2024-03-17 19:56:59
Berlin: City tour in front of the Brandenburg Gate (symbolic image).
Bild: sda
Do you finally want to go to Berlin or finally once more? Think regarding it carefully, because blue News author and Berlin resident Michael Angele knows: The city has lost a lot of its much-vaunted sexiness. A reckoning in five points.
No time? blue News summarizes for you
- Berlin – a place of longing for many travelers.
- But the city has lost a lot of its sexiness, knows blue News author Michael Angele.
Berlin has been a place of longing for Swiss people for decades. Of course, the city’s careless appearance at the International Tourism Exchange (ITB), which took place in Berlin last week, doesn’t change that. In the furthest corner of the last of the exhibition halls, the “Capital Region Berlin-Brandenburg” was advertised.
The tourist highlight this year will be “35 years City of Freedom”. Anyone who has to declare a 35-year “anniversary” to be a highlight usually has a problem. Not so Berlin. You might also have taken “ten years of the Mall of Berlin”, which would have been a round date, or the 19th anniversary of Harald Juhnke’s death. Or something else. The Berlin hype doesn’t care. It has become self-perpetuating and has only limited contact with reality. Berlin is no longer Berlin. Therefore, here is a travel warning in five points:
Image
“Berlin is poor, but sexy” is the brilliant saying that the then mayor Klaus Wowereit put into the world in 2003. “Wowi” himself never missed a party in the capital, smiled boyishly like John F. Kennedy into the cameras, said “I’m gay and that’s a good thing,” and demonstrated that in Berlin everyone can be happy in their own way . More image was not possible.
The current mayor is called Kai Wegner. He doesn’t have a lot of slogans, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear his name is the name of his dog (Caspar). He recently admitted his relationship with Education Senator Katharina Günther-Wünsch, thereby forcing a debate regarding the problems of love in the workplace on Berliners stressed by overcrowded offices, striking bus drivers and rising rents. This is what remained of “poor but sexy” and Kennedy in Berlin.
Arts and Culture
After the fall of communism, alternative culture and the city formed an organic unity. Art emerged from their still open wounds. The symbol of this was the Tacheles on Oranienstrasse. Like so many buildings in Berlin, this building also told the story of a century. Originally part of the Friedrichstadtpassagen, it was a department store, Nazi building and GDR functional building. In 1990, an occupation saved it from being blown up.
What followed was a wild time, iron sculptures, techno and every day a new picture by Jim Avignon. In 2006 the Tacheles was covered by the “Summer Fairy Tale”. During the World Cup, the crowds of fans celebrated on the wasteland behind the Tacheles. Today there are luxury buildings with luxury apartments designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron.
The Tacheles itself was completely renovated. The investor had the requirement to create a place of art in memory of the old Tacheles. The choice fell on a Swedish photo gallery. You can’t go wrong with a photo gallery. Interesting artists from all over the world show their “works”. The gallery is open until 11 p.m.
So much of the old attitude to life remains.
History
Okay, it was always clear that Berlin would eventually become an almost normal city. The price for being different was very high: a world war and an inhumane wall. The evidence of this history is decreasing, but it is still there. Some even come back that were gone. The Berlin Palace, for example, which for four decades had to make way for the Palace of the Republic, which was demolished in 2008 under the pretext of asbestos contamination.
GDR history was not wanted in the cityscape, especially not on Unter den Linden. Behind the baroque facade of the rebuilt Hohenzollern seat is the Humboldt Forum, which has a problem with its colonial collections.
A monument is being built opposite the main portal. It’s not entirely clear what it’s actually called. Some sources talk regarding “Citizens on the Move”, others talk regarding the “Unity Monument”, and still others talk regarding the “Unity and Freedom Monument”. Anyway: a walk-in seesaw.
It was originally scheduled to be inaugurated in 2013. But problems with environmental protection, monument protection and financing meant that the seesaw is still not finished. If Berlin needed a “monument” that was up to date, then one that reflected the collapse of all planning through a mixture of overcomplexity and incompetence. If all of this is too stupid for you, you can find the Bud Spencer Museum at Unter den Linden 10 within walking distance – where the Ferrari showroom was until recently.
Shopping
Of course, you also go on a city trip to go shopping. According to the survey cited above, this is particularly true for Swiss people. When my father visited me in Berlin, we liked to go to the delicatessen department at KaDeWe.
Tourists, newcomers and the West Berlin bourgeoisie met here informally, and a lot of Russian was heard. The bar under the roof had something cosmopolitan and homely at the same time. Such are the magical places in a city. Unfortunately, the eighties can only go on forever on Berlin radio stations. So the KaDeWe was completely renovated.
Today the ground floor looks like the duty-free department of BER Airport and under the new glass roof it looks like Berlin Central Station. In addition, René Benko dragged KaDeWe into its abyss. It is insolvent. The deep crisis of the department store as a place of experience and consumption does not only affect Berlin, but it hits Berlin particularly hard.
The Galerie Lafayette is withdrawing from Berlin and the city library is to move into the elegant building on Friedrichstrasse. Galeria 205 to 207 next to Lafayette is almost completely empty. At least something for lovers of ruin tourism. The fact that Friedrichstrasse is pretty much at its end also has something to do with the “Mall of Berlin” on Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz. Here, the city traveler will find every chain that he would find in any other big city.
Hotels
It’s like the proverbial sand by the sea. Because the real problem in Berlin, as the figures quoted at the beginning make clear, is: Overtourism. Of course, it is primarily the people who live here who suffer from the masses of tourists. The solution that Berlin has in mind is to distribute the tourists to the outskirts. For example to Pankow. I live here and like to relax in the castle park around the corner.
It would be nice if it stayed that way. Actually, the tourists themselves should also suffer from overtourism. Do you only want to meet yourself when you explore a city?
There are alternatives. Hamburg, for example, is the second most popular German destination among Swiss city travelers. The flair of the Hanseatic city seems indestructible, but overtourism on the Elbe is practically not an issue, say experts.
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