Tourists in Berlin
It is that time of year again. Giggling Japanese girls in Starbucks. Buffoonish British teenagers on the top floor of the M 19 cheering each time the bus brushes against branches. A couple of Italian women with jangling gold bracelets, so charmingly tactile and leaning in so closely to show me their map, that I check later to see if my wallet has been lifted. Yes, the tourists are back again (and my wallet was not stolen; shame on me for even being suspicious), descending on the city like a migrating flock of snow-geese.
You cannot complain, of course, not even a little bit: tourism is Berlin’s only serious industry and we must all be its servants. Without tourism Berlin is, well, Detmold. So it is politically incorrect to point out that bits of the city are being eaten away, devalued, by the creeping phenomenon of Ferienwohnungisierung. These places, with their mismatching cutlery and IKEA curtains, are shooting up everywhere. Around 17 million people spend the night in hotels and pensions every year. But at least 750,000 sleep in privately rented apartments, and the number is rising. Perhaps bankers, in the good old times – 2006, say, 2007 – urged their clients to invest their cash in apartments in Plattenbau and promised them untold riches.
Easy to imagine the conversation.
Bank-Kundenbetreuer: “Put your money into bricks and mortar, always safe.”
“But what if there’s a recession and property prices collapse?” asks the alert investor. “And what about the inconvenient German rent laws that mean you can’t get rid of people?”
The bank manager sighs.
“Let me tell you Herr Boyes, property will always gain value. Berlin is sexy! And you can always rent to foolish tourists, they are a money-cow.”
So Berlin found itself with thousands and thousand of small-time property speculators who thought that you could make a fortune without having to invest. No lift? Australians love to run up stairs! Filthy, cracked windows? No matter – rent to clubbers who are out all night and sleep all day. That dead mouse beginning to smell under the fridge? Chill out; the renters will be back home in two weeks. The key point about a Ferienwohnung is location; it has to be close to transport links even if this means a place under the arches of an S-Bahn bridge, rattling like a machine gun every three minutes. And, if possible, a view of the Berlin skyline.
That is how the Wilhelmstraße, that tired, historical relic – once the Whitehall, the Quai d’Orsay of Berlin – has become the Gold Coast for the Ferienwohnung business. Views of the Führerbunker and the Holocaust-memorial, an easy walk to the Felix club, the Schwulenmonument, the Reichstag: what more could one want?
The fact is though that some of the Wilhelmstraße blocks are now 30-to-40 per cent occupied by tourists, and something very important is being destroyed: a sense of neighbourhood. Daniel Dagan, the venerable Israeli journalist, lives on one of those blocks and complains about the slow transformation of his home into a cheap hotel: the late-night parties, the rubbish sacks dumped in the hallway, the constant ringing of the doorbell by bewildered ever-changing neighbours; the sense of invasion. These are more than the musings of a grumpy old man. There are few streets in Berlin with such a spectacular biography: the history of Wilhelmstraße 75 goes back to 1738 (ripped down 1949); number 74, once König Friedrich Wilhelm II’s Diensthaus became the Auswärtiges Amt after 1919 (blown up 1950); number 62 was the Reichskolonialamt, then Goebbel’s propaganda ministry (blown up 1947); the Neue Reichskanzlei at 78, corner of Voßstraße. You get the picture: Wilhelmstraße was the heart of German power. It was bombed hard by the Allies, then flattened by the East Germans; part of the 2 kilometre street was named after Otto Grotewohl. And eventually, high-grade high rise buildings were put up there as exclusive housing for East German Promis who had no problem living so close to the Wall.
The street came properly alive just after the Wende. Treuhand managers and the pioneers of unification moved in alongside the ex-DDR stars – Kati Witt in the Pizzeria, ex-DDR Kulturminister Kurt Hage in the supermarket next to Rolf Hochhuth, Birgit Breuel and Angela Merkel (als West-Politikerin). Günter Schabowski going out to buy the newspapers. Markus Wolf drinking coffee. For the first time in its chequered history the Wilhelmstraße almost achieved Kiez-Status. It was an example of how architectural history can be wiped out – by bombs and urban planners – but replaced by people creating their own mixture of memories and ideas of the future. Most of the Promis moved on or died but the sense of Kiez survived and with it the spirit of the Wilhelmstraße. Now that is disappearing. Increasingly the Wilhelmstraße apartments are occupied either by partying foreign teenagers or by former members of the Party who have to sleep with ear-plugs. A strange but important chunk of Berlin is disappearing. It would not take much – a legal limit for example on the number of holiday apartments allowed in a residential block – to remedy this problem. But that would require imagination, a feeling for history, and for older Berliners. These qualities are currently in short supply; I am not optimistic. My prediction: in five years time, 85 per cent of Berliner will have no idea of the past significance of the Wilhelmstraße. Memory will have been wiped clean. But who cares? By that time Knut will have fathered his own cub and the tourists will keep on coming, wave after wave.
10. Juni 2009 um 13:16
so sad – so true! and how tragic that after living through the dark decades of Germany’s ‘unjust states’ these old Berliners will finally be done in by alcohol dazed twenty somethings searching for the thrills they were promised by inflight magazines…