Climate change is helping bring back the summers I know and love. Though that probably isn’t a good thing.
I’m used to heat and humidity. What I got when I moved to Berlin were weeks-long stretches of rain and chill. In July. There was little need for shorts during the day and almost always need for a layer at night. After a few years like that, I just resigned myself to a life without having summer ever again. Such was the consequence of choosing to live in a city on an open plain, on the wrong end of the jet stream, exposed to arctic air and sharing a latitude with Hudson Bay.
The last few summers have seen a remarkable reversal. While mostly welcome at a personal level, heat waves, wildfires, and drought across Germany and much of Europe have become a reliable, and distressing, top news story. I’ve gotten to learn a new climate term: tropical nights. That’s when temperatures don’t drop below 20°C, and they are becoming more frequent in a non-tropical part of the world.
With temperatures this summer once again threatening records that themselves were minted only recently, I found myself out in Berlin with a camera team to report about it. As they say, the world’s worst (or hottest) days are a journalist’s best.
Working with a camera team is usually good fun. You can bat around ideas and get some creativity going. It’s huge to have others help figure out how to tell a story. And with them busy with tech, you can focus on editorial.
Camera teams are made up of professionals who have been in the TV and film business a long time. They aren’t “content creators” or “influencers”; they’re camera operators and sound engineers. They’re technical people with an eye, and ear, for aesthetics. They’re problem solvers, which comes in handy in the field because something is always sure to go wrong.
Going live in 60 seconds? We got this.
What’s extra special about teams in Berlin is they tend to be old enough to have been born in a different country that no longer exists. East Germany. Some of them got their start with the communist regime’s state broadcaster. They have seen some things. They have been through a lot.
As such, these folks are an incredible resource. They remember and represent a Berlin from when the Wall still stood and before the speculators rushed in to snap up a bursting public portfolio, which the state needed to shed fast to raise the revenue to provide basic services, and lacked the foresight to see how destructive that would be. It was the post-everything, neo-liberal 90s, after all.
Berlin was a divided city — broken, poor and isolated — on one side a capital to a morally and financially bankrupt state; on the other, a heavily subsidized middle finger to the Soviet Union; and both, in varying degrees, puppets to bigger powers occupying them.
In the city’s most sought-after districts, especially, that rough history has been largely scrubbed away. To see it, you really have to want to find it and know what you’re looking for. If you don’t, the squats, bullet holes, empty lots, broken facades, and array of sites where so much of the course of the last 200 years was determined are easily, if not preferably, outshined by the sparkle of glassy luxury condos, rows of vegan Vietnamese tapas, Scandinavian boutiques, and high-end coffee roasters whose fastidious and curated innards leave one to wonder if anything happens in them at all.
In a war for the meaning, tenor and aesthetics of place, much of the City of Berlin has surrendered to Brand Berlin™. Its residents have become POWs, with those from its eastern half left without a country to go home to when the fighting stops. They’re not exactly stateless, but they are in a way displaced. They didn’t move, but time and circumstances around them did.
With some time to pass between lives, we found ourselves in Mitte, once the heart of East Berlin. Today, the district’s borders encompass areas that were once West, so what exactly Mitte is now is hard to say.
It has many corners, but Mitte is probably most popularly known for its pre-war survivors that have been converted into million-euro penthouses and flagship stores of high-end brands. A Soho House — in what was once a Jewish-owned department store, a Hitler Youth center, and the politburo of the East German Communist Party — pokes at Mitte’s eastern edge.
We parked the van on Alte Schönhauser Straße, which is about as Insta-ready of a street as they come, and picked a place to get coffee and some shelter from the nearly 40-degree sunshine. Remarkably, despite it being peak tourist o’clock in peak tourist season in peak tourist area, we cobbled together enough seats under the awning out front.
The anachronism was immediate and palpable. Think of parents day at sleepaway camp, but in an alternate universe that runs on light-roast caffeine and hipster chic. The youthful barista team bounced about behind the glossy, white-and-glass counter, whisking orders of plant-based, foam-topped orders to-and-fro. They were no less a part of the simulation than the iPad cash registers and mason jars of organic hemp energy balls.
Spaces like this transcend place. It could be Moscow, New York or Cape Town; you are firmly on the sovereign territory of nomadic Instagram monoculture. The Bundesrepublik has no jurisdiction here. You will not find a single umlaut anywhere, neither on the menu nor out of the mouths of those who work there.
We just wanted coffee, but of course you can’t get coffee. There were cold brews, lattes and cortados of all kinds, but not a coffee in sight. And, of course, every word of it was in English.
