The coolest sight in Berlin is also the most chilling. It looks as if it has
been left there by mistake but, this being Germany, it is there entirely on
purpose. It is a listed building on Erna-Berger-Strasse that doesn’t appear
on many maps, although is not too hard to find.
First go to Potsdamer Platz — in the Wall years a flattened expanse of no
man’s land and now a shrine to swanky capitalism (Ritz-Carlton on one side,
Mercedes-Benz sales headquarters on the other).
Walk 50m into neighbouring Leipziger Platz. Admire the penthouses and
retouched sections of Wall that have been put there like billboards if you
must, but then go down the alley to the left of the new Salvador Dalí museum
on the south side of the square. Turn left, and you see it: skulking on the
edge of a fenced-off plot of land behind the finance ministry, a concrete
watchtower from the dark ages.
Berlin still does kitsch, but there is nothing kitsch about this tower. From
its octagonal viewing platform, about 13m up, the East German Volkspolizei
enforced the shoot-to-kill policy that claimed the lives of more than 130
East Germans trying to escape over the Wall between 1961 and 1989. It used
to guard the world’s largest prison. Twenty years on, it can’t be more than
30 seconds from the nearest cappuccino. Unsignposted, uncaptioned and
unadorned, the Wachturm is history in the raw.
I had been mooching round Potsdamer Platz because it was the sight of my
personal indelible Berlin moment. For most people that came on the night of
November 9, 1989, when news crews beamed the fall of the Berlin Wall live to
a pinch-me-this-isn’t-happening world. The communist regimes of Poland and
Hungary had gone.
Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania would be next. The game was up for the
East German leadership, including the deposed Erich Honecker. With the
Brandenburg Gate glowing in the background, ecstatic East Germans were
tumbling over the Wall in their mullets and stonewashed denim, and half a
century of paralysing fear was disappearing like their beery breath into the
night.
My moment came a few months later. Angry about missing the main event, I rode
a bicycle from Hanover to Berlin and spent an implausible afternoon with a
couple of management consultants who were working mad hours trying to
privatise an entire country.
They had rented an S-class Mercedes convertible in which we crossed the newly
opened border at Potsdamer Platz and headed for the Grand Hotel, where the
crown jewels of the East German economy were being sold off by former
communists. This is it, I reckoned, reclining in soft calfskin and enjoying
one of those moments of expansive clarity that make you feel inordinately
clever. Berlin is it. East meets West. Geopolitics meets history. Berlin
will be the New York of the 21st century.
Which shows how wrong you can be. Twenty years after the Mauerfall,
Berlin hasn’t eclipsed anywhere. Far from it. What it has done is to reprise
its old role as the seat of Germany’s federal government and repository of
the nation’s history. It’s a big city (3.4 million), but so interspersed
with lakes and cycle paths that it doesn’t feel big or, often, very
city-like.
It also sucks in public money, which helps to perpetuate the sense of
insulation from the real world that set it apart in the Cold War. “We’re
still poor,” said a novelist friend who wouldn’t live anywhere else. “Still
breast-fed by the rest of the nation.” So a lot of workaholic Stuttgarters
heartily disapprove of it, but what irks them can be alluring to the
visitor.
When I rode into town in the spring of 1990, there wasn’t a bed to be had
anywhere. I spent my first night in a wood. This time I got lucky at the
Hotel de Rome, a study in restrained opulence that occupies the old
headquarters of the Dresdner Bank and symbolises the expensive refurbishment
of the Mitte district.
Honecker would have loved it — and not just for the squads of attentive staff
to which the Communist Party apparatchiks became accustomed. There is also
nowhere else he could have enjoyed a €200 massage in a converted bank vault.
From any of the Mitte hotels you can get guided tours of the city’s
contemporary history by foot, bicycle or bum-numbing Trabant. Or you can
strike out on your own by S and U-Bahn (€25 for three days’ unlimited
travel, including Tegel and Schonefeld airports).
It’s a short walk down the hill towards the River Spree from Warschauer
Strasse S-Bahn station to the longest extant section of the Wall, which is
being repainted. After the Mauerfall, this stretch was smothered with
murals and graffiti of such exuberance — a Lichtensteinesque rendering of
the famous image of Brezhnev snogging Honecker had pride of place — that it
was saved from the bulldozers and labelled the East Side Gallery.
“Artists came from all over the world,” said Ditmar Reiter, who was among
them. “Many are dead now, but the atmosphere at the time was, it was . . .”
— he gropes for the right word as he repaints a 3m-high forest scene that he
first completed when he was 40 — “it was strong, like these trees.” The
weather, and tourists wielding chisels in the hunt for mementoes, have taken
a heavy toll on the artists’ works, and the gallery is now being recreated
more as art than history. At least one should help preserve the other.
