When I went to Berlin for the first time, in 1959, I was young, optimistic, and enthusiastic. Berlin was not. It still lay mainly in ruins—Allied bombings and Soviet armies having done a thorough job of it. The city sat in the center of Russian-occupied East Germany and was divided into four sectors—U.S., Russian, British, and French. The young and able-bodied had been fleeing the city, and it was becoming home only to the old plus as many younger workers as could be bribed to come or stay.
I, on the other hand, was American, bushy-tailed, and arriving for the world premiere of my first play, The Zoo Story, having its debut amid the German devastation. When I wrote The Zoo Story, Off Broadway had not yet come into its own, and no theater seemed interested in my hour-long, rather grumpy play. Besides…who was I?
Friends arranged for the play to find its way from New York to Florence to Zurich to Frankfurt to Berlin. During this journey it was translated and given its first performance on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape—in German, of course, a language I speak not a word of.
You can be at the world premiere of your first play only when it happens, so I quit my job delivering telegrams for Western Union in New York City, borrowed steerage sea fare, and sailed to Bremerhaven. I then continued on by train to Berlin, meeting my first Soviet soldiers along the way—very young, with very large machine guns.
Two years later I was back for another world premiere, this time of my play The American Dream—and while I was still young and a functioning playwright in New York City, my optimism and enthusiasm were tempered: The Wall had gone up in my absence, and West Berlin, where I and my work were, was even more of a beleaguered island.
By 1990 everything had changed. The Wall was down, the Soviet empire had collapsed, Germany was one country again, and Berlin was a city of cranes. The rebuilding was going on everywhere I looked. It was much slower in the eastern section, where the Communist government had kept things shabby and dreary—as a kind of punishment, it seemed. But even here work was going forward. I no longer had to negotiate fallen buildings to find the Berliner Ensemble, Bertolt Brecht’s theater and its revelatory productions.
During the preceding years, the center of the city—the art galleries, the shops, the “life”—had moved west to the Allied zones of control, in particular to the Kurfürstendamm area, and here there was relative normalcy. It was much like being in any other European city so long as you remembered that the normalcy ended only a few miles away. Mitte, the old city center, the cultural and governmental center, had been left in disrepair, and my visits there in 1990 were trips to a wasteland.
Now, as I write this, all is changing yet again. The heart of the city is returning to its old centers. A giant business, entertainment, and cultural complex has risen in Potsdamer Platz—a complex, unfortunately, of considerable architectural incoherence, in spite of individual buildings of great interest. Maybe all this will change: Much of the surrounding area is still a vast wilderness.
Although new concert halls and museums have been built and a vast transportation complex is nearing completion connecting all of Germany with its reinstated capital, much of the construction is literal. The great treasure of museums, libraries, churches, and government buildings around Unter Den Linden, east of the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, is being reconstructed much as it was before the destruction of the Second World War, and the massive shops and office buildings along Friedrichstrasse, for example, are—for all their reimagining—echoes of a previous time, a time you cannot have experienced. I was in the presence of an equivalency.
If you’ve been to a city several times over a long period you have something new visitors don’t have: familiarity, an almost “at-home” sense. What you usually don’t have is the surprise of the new, the wonder of the new. With Berlin, on the other hand, my familiarity with the city also allows me the surprise of the new, for the city is in constant flux—it is rebuilding its identity all around me.
The city seems to be doing several things at once—reconstructing its past, opening itself to new adventure, and flexing its muscles—saying, in effect, “Here is the wonder of how it all was, and here, too, is the future.”
I find it is all very exciting and perhaps nearly as wonderful as Berliners think it is.
Berlin is a city of memorials. Well, the entire city is a memorial to itself, but two transcend the genre. As architecture, I find the Jewish Museum (designed by the American architect Daniel Libeskind) thrilling and disturbing. To walk on the faces of thousands of Holocaust victims done crudely in flat metal in a vaulted chamber is to participate in the awful truth of history. To stand for a while in an outdoor forest of askew pillars, in a sloping courtyard, is to find your balance and sense of reality departing. The irony and inevitability of this museum in Berlin is profound. I found the experience essential, and wondered if I could have borne it had I been Jewish.