This put me in an amusing position. Not only did I, as the native English speaker, have to translate between the cashier who spoke negative German and my German colleagues who spoke some English, but not with great confidence, but as a member of the Millennial generation’s easyJet class that debt-financed this escapist safe space into being, I also had to translate the experience we found ourselves enveloped in.
Though even I struggle with comprehension here. I am aging out of it, was never really part of it, and am out of place in it; much has been bequeathed to our Gen Z successors. I can navigate out of necessity, but mostly through gritted teeth.
We huddled around the special summer menu of iced drinks, as the bright-faced cashier waited to tap in our orders, utterly useless beyond that since “einen Kaffee, bitte” fell outside her cheery programming.
My cameraman eyed the list with some suspicion. Finally, he landed on one item and raised an eyebrow. His finger traced the words on the menu.
“Wat-is dit?” he asked, more to the Germanic heavens above than to anyone in particular around him. “Ein eist öt flät veit.”
The words stumbled from his mouth like an Egyptologist fascinated but confused by a section of hieroglyphs found in a newly unearthed tomb.
“Flät veit. Wat?”
Where to begin explaining to someone who likely grew up without bananas the intricacies of a flat white with oat milk. I couldn’t possibly know how to break down its requisite parts that in any way was “coffee” approaching his understanding of it. I suggested cold brew instead, which at least can be quickly summed up as “kalter Kaffee.”
We muddled through and, I as the bridge across this gulf of language, history and privilege, got our coffee-adjacent orders. When we sat down, I asked them what it felt like to have trouble communicating in their native language in their own city.
In short, “it’s not great.” Not the globalization of Berlin that has taken place over the last 30 years, and at an exponential rate — that is a development my colleagues largely welcome because it has mostly improved their lives — but the ease with which you can be here and pretend you aren’t.
If the East German experience is one where everything changed but you stayed put, than this is the inverse: You moved, but keep living as if you haven’t. A streak of self-entitlement runs strong through swaths of this city, which expects the environment adapt to you and not vice-versa.
Gentrification is just a dirty word for “change,” and it is prevalent and unstoppable everywhere. That includes Berlin, of course, but something even more than gentrification has taken place here: a form of colonialism. Whereas the former raises prices and displaces certain groups of people in favor of others, at some point an equilibrium between old and new is reached. The core of a city bends, but does not break.
Berlin is different because it was already broken. Its postwar reality made it something of a blank canvas on which you could paint what you like. There was little to push back against invading forces and, in many cases, the city was itself a collaborator. The fall of the Wall was seen as a shortcut to finally becoming the “Weltstadt” on par with Paris and London that it always wanted to be but rarely felt it was.
Its two populations either politically, societally or economically irrelevant, Berlin became a land without a people, ready to be settled by people without a land. Outsiders brought not only their money, but also their values, norms and intentions, with the expectation and assumption they would become the city-state’s new Leitkultur.
Germany’s old-new capital has a long history of sheltering those from the torments of where they’re from — the Huguenots, the Bohemians, the Jews, to name a few. For a lot of Germans, West Berlin was a way to dodge the draft. Western foreigners found an escape from the capitalistic excesses of their home cities and countries, able to pursue low- or non-earning interests with very little pressure to produce. Some fell into myriad subcultures and never quite found their way out.
The latest wave of history’s refugees, aside from the literal ones, is the one I belong to: the financial crisis kids, raised in the promise of the 90s and matriculated into the disillusionment of the naughts.
Arriving to Berlin then was to witness the tail end of an era that let you and your weird friends live in a dilapidated, urban palace for about the cost of a couple packs of cigarettes today — if you didn’t mind shoveling and schlepping coal to heat it. In my early days looking for a place to live, you’d still occasionally come across those places, including in the former West.
Such conditions made Berlin into something of a real-life Giving Tree. Take what you want, make of it what you want, with little expectation to give anything back. Three decades since reunification and two since it was reestablished as the reunited country’s capital, it isn’t clear how much the city has left to give. But enough money has since poured in to make the stump remaining an expensive, and still sought after one, to sit on.
Living space, for all intents and purposes, has run out,1 to the point that sometimes even money won’t help secure a place. In response, some people are moving further out, but infrastructure is struggling to keep up and previously unknown Podunks beyond city limits are facing their own housing and cost-of-living problems.
A low-intensity conflict is brewing, and the demarcation line is the Ring — the commuter rail line that loops around Berlin, separating the inner districts from the outer ones.
