Former East Berlin
I am off to Starbucks to spend an hour over coffee while checking my email but their Hotspot internet service is down. It’s a good time to revisit the former eastern sector of the city. Berlin’s architecture is stunning…old and new. Cranes hang suspended everywhere over the city. The Wall fell in 1989 and Germany has not looked back.
The West German Bundestag moved the capital of Germany from Bonn to the eastern sector of Berlin located in the middle of former East Germany and from a former wasteland has sprung a new urban district…a symbol of Germany’s Unity and the country’s success. The Brandenberg Gate is fully visible now with only strips of stone inset into the streets and sidewalks to show a new generation (dressed in retro east German clothing to tweak their parents) where the Wall once stood.
Concrete grey Friedrichstrasse in the former east sector is now the new hip place to be…hardly remembered from my 1965 trip to Europe. I asked a young English speaking guy “(I am German American,” he says) in a music shop to suggest some popular Berliner music but came away with two interesting “out there” Norwegian jazz CD’s.
Checkpoint Charlie that in 1965 released me and a friend from the American sector into the grey colorless landscape of East Berlin is now a tourist site.
Recently, the New York Times aptly described the weedy wasteland at the corner of Niederkirchnerstrasse, where Gestapo and SS headquarters used to stand. “A chilling exhibition now occupies basement cells where the regime’s opponents were tortured. A block away stands Goring’s huge Air Ministry, one of the few components of the grandiose capital that Hitler called Germania ever to be built. Designed in the stark Fascist style favored by Albert Speer, the building now houses the Finance Ministry, but during the Communist era it housed East German government offices, as attested by a mural showing improbably happy workers and young people.”
Berlin lives and breathes Kultur. The local government went bankrupt in 2001. Nearly 20% of the former eastern sector’s workers are jobless. Now President Shroeder says economic reform is his top priority and he seems to be sticking to it. CNN shows demonstrations in Berlin against losing what little state support former east Germans had been receiving.
President Shroeder’s financial stringency is putting pressure on the city’s arts organizations also, according to the former East Berlin opera singer who works for her sister in our pension. City authorities have threatened to merge the two opera houses, as they merged art collections that were split when the city was divided, arguing that it no longer makes economic or aesthetic sense to maintain two or three of everything.
Tags: Berlin, Culture, Europe, Germany, Reading, World Watching And Politics
Zoe