I Went There: Berlin

Street Art in Kreuzberg

While I was away I occasionally kept myself company during dinner by typing up some notes about my experiences. Or talking to myself. Same thing, really. This is one of those entries, which I meant to post while still on the road but ended up setting aside. I left the typos in - very authentic.

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Greetings from Bavaria!
As I type this I am sitting in the shadow of the Spaten brewery. Or at least one of the Spaten breweries, and enjoying a very large Spaten in the 'lighetst' type available. I've always been a lager person. You care.

So! Travel news: I'm on the continent for almost two weeks to visit Berlin (done, as I type this), Munich (happening, as I type this), and Copenhagen, (happening in a few days). It's been good. Kind of a lot to take in.

Berlin is just a weird as hell accident of history, which makes it awesome but also kind of a lot to take in if you are only there for a short period of time. The city itself really only came to life in modern times after the wall came down in 1989. Prewar Berlin was a thriving and diverse metropolis, famous for its tolerance and live and let live attitude. In the period between wordl war 1 and world war 2 it had over 100 gay bars, which is a lot considering homosexuality was illegal in many other western countries at that time. According to my tour guide the population was arund 4.2 million at the start of world war 2. It's around 3.5 million now, which shows how depressed and slow the recovery has been as a result of the cold war.

It was an island outpost from the end of WWII until the wall came down, with extremely limited economic opportunity combined with the fact that the city center was 85% destroyed during the war, and the greater city itself was roughly 60% destroyed. So it was a big pile of rubble, and there was no way to get it all cleaned up. (It bears mentioning that not only was the city a big pile of rocks, but this was after several years of hardship and shortages due to the war, so things were already bad before the whole place was bombed back to the stone age.) Almost all of the rebuilding work was done by women, so much so that they have a name, but I don't know it, either 'stone women' or 'rubble women' or something similar in German. All the men were either dead or wounded or in POW camps. Even if you wanted to build something or run a business you were still stuck on an island, effectively behind the iron curtain. It was hard living.

In order to get people to stay there the West German government subsidized the people. Also there were many people that moved to Berlin because the old attitudes prevailed: it was still a live and let live kind of place, even if you had to live in a rock garden. Squatting in buildings became a thing, mainly because there were a lot of empty buildings in West Berlin after the war, so the artists and punks and immigrants came, since that was the only place they could go and live for free or nearly free. It was a place that no one wanted to live. The government was still trying to maintain some order, so as part of their efforts they worked on improvement projects, usually aiming to tear down the old buildings and put up cheap housing blocks. This did not go over well with some of the residents, so they squatted the buildings in protest, and fought to keep some of the historical structures (Bethanien was ground zero for the squatter movement). These fights went on for years, and they were brutal, but eventually the government saw sense and negotiated with the squatters and places like Kreuzberg became thriving multicultural centers. It's kind of amazing, but that's what happened. And so it went, until the wall came down and the money showed up.

Once the wall came down it was only a matter of time before the most permissive, affordable capital in Western Europe became a lot less affordable. Gentrification is transforming Berlin, and not for the better. Expensive high-rise apartments are going up all over the city, and corporations are moving in. The current fight is aimed at trying to prevent Google from opening an office in Kreuzberg. I hope that they do not, because fuck google, but the money always wins. Old neighborhoods that have survived world wars and depressions and communism do not deserved to be run over by capitalism, but it is happening. The people that will no longer be able to afford to live in their home town will have to find somewhere else to go, and after a generation then google will give them the shaft there too.

I guess my point is that Berlin is weird, but good, and before long it will just be like Manhattan, and only for rich people. Progress, of a kind.