You can tender a guess at which side is winning. Despite a recent revelation that it’s probably politically unwise to forget about the working-class folks in this once working-class city, City Berlin is disappearing to Brand Berlin™ about as fast as alpine glaciers to climate change. The fundamental flaw with the post-Wall settlement surge that viewed Berlin as a place up for grabs is, like so many colonial enterprises, not really knowing what to do with the people already here.2
Voting patterns, however, offer only a partial picture, seeing that nearly 20% of Berlin’s population can’t vote because they are not German. That is nearly 740,000 people.3 To look at it another way, take this fun quiz:
Paris for croissants;
Budapest for goulash;
Naples for pizza;
Berlin for …
not the currywurst, methinks. What about Berlin do people actually come to Berlin for? What makes Berlin special? What makes Berlin Berlin, that wasn’t imported or copied from somewhere else, as far as what most people want to participate in?
Questions I frequently ask myself. Even its storied club scene, which is the answer for some and accounts for around 1% of the city’s GDP, is a largely transient one. People come, they take, they go.
Many people I discuss this issue with criticize me for cherrypicking. Well of course if you go to a high-end cafe in tourist Mitte all you are going to get is English. That doesn’t reflect Berlin, and Berlin is hardly unique to have been overtaken by over-extracted, overpriced espresso bars and Brooklynized foodie events.
Well, sorta.
A few years ago, before he became the face of Germany’s media-spun pandemic success story, Jens Spahn caused a good deal of hand-wringing in the German capital. In an interview he gave to a regional German newspaper, the rising star of erstwhile Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party had the audacity to say that he expected people who moved to Germany to learn and speak German.
Here’s what he said in response to a question about supporting initiatives to promote the German language:
Sure we should promote the speaking and learning of German internationally and within Europe. There is a growing interest, such as the Goethe Institute’s language course offers around the world. And here, too, in Germany social cohesion can only work when everyone speaks German. We should and must expect this from every immigrant.
And the part that really caught everyone’s attention:
As it were, I’m a bit perplexed that in some Berlin restaurants the staff only speaks English. You’d never have such a crazy idea in Paris.
At this point, it had been just about two years since nearly a million Syrian and other refugees arrived to Germany, which was about the same time that nativist sentiment was surging and Merkel stated the — uncomfortable to some, particularly on her side of the political spectrum — obvious: We are a country of immigration.
So you can probably imagine that when Spahn made this comment, the pump was primed for everyone to lose their shit.
Spahn, who as a young, gay, media-savvy conservative many on the left eye with some suspicion, was accused of xenophobia and subtly blowing an anti-migrant dog whistle.
Maybe. I’m not in his mind and it isn’t my job to read it. And seeing that Spahn has not run for any high-profile public office since, it’s hard to say what his policy positions are or might be. Fwiw, he is quite comfortable speaking English, as his time as health minister later demonstrated — a particularly impressive feat by the standards of German Officialdom, who seem to forget that German is not a lingua franca. Cringe.
As is often the case with these media-centric culture battles, all nuance was lost. Spahn did not say he had anything against English or any other language in Germany. He said people in Germany should be able to speak German, and it wasn’t OK that there are places in its capital where only English is spoken.
Is that really so horrible or unreasonable?
It’s notable he picked out Paris as a comparison, a city Berlin has long been in the shadow of, and one known for fiercely protecting its native language and culture. Can you imagine going into any public place in Paris where the staff cannot speak French? No, of course you can’t. That would be ridiculous. It’s been a long time since I was there, but I would hazard a guess that even those working at the famous Shakespeare and Company won’t stare blankly at you if you ask, “Aimez-vous ce livre?”
OK — everyone knows the French are special when it comes to Frenchy things. So let’s take a less charged example.
In May, I took a trip to nice, innocuous Antwerp. It’s a lovely and fairly affluent city in northern Belgium. As a port city of a former colonial power, it has a long history of trade and exchange across languages and cultures. Today, it’s just a tiny urban speck of vanilla western Europe in a country so insignificant that both the EU and NATO claim its national capital as their own seat of power, while Belgium’s own seat can regularly go hundreds of days without a parliament and nobody seems to care.
Flanders Antwerp doesn’t even belong to the Francophone world like its Belgian counterparts further south; it speaks Flemish, the obscure twin to Dutch, which is itself not exactly a tongue of global import.
If any place is to have been crushed by the Instagrammed globalized pursuit of avocado toast, it is a place like Antwerp. Indeed, high-end espresso and craft beer, adorned in Edison bulbs and post-industrial irony, abound. I can be as much the vegetarian, negroni drinker here as I can be in Berlin. Or London. Or Amsterdam. Or Dublin.
