Better Berlin
Amazing to re-visit Berlin twenty years after unification in October 1990. Then we were a group of young journalists from all around the world sharing one year together on the Journalist in Europe programme (now sadly gone). We were based in Paris for one glorious year and our first group venture together was to Berlin to experience the political and social story just twelve months after the wall came down and to coincide with the unification ceremony at the Reichstag. Now we returned as just two of that group, Pia Diaz from Chile and myself, to see what twenty years had achieved. Then some people talked about the possibility that Berlin would once again become the major city in Europe, would re-gain its status at the political capital of Germany and could potentially be one of the most dynamic cities in the world. It seems difficult to imagine as we, like others, chipped away at the huge chunks of wall that still divided the city and walked through empty, no-man’s land between east and west Berlin. Today the city is a mix of the most creative elements of new architecture in Potsdam Plaza and the re-invention of the old glory of Berlin in Museum Island. The once empty wastelands beyond the Brandenburg Gate have become tourist attractions with more museums on offer (including one very strange one for the old DDR) than any city visit can accommodate. But more significantly the dynamic energy of the city is real with thousands of young people from across the world coming to it to live and experience Europe in a way that Paris used to appeal. Berlin seems more cosmopolitan, more open, more relaxed than either London or Paris. In old east Berlin the once Jewish quarter has been re-built but with respect to its tragic past and while Berliners will still say the old lines of division exist, in that east Berliners stay east and west stay west, now it seems more a concept of habit than anything else.
The canal and river Spree bridges tour is three hours long but a view of Berlin from the water is vital as you get a sense of the weaving past and present; the divisions and aspirations of the city. And the new Norman Foster designed Reichstag tower captures beautiful the old and new. A transparent democracy is what they say it symbolises; this parliament with a glass tower roof that people can wall through and see power in action.