Since the fall of the Wall, the city has transformed itself from a divided, stagnant anomaly into one of the most exciting capitals in the world, writes Sophie Lovell.
“When I moved here from London twenty-three years ago, Berlin was still very much two cities: the former West, for all the infrastructural investment in the ‘50s and ‘70s, was little more than a provincial lacuna notable for its sleepy suburbs and rather dated commercial infrastructure. Much of the Mitte district, the capital’s former heart and then in the former East, along the former border, was a backwater; the Palast der Republik and other representative buildings of the former GDR stood empty or were quietly being demolished. The neoclassical masterpiece by Schinkel, Stüler, Messel et al. that is the Museum Island was shabby and dirty, its walls pockmarked with the scars of snipers’ bullets and shrapnel from the war and the bombed-out ruin of the Neues Museum sported full grown trees where its grand entrance hall once stood.
During the Second World War, 50 percent of the city’s fabric was destroyed and in the form East this was still painfully, yet rather beautifully, obvious. The neighbouring area around Hackescher Markt was a combination of crumbling, gap-toothed, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century street fronts and despondent-looking GDR prefabs. Jungles of weeds and yet more unchecked trees filled the empty plots between the buildings. Makeshift metal doors concealed basement entrances to semi-illegal clubs, bars and galleries. On autumn mornings in the Scheunenviertel (the former Jewish quarter), the foggy air was thick with the smell of coal smoke from the stoves heating the old buildings and the pavements were so bad that negotiating them in high heels was a high-risk venture. Finding a decent sandwich at lunchtime was an impossibility and buying anything more adventurous than an avocado involved a trip to Kreuzberg or Schöneberg in the former West…”