A few days in Berlin

Beautiful thickly wooded valley on the Czech-German border

As my trip progresses time is beginning to slip past like a nuclear-powered comet. It seems hard to believe that in a few days I shall be back in my office in Scotland.

Or it may be that I have just enjoyed Berlin so much. This has been my first visit to the German capital and as you'd expect of the scribe of an organ such as this, I've spent all of it in the former East Berlin.


The Palast der Republik being dismantled

The whole place crackles with the incredible energy that comes from massive rebuilding programmes. On the one hand, this has produced amazing new buildings such as the cathedral of glass and steel that is the new Hauptbanhof station. On the other, and more controversially, the old East German parliament, the Palast der Republik, is a gutted skeleton and will soon no longer be with us. This brutalist concrete and glass structure, home to the rubber stamp Volkskammer in DDR times, now stands like a giant whale skeleton in the centre of the city, with the ghosts of Honecker, Stoph, Mielcke and Mittag not having too much more time to rattler about in their old stomping ground, until it is levelled completely. For many East Germans, this demolition provides further evidence of the former West's arrogance towards them, and the desire to eradicate the DDR state from history as much as is possible. The plan is to re-create the Hohenzollern palace that used to stand in the site of the Palast der Republik, which Staatsratsvorsitzender Walter Ulbricht had dynamited in 1950, convinced that there was no place in his new socialist society for such an old imperialist relic. The reconstruction of the Hohenzollern building is very controversial and likely to be prohibitively expensive, so expect the troubled history of this part of the capital to rumble on for some time to come.


The Palast der Republik in the late 1980s

However, if the more paranoid fears of some that there is an agenda to forget that the DDR ever existed, then as long as the excellent DDR Museum exists (roughly 200 yards from the Palast by the River Spree on Karl-Liebknecht Strasse) such hopes will surely be thwarted. I paid a visit there today, it's a modern, tidy place which tells a fascinating story about the defunct state, from the point of view of the ordinary citizen living and working there. The Museum is fairly small but the curators have made the most of the limited space they have with a very intelligent set of displays. The exhibits range from the laugh-out-loud-funny (East German nudist camping), to the workaday (the re-creation at the back of the space of a typical DDR living room and kitchen), to the very sinister (the work of the Stasi and their Mitarbeiter informants. Pride of place is given to a factory condition Trabant 601 deluxe at the front of the museum, where the visitor can enjoy a simulated "drive" through a relentlessly grim high rise landscape. The emphasis is on interactivity, with people being encouraged to pick up objects and examine them for themselves, which is unusual.


Entrance to the DDR Museum


Comrades Croy and Spartwasser of the footballer's collective get ready
to overfulfil their 5 Year Plan by pumping West Germany in the 1974 World Cup Finals


Immaculate Trabi de-luxe in the Museum

Elsewhere, it's been a very fertile visit in terms of ideas and possibilities for the future. Not only that, but Berlin is a place where one can have an uninterrupted seventy two hour bender and nobody will turn a hair. Amidst all the relentless rebuilding of the newly unified city, there is a very relaxed and calm atmosphere socially, quite unlike other capitals such as London or Paris. My friend Arnar the Icelander staggered out of a grimy back street gin shop here, at 7am the other morning; the doorman presented him with a pair of Honecker-esque sunglasses, to shield his stinging eyes from the rising sun. Needless to say, as a responsible taxpayer, I had long since crashed in flames by then, but it was a nice touch.


Alexanderplatz in the gloaming

There is still a real architectural divide here. In the former East Berlin the street and traffic lights are largely still DDR vintage; the commercial centre of the old divided capital is a phalanx of Communist apartment blocks and shops, with the odd pre-1939 building hanging on grimly as a reminder of an even older Berlin. As with other Central and Eastern European capitals, it's discomfiting to see these buildings transformed with commercial signs and adverts, rather like encountering one's grandmother wearing a Run DMC hoodie to a WI committee meeting.

However the Trabant, iconic symbol of the DDR, is conspicuous by its absence on the streets of Berlin, amking the legislation to ban them from the capital's centre appear stunningly pointless (see rants passim.) I saw one 1.1, and no 601s, during my time here.



Berlin is also Knut-daft at the moment. Knut? Not a mulleted old pop stager on the come back trail, but a polar bear cub at Berlin zoo. The bear is the symbol of Berlin, one encounters stuffed bears of varying sizes and colouring everywhere here, so maybe that is why the papers seem so obsessed by him. Two German tabloids that I looked at tonight devoted four page spreads to his current health and activities. The Berliner-Zeitung produced a 72 page Royal Wedding style supplement devoted entirely to the bear, and toy Knuts are being bought in vast quantities for small children captivated by his story. Knut was rejected by his mother at birth, and an environmentalist provoked consternation and outrage, in suggesting that he should be killed, as that was the law of nature and he would not have survived had he been in the wild. Since that grumbling in the media's lower intestine, Knut has become a massive Big Brother style-celebrity, without the obvious neuroses or moronic tendencies, and seems set to become the most famous bear since the late Hercules, who lived on a farm in Scotland. If there's time before I trundle eastwards to Warsaw tomorrow, I might pop in and see the little creature for myself.

On that subject, it's high time I went to bed. See you all next week after Warsaw!

Trabant