Germany

The sparkling new Potsdamer Platz, the hub of Berlin.

Having spent a fair amount of time in Las Vegas, I am intimately familiar with the conceit of what I call Cup-o’-Soup Architecture or COSA. In Vegas, the Eiffel Tower can be constructed in a matter of months. Add a little water, wait a few minutes, and where there was once a vacant lot is now the Doge’s Palace.

Potsdamer Platz, which was totally laid to waste during World War II and then sat as a desolate no-man’s land throughout the Cold War, now looks like a futuristic movie set for a sci-fi film, something titled “Europa: 2030.”

But here’s the thing: These are not streets of plywood facades like the movie sets at Universal Studios. Nor are they the 2/3 size trompe l’oeils of Vegas or Disneland. These are the real things. Full size. Street after street of noveau office buildings and glitzy apartments, restaurants and museums, all beautiful, all very modern, and all designed by a host of world-renowned architects like Renzo Piano, Arata Isozaki, Richard Rogers, and Jose Rafael Moneo.

And all of these stunning-looking building have sprung up in the last 20 years. I’ve never seen anything like it. Not on this scale. Not as a national statement. This is a brave new world. And it is endlessly fascinating.

Does this young student know the history of The Wall? Maybe, maybe not. Photo by David Lansing.

I went looking for a chunk of the Berlin Wall today and had a hell of a time finding it (more on that later) but it got me to thinking.

In a very short period of time—perhaps no more than ten years at most—Berlin as the metaphysical symbol of the Cold War will be all but forgotten outside of history books.

High school-aged students from London and Prague and Kansas City will hop off stuffy motor coaches and be herded towards a rather non-descript gray monolith of pitted cement and, being informed by a buttoned-up, sweaty-browed teacher that this is, in fact, a piece of the Berlin Wall, they will think—or perhaps even say out loud—“So what’s the big deal?”

It will carry no emotional weight for them. It will seem much ado about nothing. The some 1,200 people who died trying to get up and over that wall (the last, Chris Gueffroy, was shot trying to flee East Berlin the night of February 5, 1989) will be no more meaningful than the names on that forgotten plaque in their little hometowns honoring the dead from WWI.

Anyway, yesterday I hopped in a taxi and asked my driver to take me to the Berlin Wall. Minutes later we were at Checkpoint Charlie where there is, indeed, a chunk of what’s left, but what I was interested in seeing was the graffiti-filled section of the Wall. My driver had no idea where that was. It’s in Kreuzberg, I told him. What street? He asked. I told him I wasn’t sure but surely someone would be able to point us in the right direction.

After driving aimlessly around Kreuzberg for a bit, I told the driver to pull over. I got out, paid the driver, and then asked the first person I saw, a young woman who looked to be 16 or 17, how to get to the Berlin Wall. She shrugged and kept walking. I decided to do the same. A block later, there it was. Being passed by dozens of strollers who never gave it a second look. Some twenty years after The Fall, and The Wall is all but forgotten. At least by those born after 1990.

I'm waiting for the soft parade to begin in Berlin.

It is warm and humid with gray thunder clouds hovering over the dingy Aeroflot building. I am walking up Unter den Linden, which is becoming my favorite street for strolling aimlessly in Berlin. Usually I stop at the Cafe Einstein and sit at an outdoor table drinking a rich König-Pilsener and just take in the scene. It’s the perfect spot for a flâneur.

Across the boulevard is the old cakebread Russian Embassy which looks childish and ridiculous, like a Legoland castle. The crossstreet to Unter den Linden is blocked off; the gi-normous American Embassy is nearby, guarded and protected within an inch of its life. Hot wars, cold wars—it never really ends.

As I am sipping my beer thinking about all this, there is a sudden commotion coming up Unter den Linden. It’s a surrealist scene of Indians, in full war paint, on horseback and an Old West wagon train. There are cowboys in buckskin, waving their hats, and Indian chiefs in headdresses. All led by motorcycle polizei and trailed by a truck with DJs playing harmonica-laden dance music.

When I ask the woman sitting next to me what it is they are saying on the screeching speakers, she says it is a promotion for a new dance club in Mitte. “Something to do with cowboys and Indians,” she says, shrugging.

Berlin is such a startling city. And, it seems, the soft parade never ends. It all reminds me a bit of that Doors song:

The soft parade has now begun

Listen to the engines hum

People out to have some fun

A cobra on my left

Leopard on my right, yeah

The deer woman in a silk dress

Girls with beads around their necks

Kiss the hunter of the green vest

Sometimes when life hands you traffic congestion it also hands you free beer.

Yesterday I got stuck under the shadows of the Brandenburg Gate waiting for a long line of police vehicles escorting some political dignitary or another to the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building.

Just as the traffic signals finally cleared and the motorcycle cops hurried away, several vans pulled up at the very busy intersection and a dozen or so extremely attractive young people, dressed in green and gold uniforms, piled out, walking through the middle of the still-stalled traffic handing out purple bags inside of which were large bottles of Berliner Pilsner.

They were giving away beer samples.

Now just try and imagine that happening a block away from the Capitol building in D.C.—or anywhere in America, for that matter.

Saturday I had dinner next door to the Komische Oper, one of three opera houses in Berlin. I sat outside on a very warm summer eve eating oysters at the Art Deco-ish Dressler restaurant while faint hints of Mozart’s masterpiece, Cosi fan tutte, wafted over the night air.

The Komische Oper is regarded as Berlin’s budget opera house, neither as staid as the Deutsche Opera House in Charlottenburg or as glamorous as Deutsche Staatsoper which generally attracts the best singers. The Komische gets by putting out smaller productions with Eastern European opera singers. Still, how can you miss listening to Cosi fan tutte in Berlin?

There are a couple of things to be aware of when dining in Berlin. First of all, everyone smokes, no matter what the signs say. Particularly during meals. And your average German tends to get a little pissy, as I found out, when you politely tell them that your white asparagus has a rather odious Marlboro aftertaste. So don’t bother. What I have learned to do is to wear the same smoke encrusted shirts to cafes and bars, so as not to spoil my other clothes.

The other observation I’ve made about dining in Berlin is that German waiters are even better than the French at completely ignoring you, though they don’t act quite as annoyed when you finally do get their attention. The French, at this point, would make that little obnoxious puffing noise as they slowly strolled over to your table, but the Germans feign astonishment to find that you’ve been hiding at a table six feet away from their station, where they have not moved in fifteen minutes, without once being spotted.

“I did not see you slip in,” they will cleverly say, a big smile on their face.

No German waiter will ever say, “Guten Abend, my name is Hans and I will be your server tonight. May I get you a drink?”

No one will ever bother you with tonight’s specials (mostly because there will be no specials). And, most importantly, no one will ever interrupt your meal to ask you how everything is. Perhaps this is a good thing. I just wish I didn’t have to wave my arms in the air as if I were at a rock concert in order to get another drink.