What’s missing is the sense of menace that the Wall used to radiate. But if
menace is your thing, there’s plenty left a few S-Bahn stops deeper into old
East Berlin, where the nerve centre of the most meticulous bunch of
busybodies in history occupied a block of office buildings reached from
Frankfurter Allee. These were the headquarters of the Stasi, the East German
secret police. A furious mob ransacked the premises on January 15, 1990.
I couldn’t tell if the strong smell of sweat around the scale model in the
entrance lobby was part of the museum, but it was apt. Scent samples of all
new prisoners would be taken on pieces of felt, then stored in glass jars in
case the Stasi’s dogs needed to be sent sniffing for more evidence.
The Stasi beggared belief. In per capita terms, it had more staff and
informers than the Gestapo. In the northeastern suburbs its Hohenschonhausen
prison is now a memorial-cum-museum where you can walk (five paces each way)
in the prisoners’ exercise cages and see the interrogation rooms where they
would earn ten-year sentences for crimes such as disparaging a senior Stasi
officer.
If you liked The Lives of Others, the Academy awardwinning drama that
traced the disillusionment of a Stasi officer, you’ll love Hohenschonhausen,
but there’s only so much misery a soul can take. Fortunately for Berlin and
its tourist trade, most of the old East has been spared the time-capsule
treatment and has moved on.
My friend showed me the Hackescher Markt and the Jewish quarter across the
river from Museum Island (reputedly the biggest cultural investment project
in Europe). But these are neighbourhoods transformed by West German money
and curiosity. The Germans are justly proud of their Peaceful Revolution.
What better legacy than a plate of Thuringian salami and glass of riesling
in a courtyard where, 20 years ago, you could have been arrested for
laughing at Honecker’s name?
I walked back to the hotel by a roundabout route. The queues to get inside
Norman Foster’s glass dome atop the Reichstag were too long — I didn’t join
them. But there was none to mingle with the great grey “stelae” of Peter
Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial. It occupies a whole block immediately to the
east of the Wall’s old line from the Brandenburg Gate to Potsdamer Platz,
and is, as intended, profoundly unsettling; a hundred ways in and out, but
still a maze however you walk through it.
Berlin consists of its history. Where the monstrous 20th century flattened or
defiled it, the rebuilding goes on, always controversial, yet somehow
irresistible. Next year work starts on the £400 million reconstruction of
the Berliner Schloss, winter palace of the Prussian kings.
Due for completion 70 years after the end of the Second World War, it will be
a make-work project that will empty several sandstone quarries along the
River Elbe and drive up the wages of Europe’s dwindling band of monumental
masons. German taxpayers will grumble. Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris may join
in from his grave, since nobody likes to see his handiwork undone. The rest
of us will have yet another reason to go to Berlin, and gawp.
Giles Whittell is writing a history of the first Berlin spy swap of the
Cold War, to be published next year by Doubleday
NEED TO KNOW
Stay The Rocco Forte Collection’s Hotel de Rome (00 800 7666 6667, rocco
fortecollection.com) has double rooms from €305, including breakfast.
A Fall of The Wall package celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the
Berlin Wall starts at €800 for two sharing. The cost includes two nights in
a deluxe double room, breakfast, 3hr bike tour tracing the path of the Wall
or a 90min tour with a driver guide. DVDs capturing the historical period,
including The Lives of Others and Good Bye, Lenin, are
available to watch. The package is valid until December 29, subject to
availability.
Getting there British Airways (ba.com)
flies from Heathrow to Berlin five times a day from £161 return.
CITY NIGHTS
Step into the Cold War at Ostel in the East Berlin district of
Friedrichshain. The hotel has communist memorabilia, portraits of East
German leaders, and 1970s austerity furniture. Dorm beds from €9, doubles
from €54 (00 49 30 2576 8660, ostel.eu/en).
The Michelberger, also in Friedrichshain, is a quirky hotel with rooms
sleeping from one to five. It prefers guests such as “lovebirds,
soul-searchers and artists”. Doubles from €55 (00 49 30 2977 8590, michelbergerhotel.com).
The Propeller Island City Lodge hotel in the west of the city describes
itself as a “habitable work of art” and has 45 curious rooms, including a
padded cell upholstered in green leather. The more conservative can sleep in
a lion’s cage. Doubles from €94 (00 49 30 891 9016, propeller-island.com).
Need something more glamorous? The Leonardo Royal hotel in the heart of
Mitte has an original Art Deco foyer and a modern “wellness lounge” with
city views. Doubles from €99 (00 49 30 755 4300, leonardo-hotels.com).
Prices exclude breakfast.
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