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JOHN FLEMINGThis city of music, excess and grittiness is constructing its own urban personality and redefining its place in the modern world.
Berlin is a provocative place. My favorite description of it is by the Austrian-Jewish novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, who complained about the city's wayward growth over the years.
"The wickedness, sheer cluelessness and avarice of its rulers, builders and protectors draw up the plans, muddle them up again and confusedly put them into practice," Roth wrote. "The results . . . are a distressing agglomeration of squares, streets, blocks of tenements, churches and palaces. A tidy mess, an arbitrariness exactly to plan, a purposeful-seeming aimlessness. Never was so much order thrown at disorder, so much lavishness at parsimony, so much method at madness."
Roth was writing about Berlin more than 70 years ago, in a newspaper column included in a collection of his journalism during the Weimar Republic and rise of the Nazis, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933, but the spirit of his observation held true when I visited the city for the first time in June. There's a reason it has been called Europe's largest construction site since the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Berlin is a sprawling metropolis, with eight times the land area of Paris, and at first I had a hard time getting myself geographically situated. The River Spree twists and turns through the city. Various landmarks of the wall that remain are more hindrance than help, because its path zigzagged in a maddeningly random fashion.
The BVG is one of the best public transit systems I've come across, an efficient network of surface and underground trains, streetcars and buses, but it took some close map reading and a couple of long walks in search of stations before I figured it out. The surface rail, or S-Bahn, roughly follows the wall of the medieval city, so its pattern can seem a bit eccentric.
Only when I went to the top of the city's loony landmark, the Berliner Fernsehturm, the TV tower and icon of the old communist regime that sports a silvery sphere that looks like a giant disco ball, did I really get my bearings.
I had just spent five days in Paris, which felt very different. There I was comfortable almost immediately, perhaps because it wasn't too hard to order a meal in my half-remembered college French. But I was hopeless in German, its long words hard to hear correctly and impossible to pronounce - not to mention understand. Fortunately, most people spoke at least some English.
Berlin, for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on, intimidated me at first, perhaps because I wasn't sure how confronting the city's horrible history would affect me. But, at the same time, that slight anxiety provided a certain existential edge that I liked, a sense of anticipation that promised something more personal to respond to than the usual round of museums and historic buildings, though those things would certainly figure into my visit.
I had come to write a story about Stefan Sanderling, the new music director of the Florida Orchestra, who was born in the former East Berlin, where he has an apartment and his parents live. When I wasn't spending time with the conductor, I planned to immerse myself in the city's legendary music scene at night and see the sights by day.
The morning after my arrival, Sanderling took me for breakfast at the marvelous Cafe Einstein, located in the Tiergarten, a forest in the middle of the city. Over coffee and strudel on the backyard patio, as I told him what I had done in Paris, he delivered a pronouncement on an old debate: Berlin vs. Paris.
Sanderling thinks Berlin is the most dynamic city in Europe today. He sees it as the cultural, political and economic crossroads for the Eastern Bloc countries that have gained independence since the fall of the Soviet empire.
"Berlin will be the capital of the 21st century," he said. "Paris is the past. It gets its strength and beauty from the past. But that is all 150, 200, 250 years old now. Berlin is brand new."
That sort of grandiosity, I came to learn, is characteristic of Berlin, which always has had an inferiority complex toward Paris and other European capitals. Even cities in the rest of Germany and the neighboring Czech Republic look down their noses at Berlin, which doesn't have as many beer gardens as Munich and isn't as pretty as Prague.
In fact, when you get away from the eye-popping symbols of the new Berlin - British architect Norman Foster's remarkable glass dome on the Reichstag, the futuristic Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, a vast Mercedes World whose showroom resembles a space station - sections of the city are shabby and rundown. With unemployment as high as 19 percent this year, it was not uncommon to come across groups of morning beer drinkers in the parks.
In 1891, Mark Twain called Berlin "the German Chicago," and that still seems about right. It's a gritty sort of place that hides its charm.
In a way, Berlin's function in the Soviet empire was to serve as a metaphor for communist East meeting capitalist West, and that has carried over after the fall of the wall. The city is a magnet for people from throughout Eastern Europe who come to attend school or get a job or become an artist. These Croatians, Poles, Hungarians, Estonians and other emigres bring a lot of energy to the city.
