin’s rail network. Now it has been usurped by the brand new Hauptbahnhof (Berlin Central Station) in East Berlin. The Kurfürstendamm used to be Berlin’s main boulevard, the city’s answer to the Champs-Elysées. Today it has been eclipsed by Unter den Linden in the east. Kaufhaus des Westens in West Berlin is still Europe’s second biggest department store (after Harrods) but it is no longer such a novelty, now capitalism has reclaimed the east.
Yet as West Berlin retreats from the limelight, its past is rearing its head. In 1938 a German Jewish teenager called Helmut Neustädter fled the country from Zoo Station. A lifetime later, having anglicised his name and become one of the world’s most famous photographers, he returned to found his own museum in the street next door.
Housed in a former Prussian officers’ club, the Helmut Newton Foundation contains a wonderful array of photos and memorabilia. Around the corner, above the Hotel Bogota, is the photographic studio where he learned his trade. Newton is buried in West Berlin’s Schöneberg Cemetery; a few minutes’ walk from the house where he was born, and a few metres away from Marlene Dietrich, another native of West Berlin who, after a lifetime living abroad, was buried in her hometown.
There are so many layers to life in West Berlin – nothing is quite the way it seems. At first glance, the Kempinski Hotel Bristol Berlin looks like just another 5-star hotel – smart but anodyne, a modern building with no real history of its own. Yet when you read the plaque outside you realise that this was the site of Berlin’s most sophisticated pre-war rendezvous, the Restaurant Kempinski, founded by Berthold Kempinski – the renowned German Jewish restaurateur. Seized by the Nazis and bombed by the Allies, after the war it became the first hotel of the Kempinski Hotels group, which is now a worldwide chain.
Across the road is the Jüdische Gemeinde, headquarters of West Berlin’s Jewish community. Against all odds this is still a Jewish part of town. I headed west along the Kurfürstendamm, or the Ku’damm as Berliners call it, past Charlottenburg, West Berlin’s grandest palace, now reduced to homely anonymity by the western restoration of Potsdam, Germany’s equivalent of Versailles. Beyond Charlottenburg you are back into woods again – more than 25sq km of wild woodland known as the Grunewald. Nearly half its trees were chopped down for firewood during the lean years after World War II, but since then it has been replenished with 25 million more.
At the western edge of the Grunewald is Wannsee, Berlin’s biggest lake, and beyond that is what used to be East Germany. During the Cold War, if you were a West Berliner this was as far as you could go. More than anywhere else in West Berlin, Wannsee encapsulates the ambiguity of this strange citadel – a virtual island for 40 years and still an island in many ways today. Across the water, in a leafy lakeside glade, is the villa where the Nazis planned their Final Solution – the genocide of six million Jews.
I returned to East Berlin through Kreuzberg, the most easterly district in West Berlin, which used to be surrounded on three sides by the Wall. During the Cold War it was a dead end street and few Berliners wanted to live there, so it filled up with Turkish immigrants – many of whom are still there today. In past decades, though, immigration drove down rental prices, making the area affordable for artists, layabouts and beatniks (West Berlin was the only part of West Germany where you did not have to do national service, so there were plenty of drop-outs and refuseniks here in the old days). Consequently Kreuzberg became a bizarre blend of traditional Turkish and German counter-culture, and even though the fall of the Wall has catapulted this district back into the centre of the city, it is still much the same today.
It was in Kreuzberg that my life changed. The first time I came to Berlin I had a steady job on a national newspaper. In Kreuzberg I met three West Berliners, about my own age, who ran their own record shop. They could not believe how uptight I was. They made me feel old before my time. Meeting them inspired me to give up my day job and go freelance. Was it the right decision? Who knows? But it transformed everything, and I am still freelancing today.
West Berlin has that effect on you – it makes you do all sorts of things you would normally never think of doing – and as my bike bumped across that strip of cobblestones, back into East Berlin, I felt comforted by the knowledge that some of its old magic has survived.
GETTING THERE
You can fly direct to Berlin from over 40 different countries.
The city has two airports, which share a single user-friendly website (www.berlin-airport.de). Berlin’s biggest airport, Schönefeld, is about 20km south of the city centre. Tegel is smaller but more central, about 8km from the city centre. Lufthansa is the main
airline for scheduled flights to Berlin, with direct connections
to more than 20 national and international destinations.
www.lufthansa.com
WHERE TO EAT
The Paris Bar on Kantstrasse is where West Berlin’s arty élite go to see and be seen. A trendy media hang-out ever since it opened in the 1960s, the food is standard French bistro fare (good quality, no big surprises) but the main draw is the other diners. With tables packed close together, in a small room that’s almost always full, eating here is like gate-crashing a dinner party. It is decorated with dynamic paintings, many of them donated by previous diners, and the lively conversation is matched by the art around the walls.
Tel: (+49) 303 138 052
www.parisbar.de
HIDDEN GEM
Located on a quiet side street just off the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s main shopping avenue, the Bleibtreu Hotel is the ideal base from which to explore West Berlin. This intimate boutique hotel also houses a florist and a deli, built around a communal courtyard.
The house style is chic but cosy, the restaurant specialises in sugar-free and low carb dishes, and there are lots of other shops and cafés on Bleibtreustrasse, just outside.
Tel: (+49) 3088 474 101
www.bleibtreu.com
FIND OUT MORE
www.germany-tourism.de
www.visitBerlin.de
Comments are closed.