The memorial which moved me most as a writer, a writer aware that the sanctity of the written word is often threatened and silenced (especially in totalitarian societies, but even in democracies), is in the Bebelplatz, a large, paved open square in Mitte, in front of the reconstructed library of Humboldt University. I went there in the evening after the working crowds had gone. I saw a kind of light rising from a central area of the square. I went to it. There I found that one of the large paving stones had been removed, and an area of maybe four by four feet, covered with glass, offered a view of a small underground room filled with high empty bookshelves. This is the spot where in 1933 the infamous book burning took place, where the Nazis made a huge bonfire of works by Jews, intellectuals, and left-wing writers considered unworthy of being read and studied in the Thousand Year Reich. It was designed by Micha Ullman, and is deeply moving. I went there on a cold night, but the chill I felt had to do with what I was experiencing. Even now, months later, when I remember it, I still feel like crying.
For many, many reasons, Berlin can do that to you.
Notes on Scraps of Paper:
- Why is almost everyone on the subway immersed in an 800-page book? How do they remember to get off at their stop?
- The more expensive restaurants seem to have an unusual number of Russians dining in them—heavyset, somber men with trophy companions. Is this the Russian mafia I hear so much about?
- English must be the primary foreign language in schools here. I bet I could go whole days and never have to speak German.
- Who are these aged ladies I see everywhere—thin, primly dressed, gray hair pulled back, eyes looking deep within themselves, so sure of their destinations?
- I suddenly become aware that if there are blacks and Asians here, they are not where I happen to be.
- The pastry shops are filled with groups of penguin-shaped middle-aged and older ladies and gentlemen, their eyes misty with anticipatory bliss, seated before mounds of pastry topped with mounds of whipped cream. I am diabetic, so watching all this is a bit like being at the zoo. I am filled with envy.
- All the trees seem to be in the western section of the city. Did the Russian occupiers have something against trees—or just against the Germans?
- In the richer sections of the city there are children bound for school with skateboards and Rollerblades. Where am I?
- Could I live in Berlin? No. Could I die in Berlin? Of course. —E.A.
Staying There
Four
Seasons Hotel Berlin (800-332-3442; from $295)
The
hotel has the perfect location, across from the Gendarmenmarkt (as in gendarme, and so named for a French
regiment who quartered on the site in the 18th century). But the hotel, while
luxurious, is indistinguishable from every other Four Seasons.
Dorint Am
Gendarmenmarkt (011-49-30-203750; from $225)
Right on the Gendarmenmarkt, now
the bourgeois center of old East Berlin, this stylish hotel has minimalist
rooms with cubelike furniture. Some rooms are tiny. But it’s a winner for the
lack of fussiness, the location, and the superb breakfast (which, in deference
to late-night Berlin, goes until 11 a.m.).
Hotel Adlon
Berlin (011-49-30-22610;
from $355)
The old
Adlon, right at the Brandenburg Gate, was the epicenter of prewar Berlin. The
reborn version is mall-like and caters to groups. Still, the rooms are
wonderful and the service excellent—a surprise. Its setting, too, is ideal.
Eating There
Diekmann Im
Weinhaus Huth (Alte Potsdamer Strasse 5;
030-25297524)
So
many top architects, from Renzo Piano to Richard Rogers, lent their talents to
the resurrection of Potsdamer Platz that it’s hard to imagine how this skyscraper city
could have ended up looking so bland. That’s what makes you love this venerable
restaurant: It has been on the same site since 1912 (old pictures show the
restaurant stranded on a bombed-out vacant lot during the Cold War), and
although caught in the tentacles of the Potsdamer leviathan, you can still eke
out some old-world charm here and order good dishes like coq au vin with potato dumplings or duck in
black cherry sauce.
