ARTS + FEATURES

Special to the St Petersburg Times, Russia - St. Petersburg,Russia

Some of his predictions are wrong ("the streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just as the horse-drawn tram has vanished"), but the vision of a new European capital shaking off the past amid construction dust and scaffolding is eternally true for Berlin.

The trams are still there, so are the bakers and the smell of fresh pastries, and so is the Zoologischer Garten with its tame hares.

That's what a visitor will find in today's Berlin — a relaxing and pleasant city with great gardens and parks (the center of the city is actually a park, the Tiergarten, which once a year plays host to the Love Parade). A young dynamic hub, the center of Europe's alternative scene, Berlin throngs with numerous clubs, bars and cafes — every night there's something happening.

Berlin retains an updated version of its notorious squats — the so-called WG, "Wohngemeinschaft," especially popular in the Kreuzberg and Friedrichshein areas, where several young people live in what is known in Russia as kommunalki (communal apartments) sharing a kitchen and bathroom facilities.

Berlin is not rich (the city went bankrupt a few years ago) and unemployment rates are high. While sufficient social payments allow many people live well enough, big West German companies have not yet made it to the capital of united Germany. Many newly-built business centers are half-empty.

Among them are a few former harbor warehouses and industrial buildings on the corner of Kreuzberg, including a former egg-storage facility and a former paint factory, that are still looking for new tenants.

These buildings, dating from the 1970s and showing either their Soviet or West Berlin architechtural heritage, have been enriched with an infinite freedom of contemporary design. During the post-war restoration of Berlin (92 percent of which was almost completely demolished during the war) East Berlin tried to restore as much as it could, while in the West new quarters were built.

The East/West division is no longer always easy to trace. Unter den Linden, Alexanderplatz and areas northeast of it offer clear examples of the triumph of Soviet architecture. Alexanderplatz with its clock and a 386-meter-high TV Tower is certainly a must-see place. The view from the TV Tower is one of the best of the city and also there the chance to dine out in a '70s-style rotating restaurant.

To the east from Alexanderplatz one can find Prenzlauberg, probably the most exciting and trendy neighborhood of today's Berlin. Starting with numerous old inter-connected yards with murals and ivies climbing the walls of the Hackerscher Market, further north Prenzlauberg opens out into a vast district, full of houses, terraces and balconies, endless cafes, galleries, squats (one of which says "you're leaving the capitalist sector" — the idea of class struggle is still alive, especially if you happen to come across or even wake up to the sound of youths demonstrating against social reform), and cultural centers located even in amusing places, such as a former brewery.

In the northern part of Prenzlauberg, where it borders Wedding, a former working class area of West Berlin, the two districts were once divided by the Berlin Wall. The route of the wall can be traced all over the city. A few memorable places to visit are Checkpoint Charlie (including the famous "You're leaving the American sector" sign), along with the indoor private museum dedicated to all those who attempted to flee from East Berlin, successfully or not, and an open-air exhibition about the Berlin Wall. Another Wall-related center is located at 111 Bernauer Strasse (north of Prenzlauberg) comprising a Documentation Center, a Berlin Wall memorial and a Chapel of Reconciliation.

The Documentation Center provides an extensive collection of photographic, audio, video and documentary material dedicated to the construction of the Wall and its first days, including an interesting comparative study of West and East German media coverage of the event.

Another important Wallrelated site is the East-side Gallery (not far from the Oberbaumbrucke bridge, one of the meeting points for the East and West sectors of Berlin), where remaining pieces of the wall have been painted by artists and left as a silent remembrance of the 28 years it divided the city. Parts of the Wall can be seen almost everywhere in contemporary Berlin, from the German Historical Museum (which has recently presented a very ambitious and entertaining exhibition of the history of Germany, with many interactive features) to a department store on Friedrichstrasse which boasts having an authentic piece of the Wall at its entrance.

There are probably only a few cities in the world where so many monuments and memorial sites are actually former prisons or other sights dedicated to the darkest years of German history.

From the SS and Gestapo Headquarters to Sachsenhausen concentration camp (located just outside the city limits) to the Holocaust memorial, just off the Brandenburg Gate, those interested in an open and honest coverage of the time will find their interest completely fulfilled. A Stasi prison and an information center about the work of the secret service during the years of the misnamed German Democratic Republic (East Germany) will also prove a very rewarding experience for those interested in recent German history.

But Berlin has more to offer.

Along with various historical monuments, the city boasts world-class art museums, including the Egyptian Museum, the Pergamon Museum, and others to be found in and around Museum Island. Contemporary art can be found either at Kunst-Werke Berlin, comprising five stories of art in a former margarine-making factory, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, a renovated railway station, presenting a collection of works by Warhol, Beuys and Lichtenstein, and at the Deutsch Guggenheim museum on Unter den Linden.

A recent memorable addition to the Berlin cultural scene is the Jewish Museum, designed by U.S. architect Daniel Liebeskind in the form of a shattered Star of David. Another recent architectural masterpiece is certainly a newly-built Potsdamerplatz — one of the busiest squares of pre-war Berlin which was completely destroyed during the war and left unreconstructed until the reunification of Germany in 1990 (the Wall actually bisected the square until its destruction in 1989). Most Berliners have a love-hate relationship with the now-fully revived Potsdamerplatz — you can hardly find anyone who approves of its new look completely.

New skyscrapers, among them the Sony Center which comprises several cinemas and the German Film Museum, and new cafes and restaurants stand out from the rest of Berlin's landscape. As well as the Sony Center, the design of which resembles a flower's petals, another remarkable building on the square is a '20s-style red-brick tower on the other side of the Potsdamerplatz that recalls New York in its skyscraping heyday.

Next to the square one can see a few remaining plots of wasteland — with wild grass, even in the downtown area. Some were the location of houses demolished during the war and never built again. The plots seem out of place amid the architectural landmarks. But, after a while, they assume the status of special corridors, full of air, that let the city breathe.

The heart of European decadence in the '20s and '30s, the centrifugal hub of World War II, the border between the East and the West during the Cold War, the home of the "Iron Curtain" itself, a living monument to the greatest events of the 20th century, a Mecca for alternative people from all over Europe — Berlin is all of these.

"Berlin is a city that never is, but it is always in the process of becoming," historian Karl Scheffler said in 1910. It is still true today.