Berlin

One of the things I love about New York is its stories.

You know how when you're friends with someone for a long time and you can tell the tale of any number of times when you did x or ended up at y with an inflatable shark and half a barbershop choir? Or when you're meeting new people together and even though it's your friend's story you can feel the conversation heading towards the perfect lead-in for the Oxygen Sickness Jokes or Accidental Barn Demolishing Story and you know...just KNOW when they'll mention it?
It's the same with the city, in a way, and I've never known a place like that before. There's a huge pool of anecdotes and stories about New York - how it started, grew, changed...and how its people arrived, grew, thrived and changed with it. No one knows them all (except possibly Jason), but with the big ones, or the few you do know...you can feel conversations about the city swinging around, to and between them. The Dutch...building elevated subways out into farmland...the design of Central Park...airships atop the Empire State Building...how places got their names...

Berlin was a blank canvas when I landed last Friday lunchtime, but by the time I left on Monday morning I felt like I'd had a huge swathe of these sorts of stories dumped in my head. And it's a great feeling.

So the only thing I really knew about Berlin was that after the Second World War it was divided by The Wall...but I knew nothing geographical. I had always absent-mindedly thought that Berlin was roughly in the middle of Germany and that West and East Berlin sat on either side of the border dividing the nation. I didn't know that West Berlin was entirely embedded in East Germany. That people dug tunnels, hid in cars, made fake uniforms, engineered ziplines and slings, created ladders that could be disassembled and hidden in sports bags... all to cross the wall and the dead zone. One staggering crossing (not made in Berlin) was made by two families in a home-made hot air balloon, the largest ever made in Europe at that time, sewn together in attics and fired by four upturned gaz bottles. The Haus Am Checkpoint Charlie museum is excellent - harrowing and frightening, but excellent.

Berlin's Philharmonic Hall was built in the sixties in the then West Berlin in what had become wasteland. I saw a shocking photograph with an architect's sketch pencilled in, and the hall stood in isolation; a church and ahalf-ruined building its only neighbours, three empty blocks away. None of my external photos do it justice - see here for an idea... The hall was designed with no primary concern for the external appearance of the building - the musical environment and acoustics drove everything, with structural elements and the 'hull' under the seating pushing a nautical appearance. Portholes and angular bulkheads make up the surrounding interior, which is lit through coloured glass walls and light wells. In the hall itself everything slopes, with nearly-symmetrical hanging terraces of seating arranged around a central stage.

This crazy corkscrew staircase sits out the back of the German Historical Museum, as an extension to the baroque style 'Zeughaus' which was originally an arsenal...then a museum to showcase how great the Prussian Army was...then a museum to showcase how great the Nazis were. It was almost totally destroyed by bombing in the closing months of the war, and spent 1948 to 1965 being painfully and cheaply rebuilt by the GDR, but this didn't stop it being used from 1952 until the reunification in 1990 as a museum to showcase how great Marxist-Leninists were. When I say cheaply rebuilt I mean that most of the money went into recreating the effect of the old Baroque architecture, which is extremely decorative and grandiose. This meant that there wasn't a lot of money for the actual structure of the building, so while everything appears to be cut from solid marble, the building is made from clad steel columns, and the floor is structured so that if a heavy exhibit like a stone sculpture needs to be shown on the second floor, it has to be placed on a structural beam because the floor won't take it otherwise. The extension to the museum is starkly modernist in comparison, but feels...beautiful. The concrete was cast in wood, and the smooth white finish retains the grain. Plus I love this staircase.

Walking around the city reinforced the impression of a city building to recover from growing in two different directions for thirty years. There's been a breathtaking amount of development since reunification, and the leash constraining that development has been sometimes stringent and draconian, and in other instances startlingly liberal. The six-storey 'look' of Berlin that was enforced to prevent rampant modernisation and high-rise development somehow doesn't apply around Potsdamer Platz...or when building for the Federal Government. With most of Germany's financial institutions firmly ensconsed in Frankfurt, there didn't seem to be the money to drive the development of a 'downtown' financial district, and instead at Potsdamer Platz and in a couple of other locations offices were built in the hope of stimulating it, a move which has left these buildings empty or with very low occupancy.
Away from great areas of development, the city feels strangely and yet comfortably homogenous; a whole. Bars and restaurants of every stripe abound, art galleries are simply everywhere, the traffic is sparse and unintrusive. Parks and squares punctuate a drive through the centre; tree lined Parisian boulevards, tiny alleys, statue-lined bridges and Christmas markets, like the one where I spotted the stall selling these stars.
Maybe that homogeneity and wholeness has a lot to do with the Berlin that existed before The Wall - its deep history rather than its development during the Cold War. But it can only have been helped by the actions of the divided city's transport planners during those years. Both Berlins suffered epic damage in World War 2, and the task of relaying-out and planning a city that was born in the age of the horse but must grow in the age of the automobile is a tough one. But when the East built a road, the West built a road to match it - to the point, even at the height of the Cold War, of laying tarmac up to the base of The Wall, so that when it came down the two could be joined. So the new Berlin flows.
And I like it.