Maxwell (Bergstrasse 22; 030-2807121)
One of the city’s best restaurants,
especially for Continental food and updated German classics like duck breast in
black pepper sauce. The chic, all-white interior, with Damien Hirst art on the
walls, occupies an ornate old brewery in a run-down part of old East Berlin,
which adds a decadent touch.
Aigner (030-203750; Dorint am Gendarmenmarkt hotel)
A festive atmosphere prevails in
this refined (i.e., the crowd dresses up) beer hall of a restaurant in the same
building as the Dorint am Gendarmenmarkt hotel. Very good regional food (veal
dumplings with beets and mashed chive-potatoes; fried sweet-sour calf’s
kidneys) and a very good time.
Borchardt (Französische Strasse 47; 030-20387110)
Nothing captures the spirit of
bygone Mitteleuropa like Borchardt, despite the jazzy chandeliers. The food
isn’t always the best, but the after-theater crowd turns this brasserie into a
Belle Epoque painting come to life.
Offenbach-Stuben (Stubbenkammerstrasse
8; 030-4420229)
If
buzzing around Prenzlauer Berg (see “The Last Laugh,” page 145), this
opera-themed, gay-oriented restaurant is an elegant respite from scruffy
hipness, with nicely prepared German dishes like smoked pork with sauerkraut
and duck with red cabbage and dumplings. Some come with rather operatic names,
in the latter case, Gräfin von Paris (“Countess from Paris”).
Kaufhaus
des Westens (Wittenbergplatz; 030-21210)
KaDeWe is the most famous
department store in Berlin, and its Feinschmeckeretage (sixth floor gourmet
food hall) is a marvel, with 33 restaurant counters. There’s even a sushi bar.
Being There
The Last Laugh
Nothing is more fun than poking into the bars and nightspots of Prenzlauer Berg, a once dreary proletarian paradise with all the aesthetic appeal of Communism itself. Young artists changed the neighborhood overnight after the Wall came down; now it’s almost respectable. For something hipper, head for Friedrichshain, an off-the-map East Berlin district that only works when outdoor tables line the Simon-Dach-Strasse in summer.
Culture
Berlin, a city that dotes on music and art, has loads of museums, three opera houses, and two main concert halls (the only advantage of having been a divided town). But for sheer drama and cutting-edge presentation, nothing matches the new Jewish Museum Berlin (Lindenstrasse 9-14).
Dirty Secrets
It would be hard to accuse Berlin of hiding its Nazi past. From Peter Eisenman’s new Holocaust memorial, opening in 2005 in the heart of the city, to the subtle monument to the Nazi book burning (off Unter den Linden in the middle of Bebelplatz), the evil has been exposed and carefully labeled. Some things, however, require a closer inspection, such as the new Ministry of Finance, which has taken over the former headquarters of Göring’s Luftwaffe.
Cold War
Some say Berlin was more intriguing before the Wall was hacked away. Now, there are only glimpses of the years of division, some monumental, like the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, others more ethereal, like an innocuous profile of Lenin on a building near the Adlon hotel. But the most telling legacy is well out of sight in Treptower Park (take the S-bahn train to Treptower and be prepared to traipse through the woodlands), where you’ll find a sprawling Soviet cemetery hidden amid the trees. A giant statue of a soldier—an orphaned baby in one hand, a sword poking a swastika in the other—stands at one end. Across the vast expanse, a concrete figure—Mother Russia—sits silently weeping.
Paris Bar (Kanstrasse 152; 030-3138052)
Few places capture the sexy-but-brainy cabaret spirit of Berlin better than this 50-year-old spot off the Kurfürstendamm. There’s no actual performance, but clubgoers, set for a prowl or just back from a night on the town, put on quite a show of their own. You might spot designer Hedi Slimane, just in from Paris, or Ute Lemper, or maybe Wim Wenders. Even the food is beautiful: French brasserie fare that’s too retro for Paris—snails, pâté, grilled sole, steak tartare.—William Sertl