A divided city before it reunited
When I visited West Berlin in 1984 to cover the Filmfestspiele, or Berlin Film Festival, the city was thoroughly divided. Much of my day there was spent exploring the two sides of the city.
In the 1920s, the 1960s then again in the 1980s, Berlin was at the centre of world politics and culture. Worth considering how much it has evolved over those decades.
The city profile I wrote in 1984 for the Travel section of the Toronto Globe and Mail is posted below:
Two Berlins
One splendid, the other sombre, together fascinating
By David Winch
The Globe and Mail (June 1984)
BERLIN – This city, wrote novelist Christopher Isherwood, has two centres: “the cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas and shops around the Memorial Church, a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond … and the self-conscious civic centre of buildings around the Unter den Linden … a parliament, a couple of museums, a State bank, a cathedral, an opera, a dozen embassies, a triumphal arch; nothing has been forgotten.”
Amazingly, Isherwood’s description of Berlin, written in 1934, still holds true after 50 years of war, blockades and physical partition. But today, the contrast between the flashy Memorial church area and the sombre Unter den Linden is more pronounced than ever: each is at the heart of a separate Berlin.
The Memorial Church is the heart of West Berlin, standing amid fast-moving traffic and neon signs – a sort of German Piccadilly. Behind the church rises the glitzy, commercial Europa Centre with, at its peak, a revolving symbol of Mercedes Benz. Meanwhile, the Unter den Linden, which was the “other” focus of Berlin in the 1920s, is now as determinedly socialist as its Western counterpart is capitalist. The Unter den Linden’s most prominent sights are the Soviet embassy, history museums, war memorials and official bookstores stocking the most recent best-sellers of Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko.
Two Berlins one city
For the traveller, however, the two Berlins still make up one city, whose improbably juxtaposition of East and West makes it one of the most exciting cities in Europe. The two Germanies, moreover, have continued to talk to each other in recent years, and one result is that transit from West to east Berlin has become easier than ever. It is now simply a matter of taking a 2-mark U-bahn (subway) ride, procuring a day-visa for $2.50, and making a small currency exchange amounting to $12.50, in order to reach East Berlin’s many cultural attractions. Crossing the border has become so routine that West Berlin’s two popular city magazines, Tip and Zitty, now make sure they list all cultural events – theatre, classical music, opera, cinema and movie schedules — for both sectors of the city.
The situation can be particularly interesting for art lovers. Taken together, the two Berlins offer a dauntingly large collection of museums, whose permanent exhibitions range from the bust of Queen Nefertiti in the Egyptian Museum to the modernist experiments of the Bauhaus and expressionist museums. And it is not much more difficult to visit the impressive collection of Rembrandts at Dahlem in suburban West Berlin than it is to visit the Pergamon Altar on East Berlin’s Island of Museums.
West Berlin, however, remains the focus for most travellers. The city is extremely conscious of being a “Weltstadt”, or great metropolis, and city officials have been careful to promote a range of metropolitan attractions, from the Berlin Film Festival in February to the extraordinary high-tech convention entre, the ICC.
The showcase of West Berlin, however, remains the Kurfurstendamm, or Ku’Damm, the grand boulevard leading up to the Memorial Church. The Ku’Damm boasts wide, tree-lined sidewalks, elegant hotels such as the Kempinski, chic galleries and the most fashionably dressed crowd outside the Champs Élysées. Some Ku’Damm cafes, such as the Café Kranzler, have operated more or less continuously since the 1920s, when they were the focus of artistic and intellectual debates.
Smaller streets
Unfortunately, the parallel with Paris ends there. There are relatively few Ku’Damm cafes where one feels free to sit and read all day (coffee can be very expensive) and, in the German style, are brisk stand-up affairs. It’s worth it, then, to wander into some of the smaller streets that run off the Ku’Damm. Bleibtreustrasse, for example, running between the boulevard and Savignyplatz, is an arty quarter full of small Greek and Italian restaurants, such as the Cafe Untreu and the Bleibtreu, where a younger crwd of Berliners gather, drawn by the area’s many cinemas. The Pension Scheffer on Bleibtreustrasse, for one, rents double rooms for 50 marks (nota: in 2018 prices, about $97 US) on the second floor of a sedate apartment block. And if the French have them beaten when it comes to cafes, the Germans compensate by serving substantial breakfasts to hotel guests: bread and cheese, sliced meat, orange juice, fruit and hot coffee. This is true both the pensions and the large hotels such as the Intercontinental and Hotel Berlin.
Despite the life and colour of West Berlin, arguably the biggest tourist draw in the city is a symbol of desolation and division: the Wall. The 4-metre high concrete barrier is lined on the western side with a series of somewhat rickety-looking wooden watchtowers, from which one can look eastward across 200 metres of minefields, and bulldozed wasteland. It’s a morbid kind of attraction: one French visitor I met had made a “pilgrimage” to the Wall each day of his three-week stay in Berlin, looking out over the top from various angles.
The Wall may be an ominous introduction to East Berlin, but at least one visit is recommended. The crossing itself, at the Friedrichstrasse U-bahn or, on foot, at Checkpoint Charlie, can be a birt of an adventure. The East German border guards are always careful to triple-check passports, and to make sure a visitor has the 30 marks needed for a one-day visit and East German spending money. (East German marks cannot be exchanged or brought back to West Berlin). At Checkpoint Charlie, the border crossing has all the elements of a low-budget spy thriller: in just 75 metres the visitor walks from a part of West Berlin full of tawdry souvenir stands and boarded-up storefronts into its socialist equivalent, through several control points and electronically controlled gates. Once in East Berlin, it is advisable to flag a cab for the city’s centre, the Alexanderplatz, on the Unter den Linden.
Lively central square
At first glance, East Berlin is every bit as austere as it is reputed to be in the West, with the geometrical severity and imposing concrete structures. On the other hand, the Alexanderplatz can be quite lively on a weekday, as shoppers from the Centrum department store and the nearby offices and hotels crowd into the many restaurants and bars around the central railway station. East Germans line up at fast-food “Imbiss” stands for hot tea and bratwurst, while a smoky bistro such as the Café Alex welcomes a bohemian, coffee-sipping clientele.
After a day of museum-going and wandering in East Berlin, a visitor might try the restaurant on the ground floor of the Palast hotel, where dinner of hot Polish soup, a meat and potatoes dish, dessert, beer and wine will cost about 16 German marks (about $8 US at the time).
Back in West Berlin, it’s advisable to check out the tourist information centre on the ground floor of the Europa Centre. It’s one of the best of its kind in Europe: the staff can really help a visitor make the most of their visit to Berlin.
