How Berlin became a Hip Capital
"Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never to being.")
(Karl Scheffler, author of Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal, 1910)
The ICE train hurdles at 120 mph through the flat-lands between Goettingen and Berlin. There are extra seats in the coach, Berlin is far enough from most other German centers to make flying faster. After glimpses of Wolfsburg and its Volkswagen factory the most noticeable things to see are wind turbines that stand in clusters on seemingly endless lush green fields. These are the landscapes of East Germany which Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor who died this week and who had overseen unification, promised to turn into bluehende Landschaften. (Flourishing landscapes).
Germany still has more open space than one thought possible. Then, rather suddenly, there is Berlin, a city and also a state with probably the most turbulent history in all of Europe. Peeling back the layers of this particular onion reveals much of what shaped this continent in the last 200 years. For many visitors, no matter the nationality, it also opens a personal history and relationship to one or the other of those periods, whether as an original actor or as the offspring or relative of perpetrators, victims, liberators and bystanders.
American soldier and German bicyclist in the destroyed
Berlin of 1945 (photo: Noel Shutt)
When Berlin was a divided city it was an island in the former socialist East Germany reachable only by air or via bumpy so-called "transit" autobahns that hadn't been repaved since Hitler had built them. Those routes couldn't be used by the "Easterners" residing to their left and right to leave their country. To ensure that nobody got away, control points on each end of the corridor back then already looked like those terrorism fortified check-points of highly secure locations look today: Zig-zag courses around concrete blocks, watchtowers, cameras and soldiers with machine guns and thorough inspections of each vehicle with underfloor mirrors and the like greeted travelers. Occupants ...Read full article
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Nikolaus Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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