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  1. Long reads
26 April 1999

Everything is so very new

New York, London, Paris. . . soon you can add Berlin to the great cities you want to live in. German

By David Lawday

Berlin is once more the capital of Germany, the seat of government. I’m beginning to think that everyone is missing the point of this tremendous turn.

Imagine the heart-searching going on now that, ten years after the fall of the Wall, the German parliament holds its inaugural session in the Berlin Reichstag. The Germans are going dotty trying to work out what it means. Symbols clash. Old scolds like Gunter Grass, Germany’s moral tutor, fear the worst. Intellectuals, opinion leaders and politicians from Chancellor Gerhard Schroder down have their conflicting takes. Time for Germany to show the self-confidence of a grown-up nation, says the chancellor. Time for a new vision of Germany-in-Europe. Indeed, the psychobabble of pious hopes and cliches is enough to make you really start worrying about Germany. Welcome to the Berlin Republic.

Stop your ears, though, and it is hard not to be optimistic. Everything is new. A new chancellor, a new government, a New Centre (Neue Mitte) at the political controls, a new generation come to power, a new capital, a new money (it is truly amazing how little fuss, in practice, Germans are making about replacing their beloved mark with the euro) and a new millennium just around the corner. Newness may not be intrinsically good, but it certainly freshens up the German spirit.

Strictly speaking, the return of the German capital from leafy Bonn to imperial Prussia’s womb is a step back into the past. But no one, not even the sceptical Grass, really sees it that way. Berlin looks too new to allow it. The capital is still taking shape. The contours, though, are clear. A modern metropolis is born. What it needs now is world-city patina, a fleshing out through use.

The heart of the city in the former East Berlin beats youthfully on re-made Friedrichstrasse, the shopping avenue that sinister Checkpoint Charlie once cut in two. Crowds gape at the redeveloped Potsdamer Platz nearby as if they still can’t believe this infamous crater has become a handsome part of town with shades of Manhattan (and, to be frank, of Hollywood urban setmanship). Nightlife has moved east, to the old Jewish district of Orangienburgerstrasse and to Prenzlauer Berg, a sort of dilapidated Kensington tarting itself up.

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The monumental Reichstag with its new glass dome, the work of our own Sir Norman Foster, returns to life suitably pompous yet magically relieved of its Prussian ponderousness. Close by on the banks of the Spree rises the avant-garde new Chancellery, which gives every indication of being ten times bigger than the chancellor’s modest domain in Bonn. The size won’t please Grass, who frets about Germany becoming too big for its boots, but Chancellor Schroder has a lot of work to do.

The Berlin Republic can’t afford to be shy about mobilising buildings with suspect histories. The finance ministry is moving into the austere Hitlerian edifice built for Hermann Goering and his air ministry. The foreign ministry has bagged the huge stone Reichsbank built to finance Hitler’s Third Reich and store Nazi gold. When run from Bonn, official Germany kept away from stone and granite because such materials had, it was thought, a fascist look. Those who recall bleak 1945 photographs of bombed-out Berlin will find it hard to believe, though, how much stone from Bismarck’s and Hitler’s times remains solidly intact. It now seems a sensible economy to re-use Berlin buildings, once they’ve been “democratised” by architectural legerdemain. Especially to a political generation that is less uptight about shouldering Germany’s moral burdens.

As exemplars of the Berlin Republic generation, Gerhard Schroder and his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, are almost too good to be true. Not that they are pimply adolescents. Both are over 50. But they are raring to go in the new capital. One of the reasons, it may now be told, that Helmut Kohl, Schroder’s venerable predecessor, failed to sell himself to German voters last year for a fifth term as chancellor was that he hated the prospect of moving to Berlin. He was much too comfortable in Bonn.

Schroder is comfortable in Berlin. He sees the restored capital – a gritty, blue-collar, young-professional, provocative, creative place – as the natural home of his Neue Mitte politics, the German counterpart of Tony Blair’s new Labour. In Berlin Schroder can be a new kind of chancellor, looser, in touch, a Clintonian media star, though he may need to temper his fashion modelling pursuits. Recent magazine spreads of the chancellor in slick Italian suits, posing against doric pillars, had Germans wondering whether a capo di famiglia hadn’t eased into the Chancellery. Berlin’s loose atmosphere is also the right stage for the virtuosity of Fischer, the Greens’ leader, who has convinced everyone he isn’t playing for smiles alone when dropping his regular T-shirt-and-jeans garb for the striped pants of high diplomacy.

The Schroder brigade is rightly impatient with civil servants who need coaxing to leave nice, dozy Bonn for Berlin. The truth is that Berlin frightens many ordinary Germans and these bureaucrats are ordinary souls. From afar, they see the city as a hotbed of stress, crime, joblessness and, frankly, un-Germanness – all of which do indeed occur. Un-German? Because Turks, Russians, Poles and Balkan refugees throng Berlin in increasing numbers as the four million population swells.

It takes extraordinary sweeteners to get Bonn’s bureaucrats to move into this Gomorrah: free flights home to Bonn every weekend for two years for intrepid servants of the state who temporarily leave their families behind; education grants; shiny cookers for their new Berlin kitchens; rental subsidies; hefty home-buying loans virtually free of interest. Such pointed bribery costs the taxpayer around £45,000 a year for each civil servant. The whole moving bill exceeds £7 billion.

Berlin isn’t quite ready to reassume its role as capital. The construction programme, including new road and rail tunnels running beneath the city’s heart and a rail terminus for Central Europe that will make King’s Cross look like Adlestrop, is far from finished. Parliamentary sessions in the Reichstag won’t become political routine until after the summer break.

Furthermore, the gap between ambition and reality isn’t just physical. Rent a car in Berlin today and you have unlimited mileage to drive in every direction except one. Head east and the limit is 60 miles, which takes you to the border with Poland. The Germans don’t want you driving into what used to be the eastern bloc because people there steal cars. This is to forget that a lot of Germans themselves, Berliners in particular, are eastern bloc veterans. But let us allow that the prejudice has some foundation. Even so it seems an odd attitude for Berlin to adopt as it regains its place not only as capital of Germany but ipso facto of central Europe, of which Poland is a large part.

Out of all the conflicting predictions crashing around the Berlin Republic, my bet is that four are probably correct. Despite the strictures of Hertz and Avis, Germany will look more to the east to serve its interests, which is no bad thing as Poles, Czechs and the like require shepherding into the European Union. Second, without bullying or going power mad, Germany will drop its easy-touch posture in Brussels. Third, it will break through its Holocaust-bred carapace of self-doubt to become that elusive thing, a normal country, Berlin being rough-and-ready enough to ensure this. Last, the emphasis on Berlin as opposed to the prosperous Hamburgs, Munichs and Frankfurts of western Germany will heal the worst grievances of easterners and make easterners and westerners like each other a little better than they do now.

But these are already cliches that help miss the point about Berlin’s advance this week, which is that Berlin becomes an apprentice world city. It has the power, it has the flair, the feel, the mix of people, the creative daring, the modern infrastructure and, yes, the monuments, to vie with the best of them. It would surprise me if international chatterers aren’t soon adding to the places where one can arguably live – New York, London, Paris, the list is short – the name of a German rival. No one ever got a kick out of visiting Bonn.

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