Berlin's 21st-century identity crisis

It was a friend and fashion designer in Hamburg that first got me really wondering. She had left Berlin - her lifelong and beloved hometown - to live in the charmed Hanseatic city a few years before, with little warning. Just upped and left. As we were sipping an Astra beer at a beach bar overlooking the Elbe River, I finally queried, "So honestly, why did you leave?"

"It was just getting too exhausting," she sighed. "Just this endless, ridiculous hunt for the next best haunt, the coolest new underground club, the next 'it' suburb. This whole 'I'm more in-the-know-than-you-are' vibe. I'd had enough of the nonsense. But mainly, I got tired of 'cool' new-Berliners telling me my version of Berlin wasn't cool anymore."

"Cool" is, of course, synonymous with Berlin - for better or for worse. The city's cool allure has endeared it to countless wanderers, attracting to its apparent freedoms and irregular heartbeat - a parallel universe seemingly far removed from whatever pressures plague the worlds from which they came (whether superficial or real).

And it is, in part, true. The city has hardly known more than a few decades without tectonic upheaval in its 800-or-so year history. And it's that flux that has maintained its disheveled allure - the genuine sense that it lies on some invisible fault line of humanity, where anything is possible. I was drawn from the other side of the world by that very invisible force field.

Berlin has rarely ever disappointed (let's not talk about the weather).

Great expectations of Berlin

However, I had to think of my friend's lamentations on Berlin recently when attending a music festival just outside the city. I got talking to a young and genial Canadian chap named Mike who had been in Berlin just a few months and was aspiring to kick off a music career - a common tale to be sure, but a noble one nonetheless.

Canadian Mike was living in a shared apartment in the current "it" district of Neukölln (naturally) and asked for some advice. We agreed to meet up when back in Berlin. I scribbled my address on a piece of paper and handed it to him. "Prenzlauer Berg?" he exclaimed, as horrified as if I'd just told him I'd barbequed my neighbor's cat. "You surely can't live in Prenzlauer Berg? Prenzlauer Berg is dead!"

Prenzlauer Berg, of course, is the emblematic frontline in a contemporary battle for Berlin. When the Wall toppled in 1989, the suburb became the epicenter of Berlin's alternative raison d'etre. Hippies, freaks, punks, ravers, artists, and degenerates all streamed across the now-toppled demarcation line and set up in abandoned buildings, ripping down street signs so disoriented West German police could never find them, and set about their secret counter-cultural business undisturbed.

More recently, the suburb has undergone rapid gentrification - as a new moneyed class moves in, attracted equally by its gritty history as its renovation potential. (The bulk of the area's 19th-century buildings were spared by Allied bombs).

On top of that, its original post-Wall renegades have been unable to dodge nature's heavy hand: They've gotten older and procreated. And hence, it's now become a no-go zone for the likes of Canadian Mike, who, with his few months of accumulated Berlin knowledge, proclaimed it certifiably deceased. May it rest in peace.

Imaginary walls

I soon after regaled the anecdote to a neighbor, a full-time artist who has lived in the same apartment for over 30 years - a few short meters from where the Wall once divided her from the West, and an area which is now home to an inner-city kids' farm and a bevy of hash dealers.

"I have heard it too many times," she laughed. "It used to make me furious - how ridiculous the whole argument was. Change is unstoppable. You can't freeze Berlin in 1990. It's a myth - they are all living a myth. But I'm glad they no longer think of Prenzlauer Berg as 'in.' Now we can work in peace."

Prenzlauer Berg is not the only casualty in the dizzying race to remain relevant in the eyes of fickle taste-makers and trend-setters. You only need to tune into any inner-city barroom banter (generally in English or Spanish) to hear someone quip self-assuredly, "Haven't you heard? Neukölln is so passé…Biesdorf is now where it's at!" This trend is equally as hilarious as it is concerning.

This frenetic fad-chasing in Berlin is not only territorial - it's also deeply psychological. No matter where you're at, there's always someplace infinitely cooler you should be. Berlin is a city with a terminal case of fear-of-missing-out syndrome. And once you've boarded that endless merry-go-round, you've got little choice but to hang on for dear life until the nausea or exhaustion gets you - whichever comes first.

This futile race is founded on a false idea that Berlin should always be unique - a city of cheap rents and booze, loose morals, and all-you-can-eat hedonism. A city where you can fulfill more than your wildest fantasy and maybe pen a masterpiece on the side if you find time, without fear of the landlord (or reality) knocking on the door. It's a noble pursuit, but there's an endgame to everything.

A 21st-century city

As my neighbor pointed out, the dramatic changes of late 1989 in Berlin which led to German reunification had no template - and as such, nigh on anything was possible. The newfound moxie of the city was as abundant as its abandoned spaces - and naturally a decade of unhinged creativity, exploration and wildness ensued. But as any long-term Berliner will tell you, nothing here stays the same for long.

Ask your average real Berliner, from Weissensee, Wedding or even Wannsee, about their everyday lives and you'll be hard-pressed to hear tall tales of thrills, pills, swills, and secret dens of hedonistic euphoria - nor the eternal hunt for the "other." Berlin is as real as anywhere else, and perhaps even more so, having been to hell and back more than its share of times.

Yes, its dramatic twists and turns have taught us to seize life with both hands. But, more so, it has also taught us to shirk superficially at any cost - for, as the city has shown so many times, one day everything could simply disappear. If Berlin's tragic 20th-century sacrifice was worth anything, it surely has to be in the post-war/post-Wall promise that we should live as we choose to live, and not as fashion or fad dictates.

Too late for David Bowie

The Berlin that inspired David Bowie to write "Heroes" has gone. Soon after first arriving in Berlin, I asked a friend to show me some Bowie sites, to which he deadpanned: "You're 30 years too late." It hurt, but he was right, of course. That Berlin exists as much as Hemingway's Madrid does today. Similarly, the mythological post-Wall Berlin is gone. That grubby arcadia of unhinged freedom, born from such profound tragedy, is evolving. And hopefully the series of events that led to those pivotal - and extraordinary - post-Wall Berlin years will never again be repeated.

All that is certain is Berlin's perpetual evolution. As the saying goes, "Berlin never is; it is always becoming." The likes of Canadian Mike would be well served to stop fussing over an impossible myth and take stock of the real spectacle: a Berlin perpetually being reborn in front of their very eyes.