Stay informed with free updates
Just enter the Life and Art myFT Digest — delivered straight to your inbox.
As I pack my bags after nine years in Berlin, I leave a city that seems locked in a narrative of its own decline.
Veterans say jump the shark. Flats are not available. Childcare spots are like hen's teeth. Bureaucracy is like a mind. Gentrification has flattened its strange soul. The edginess is gone.
Some of these things may be true. But it doesn't reflect my experience. For me, Berlin is at the top of its game, a city that could, if it weren't so pretentious, be the capital of Europe.
When I first became an FT correspondent here in 2016, everything seemed small in the province. The people there were famous for being stubborn and unstable. Every day brings a brush with the “Berliner Schnauze”, the famous rudeness of the residents.
Over the years its rough edges have been smoothed. It has become cosmopolitan and distrustful of foreigners. And as English becomes more common, it has grown into a kind of global village.
Over the past nine years I have seen Berlin take in tens of thousands of refugees, first from Syria, then from Ukraine. It took a wave of Brexit émigrés, wishing to keep their ties to Europe. And then, especially from 2022, welcome the Russian intelligentsia-in-exile, artists, writers and human rights activists fleeing Putin's dictatorship.
It grew while clinging to its relative – innocence. It's a capital city, yes, but it's not like London, which comes across the country. The area is not controlled by banks, because they are all in Frankfurt. The biggest news conferences are in Hamburg, the car makers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Berlin is many things – the seat of government and a growing tech hub – but it is not a slave to Mammon.
That means public space isn't as commercialized as it has been elsewhere, and there are fewer dirty chains that make London's high streets seem ordinary. Strangers you meet in groups still seem to be more interested in what you do for a living than your thoughts on some “left-independent” technoclub or the recent premiere at the Schaubühne.
Still, those who say the city has changed for the worse have a point. Its former mayor described Berlin as “poor but attractive”. Some say it's too rich and boring.
Exhibit A – Am Tacheles complex on Oranienburger Strasse. It's a former department store that was half-destroyed in the war and taken over by a group of artists after the Wall came down, becoming a symbol of Berlin's wild spirit. I remember visiting there in the 1990s, the large murals, the paintings, the strange sculptures in the yard, the raw, poignant energy of the place. Now a cluster of offices, luxury apartments and high-end shops, all shiny and sleek, has a private photography museum for profit.
Then there is the small matter of the 130 million euros the Berlin government has cut from the city's budget next year. The cultural elite, long used to drip-funding high prices, are in chaos: many theater groups and artists' initiatives may be closed. An act of “destruction of culture”, one famous director called it.
But something tells me that Berlin will win. After all, this is a city that survived the near-death experience of Allied bombing, and is at the forefront of the cold war, divided in two by a 4-meter-high wall for 28 years.
Although everything is still there, in the words of an Irish friend of mine who has lived here for over twenty years, the biggest collection of black sheep” in the world. It is the sanctuary of heretics and miscreants of all persuasions, who live kindly with the bourgeoisie. Citizens neighbors. Despite the rising cost of living here, it still seems to be full of creative people doing God knows what but always looking like they're having the time of their lives.
And as anyone who has walked through its countless construction sites knows, it is also a place of potential, without limits. As the art critic Karl Scheffler wrote in 1910: it is a city “doomed to remain so, and never to be”. When I finally get on the plane and leave here after almost ten years in this city, it will be the “being-place” that I will miss the most.
Email Guy at guy.chazan@ft.com
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and Xand subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen