Becoming Berlin

摘要

When I moved here 23 years ago, Berlin was still very much two cities: the former West, for all the infrastructural investment in the '50s and '70s, was little more than a provincial lacuna notable for its sleepy suburbs and rather dated commercial infrastructure. Much of the Mitte district - the capital's former heart and then in the former East, along the former border - was a backwater; the Palast der Republik and other representative buildings of the former GDR stood empty or were quietly being demolished. The Neoclassical masterpiece by Schinkel, Stiller, Messel et al that is the Museum Island was shabby and dirty, its walls pockmarked with the scars of snipers' bullets and shrapnel from the war, and the bombed-out ruin of the Neues Museum sported full-grown trees where its grand entrance hall once stood.