When it comes to global, or at least western, culture, Antwerp is very much a taker, not a giver. And, of course, just about everyone speaks English — and generally better than their Berlin counterparts. They have to.
But not only. Since I do like good coffee and hoppy beer, and I like to read and write when I travel, these sorts of cookie-cutter copycats can come in handy. The difference is that aforementioned equilibrium: It may have been Brooklynized, but you are still somewhere else.
Despite the abundance of tourists, every place I went into addressed me in Flemish first, and switched to English only when it was clear I couldn’t do the former. In one instance, the friendly, young server kept asking me things in Flemish because, when you speak German and English, you understand enough Flemish to not seem like a total basket case straight away, even if you can’t really respond in it.
Antwerp is the norm. Berlin is the outlier. I challenge you to think of a single other place where it’s acceptable, especially in a public-facing position, to not be able to speak the local language4, at least haltingly. How is it OK to flip the script by putting the onus on the customer to adapt to you?
It reminds me of a time — years ago when Berlin was already “over” but could still pretend it wasn’t — that I tried a British-style pub cafe in Kreuzberg. A German couple sat over my shoulder, struggling to explain to the waiter what they wanted because he could not be bothered to understand them, even though most of the words were by default English (bangers and mash) or universal (latte macchiato).
A couple summers ago I was at a jazz festival at the Funkhaus, which used to be the home of East Germany’s state broadcaster. The woman behind the bar was flummoxed by “ein Bier, bitte.” That seems like something you would want to know how to say, even if you’re just a tourist for three days in a place you’ll never go to ever again, let alone the person living there on the other side of the order.
There are more such anecdotes. Though hardly scientific, enough smoke means the fire has to be somewhere.
An abundance of English does not make Berlin “international.” To the contrary, it makes it provincial and exclusionary. It further drives a wedge between City Berlin and Brand Berlin™, largely impeding the former who may be interested in experiencing the latter but either are unable to speak English or can but why should they?
Far from contributing to a weltoffen city — a buzzword Berlin officials regularly throw around but tend to have trouble defining — an all-anglo subculture is just another concentric circle5 that does not mix with others. That its development is encouraged is an implicit admission that Berlin does not have have, or think it has, anything of its own worth offering. Such an inferiority complex is by definition at odds with the Großstadt Berlin strives to become.
When it’s any other language — think Arabic or Turkish — such cloistering is considered a Parallelgesellschaft, which the majority society is more likely to look at with suspicion or contempt than as an improvement to the local cultural landscape. Why won’t these people integrate? Never mind the imperfect comparison, as these communities by-and-large do speak German because they have to hustle in ways that native- and secondary-English immigrants do not.
A truly open and progressive city creates pathways to connect the various walks of life that roam its streets. It’s unclear if Berlin, a closed city for four decades that is geographically disconnected from other major population centers6, can ever really achieve this. Its cultural fate may be one of extremes that never cross. Some walls do not fall.
For those fine staying put behind theirs, life in Berlin can be very easy because it makes few demands. The comfort and safety are understandably appealing, even if boring. As I observed a long time ago: If you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere.
Housing is an enormously complex issue that has many factors, and no city has quite found a silver bullet. Here I am only referring to the role Berlin’s euphoric popularity has played in throwing supply and demand massively out of whack.
The good news, in a way, is that the trend is not new, but consistent with Berlin history. More than a century ago, when Berlin’s disparate districts voted to form a single city-state, it was also suffering from insufficient infrastructure, a massive housing shortage, a dangerous influx of speculation, and huge socioeconomic disparities. This was one reason Berlin almost didn’t come together at all. The richer, leafier outer areas didn’t want to lose or share political power to the poorer, urban inner ones. The Märkische Museum’s exhibit marking the city centennial was excellent on this topic. Although it’s long over, the museum is well worth a visit.
Actual number subject to voting age and dual nationals.
Dubai et al. do not count.
I first heard this term from an Irish academic — a linguist, if memory serves — I met in my first weeks in Berlin, who spent most of his adult life between Berlin and Istanbul. “Concentric circles” was his description for layers of Berlin society, which I found very useful imagery that has held up after all these years.
Unlike western German cities that are day trips to French, Belgian and Dutch ones, or southern Germany that connects easily to Switzerland, Italy and Austria, Berlin hangs out on its own in the rural east. Warsaw and Prague are a reasonable train ride away, but then you run into a perception problem: Berlin is the capital of a country that wants to see itself as western, and puts itself above its eastern neighbors, even though they are far more advanced in many ways. That is a complex to break down another time.