Forging a new history

War, walls, and bankruptcy. Hardly known as a refuge of tranquility, Berlin has struggled to move beyond its unstable reputation. Yet in the shadows of a rocky past, the city reinvents itself with creativity as the selling point.

Berlin saying dating back to the Roaring Twenties, when Berlin was riding high, boasts that this is a city that never simply exists, but eternally remains in the making. After 16 years of the German (and Berlin) reunification buzz, the winds of change may have slowed down a little, but Berlin is still evolving at a staggering pace.

This evolution is not economic or financial, however. The city is close to bankruptcy, due to the fact that federal subsidies once sweeping into West Berlin in order to pamper the Capitalist showpiece island deep inside the former East Bloc have been virtually cut off. The generally grim economic situation currently facing Germany does the rest.

But what Berlin lacks in money, it makes up for with creative potential, international hype and a “now less than ever” approach to life and its miseries characteristic of a city that has survived two World Wars, a bloody 40-year-long separation by the Berlin Wall and social hardships after the demise of the East German regime. The wall may be gone, but “Ossis” and “Wessis,” as the brothers and sisters from both halves of the country teasingly call each other, and the eastern and western downtown areas still feel different.

Berlin is also the proud federal capital of a reunited Germany and an impressive center of attraction for creative companies such as MTV, Universal Records, Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Europe, as well as biotech and IT companies-and Hollywood is filming blockbuster movies at the revived Babelsberg studios in the suburbs of Berlin, where Marlene Dietrich started her career some 75 years ago.

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Juergen G. Scheunemann is a writer based in Berlin. Email Juergen at editor@executivetravelmag.com.

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