One Saturday night, the U-Bahn (subway) was crammed with young people out on the town, but a group from one of the former Soviet republics stood out from the crowd like a sore thumb. With their clunky clothes, pasty complexions and bad haircuts, they looked awkward and embarrassed next to the chic, punkish Berliners, with their tattoos, color-streaked hair and midriff-baring jeans.
There was something heartbreaking about that little scene, seeing how out of place the Russians were. But it was also exciting to think of what they represented, the tremendous changes going on throughout newly freed Eastern Europe. Berlin provides a great window on those changes.
A smorgasbord of music
Musically, Berlin is the most amazing city I've ever been in. The highlight of my visit was listening to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in its acoustically superb hall, the Philharmonie. Never have I heard the details of orchestra music more clearly, not even in Carnegie Hall in New York, than in this airy, oddly configured space where the audience surrounds the stage.
At one point, during a surging crescendo in Stravinsky's Petrushka, I jotted in my notebook: "This must be what heaven is like, to hear music like this!"
I spent another rapturous night in the Philharmonie, in its chamber music hall, where pianist Fazil Say gave a recital. Say, born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1970, is an up-and-coming star who reflects an important aspect of Berlin, which has a larger Turkish population than any city in the world except Istanbul. Wittily, he opened his program with Mozart's "Turkish" sonata.
Incidentally, my Berlin Philharmonic ticket (about $65 for a great seat) was the only one I purchased in advance, over the orchestra's Web site, and I was glad I had, since the concert was sold out. However, for the piano recital and performances by other orchestras and opera companies, I had no trouble buying a ticket just before at the box office. Tickets were much less expensive than in New York - as little as $14 - and I never got a bad seat.
In fact, one Wednesday night when I bought a ticket to Ariadne auf Naxos at the ornate old Staatsoper, I found myself among only seven people in the balcony for Strauss' opera. An usher told us to sit where we liked since there were more than 600 empty seats that night.
Berlin has more opera than any city in the world, with three major companies churning out dozens of productions a season. Not only is there probably too much for the market to bear, but the German mania for avant-garde stagings of traditional repertory is wildly hit or miss.
The Ariadne I saw, for example, featured an Elvis impersonator as the Dance Master, a Bjork-like Zerbinetta and a gold-suited Bacchus on a skateboard. In Semiramide, at Deutsche Oper, Rossini's rarely performed bel canto melodrama came with a suggestion of modern-day terrorism, as Arsace (American mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore) trooped through airport luggage inspection at one point.
Operagoers in Berlin relish trading tales of misbegotten Regietheater (director's theater) concepts. Paul Moor, a curmudgeonly American music critic who has lived in the city for many years, regaled me with accounts of recent productions he loathed, including a Peter Grimes in which Britten's fisherman made his entrance hanging from a parachute and a Salome with a Taliban John the Baptist.
But since most American opera companies are timidly traditional - certainly the ones in Florida are - it was a treat for me to see some off-the-wall productions for a change.
Not all the music I heard was scintillating. At the Konzerthaus, an opulently renovated hall in the former East Berlin, there was humdrum Tchaikovsky and Brahms by the Berliner Symphoniker. The busts of composers on the gilt-laden walls - Brahms and Wagner given pride of place at the main entrance - were a nice distraction.
Also at the Konzerthaus, the Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester performed Mendelssohn's Antigone, incidental music from the Greek tragedy with chorus, soloists and two speakers. It had long stretches of tiresome dialogue and a score that is far from top-level Mendelssohn.
But where else would I ever hear Antigone? The great thing about a musical community like Berlin is that out-of-the-way music gets performed regularly. Take the two Alexander Zemlinsky operas from Oscar Wilde texts - Eine Florentinische Tragodie ("A Florentine Tragedy") and Der Zwerg ("The Dwarf") - that I attended at Komische Oper.
Looking down from my perch in the balcony, at eye level with a sparkling chandelier, I exulted in the romantic score. A Zemlinsky double bill would be a rarity anywhere else. In Berlin, it's operatic business as usual.
Strategic sightseeing
The best advice I got about being a tourist in Berlin was to forget about trying to see it all but instead to limit my attention to a few neighborhoods, saving other parts of the city for another visit.
I had planned to take in the Pergamon Museum, a repository of ancient Greek treasure, but it was closed for emergency repairs, not uncommon for public facilities in Berlin. The government, strapped by the high cost of reunification, is basically broke.
I spent an hour or two in an elegant little museum devoted to the work of Kathe Kollwitz, an artist whose life and work mirrored Berlin's harrowing history. Kollwitz, whose son was killed in World War I, was her own most compelling subject. Her sculpture of a mother cradling her dead son on a battlefield is the centerpiece of the Neue Wache, a memorial "To the victims of war and tyranny."
I made a point of finding the apartment building where Christopher Isherwood lived in the 1920s and wrote Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired the musical Cabaret. It's at Nollendorfstrasse 17, just a few doors down from Mr. B, a gay leather and rubber shop. With an openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, Berlin is one of Europe's gay and lesbian meccas.
Another artist central to Berlin history was playwright Bertolt Brecht, who is buried next to his wife, Helene Weigel, their graves marked only by a pair of rocks in the tranquil Dorotheenstadtischer Friedhof. Next to the cemetery is their former home, now a library and restaurant.
Not far from the Brecht-Weigel home is the section of the Berlin Wall - actually two walls, one for the West, the other for the East, separated by a bare stretch of land - that opened first when communism began to collapse on Nov. 9, 1989. Now it's preserved on Bernauer Strasse, a pleasantly idyllic place on a sunny morning, except for a cross marking the spot where someone was killed trying to go over to the West.
For a compelling history of the wall, the place to go is the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, which overlooks the former border crossing station between the American and Soviet sectors. This homespun museum, opened at the height of the Cold War in 1962, is an inspiring testament to the resistance to totalitarianism, chockablock full of political art, photography and film. There are displays of things ingeniously used to smuggle escapees out of the East, everything from a welding machine to a pair of hollowed-out surfboards.
I had a fascinating day wandering through the heart of the former East Berlin, setting out from grungy Alexanderplatz to head down Karl Marx Allee, a broad showcase street from the Stalinist '50s lined by hulking apartment complexes. A bust of Marx stands just southwest of the fountain at Strausberger Platz. Traffic crossing lights feature the delightful cartoon red and green Ampelmannchen, or "little traffic-light man."
My destination was the Forschungs- und Gedenkstatte Normannenstrasse, former headquarters of the East German secret police Staatssicherheitsdienst, or Stasi. Now it's a museum documenting an Orwellian nightmare, with chilling displays of the listening devices, miniature cameras and other technology that the state used to spy on citizens. This mundane building also contains the office suite of longtime Stasi boss Erich Mielke, left in its original condition, a prime example of Soviet interior decoration, complete with a death mask of Lenin.
Norman Foster's dome over the Reichstag, home of Germany's parliament, is an essential stop on the tourist itinerary, preferably first thing in the morning to beat the crowds. It provides not only a panoramic view of Berlin but also an exhibit of 121 photographs that gives a concise history of the city. Well-represented is the classic photojournalism of Erich Solomon, who chronicled the Weimar Republic and the rise of the National Socialist Party before he died at Auschwitz.
Nobody can visit Berlin today without going to the Judisches Museum, a striking piece of architecture by Daniel Liebskind, who has been commissioned to design the World Trade Center site in New York. Berlin's newest museum, opened in 2001, it is a massive, brutal structure, all industrial-strength steel plates, sharp angles and slanted walkways.
Seen from above, Liebskind's design looks like a shattered Star of David, but I found negotiating the galleries exhausting and confusing. That is surely the emotional point; but it made it difficult to absorb all the information on two millenia of German-Jewish history.
The story the museum tells is devastating. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, there were 560,000 Jews in Germany: 276,000 emigrated; 200,000 were murdered. Today, there are 100,000 Jews in the country, but only 20,000 are children of surviving German Jews. Most of the Jews now in Germany emigrated from Russia.
Germany used to have thousands of synagogues, but now there are few. One of the saddest sights to contemplate in Berlin is the Neue Synagoge, which once had the largest Jewish congregation in Europe. Topped by an ornate dome and housing a cultural center, it is surrounded by concrete barriers and police armed with submachine guns to guard it against terrorism.
The Judisches Museum is not, strictly speaking, a Holocaust memorial, but it includes several powerful elements that seek to evoke the horror. One is the Holocaust Tower, which you enter through a heavy door, closed behind you by an attendant, to confront an immense vertical chamber, with only dim light at the top. It felt like being inside a nuclear silo.
"Inside this place we are cut off from the everyday life of the city outside and from a view of that city," Liebskind wrote. "We can hear sounds and see light but we cannot reach the outside world. So it was for those confined before and during deportation and in the camps themselves."
Almost 60 years after the end of World War II, there is still no official Holocaust memorial in what was the capital of the Third Reich. Politics and the sheer impossibility of finding a meaningful response to the murder of 6-million Jews in Europe have proved daunting, though a memorial is in the works for land near the Brandenburg Gate.
There is one response to the Holocaust that worked for me. On residential streets around Bayerischer Platz in the former West Berlin neighborhood of Schoneberg, silk-screened aluminum signs hang from lamp posts. Each sign has a simple picture representing an activity forbidden to Jews under the Nazis.
A picture of a bathing suit represents the law against Jews swimming; a picture of a cat represents the law against Jews owning pets; a picture of a bench represents the law against Jews sitting on park benches. And so on; there are 80 signs in all.
Some 16,000 Jews lived in this middle-class enclave. Those who didn't escape were sent to Auschwitz. To remember them while walking the leafy streets on a Saturday afternoon was to experience a quiet but stunning work of conceptual art.
If you go
TRANSPORTATION: Berlin is not the easiest place to reach. There are no direct flights from any U.S. city to Berlin's Tegel Airport, which handles most flights from Western Europe. Flights from Tampa involve at least one connection, with round-trip tickets this month starting around $570.
I took high-speed trains from Paris to Berlin's Zoo Station, a nine-hour journey with a change of trains in Cologne. A good source for rail travel is Budget Europe Travel Service, toll-free 1-800-441-2387 or 1-800-441-9413; www.budgeteuropetravel.com
Berlin's marvelous public transit system includes the S-Bahn and U-Bahn lines, buses and streetcars. Every day I bought a Tages Karte (about $7), which allowed unlimited travel until 3 a.m. the next day.
LODGING: I stayed in Niederschonhausen, a residential district of the former East Berlin. I rented an apartment close to the No. 53 streetcar that ran up and down Friedrich Engels Strasse to the Pankow train station. An agency for apartment rentals in Berlin is fine+mine; www.fineandmine.de If you prefer a hotel, a quick search on the Web turns up most of the major chains, including Hyatt, Best Western, Holiday Inn and the Four Seasons.
BASICS: As an enjoyable introduction to the city, I took a walking tour led by a native English speaker for about $14 from "The Original Berlin Walks"; www.berlinwalks.com The Falk Plan map about $7 is extremely detailed, and at times it was indispensable, but I usually found it too large and unwieldy. More often I used a city map sold for less than $1 at a Tourist Information office. The best guidebook I came across was Fodor's Berlin, listed at $18.
MUSIC: Berlin offers as many musical events as any city in the world. Even though the season was winding down when I was there in June, the Berlin Philharmonic, other orchestras and all three opera companies were busy. Things slow down in July and August before cranking up again in September.
Magazines with comprehensive arts and entertainment listings are the monthly Berlin Programm (www.berlin-programm.de) and the weekly Tip Berlin (www.tip-berlin.de) Or consult the Web sites listed with the musical venues located on the map on page Page XXE.
FOOD: I often had a snack before performances at opera houses and concert halls, all of which have modest restaurants. Cafe Einstein, Kurfurstenstr. 58, is an old-fashioned Viennese restaurant, great for breakfast in the garden. Near the Judisches Museum, I had a tasty lunch at Cafe Persil, Friedrichstr. 237. Pasternak, Knaackstr. 22-24, is the spot for beef Stroganoff and other hearty Russian fare, while taking in the sights of Kollwitzplatz from a sidewalk table. There's good German cooking at Hakescher Hof, Rosenthaler Str. 40-41, located in a beautifully restored art deco warehouse complex. Don't miss the Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe), the largest emporium in Europe, whose sixth-floor gourmet deli includes 1,500 cheeses, more than 1,000 kinds of sausage and 2,400 wines as well as, on the day I was there, a 6-foot pyramid of chocolate truffles.