After two-plus years in Berlin, I’m moving to Washington, DC. This is a positive life development but has had an adverse effect on my posting, which was never frequent to begin with. I may also need to change the subtitle of this blog.

Anyway, stay tuned. For better or worse, you’ll soon be hearing a lot more of me if you live in the States and listen to too much public radio. If that doesn’t apply to you, my greatest hits will continue to be available on this site.

Now, an homage to another ex-Berliner…

November 9th is a complicated day in German history. In addition to marking the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was also the day in 1938 when Nazi-led mobs attacked synagogues, Jewish businesses and Jews on the streets of Germany. In 1918, it was the day the Weimar Republic was founded and in 1848, it was the day the last of the German revolutionaries of the 1848 revolutions was executed, marking an end to Germans’ first attempts at creating a constitutional government. That’s German history for you, the highs are stratospheric, the lows hellish.

While there is plenty of coverage of the day, including some of my own, I’d like to share one story, told to me by a neighbor.

She and her husband have lived on my street for 42 years, when the neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, was in such disrepair that balconies often collapsed without warning. Many buildings were still heated by coal and bathrooms were often shared between several apartments.

In the fall of 1989 one of their two daughters fled to the West via Hungary, like so many East Germans did that autumn, precipitating the regime’s collapse. The second daughter had remained and was barely out of school, just 19 or 20. It was early November and suddenly, perhaps like any teenager, she wanted an apartment of her own.

She went with her mother to the nearby office that doled out apartments to see if one was available but none were even though there were dozens of empty apartments nearby because so many people had left the country in the past few weeks. They leave the office and the daughter turns to her mother and said, “Mother, this is the last straw, I’m going to the West, too. I just can’t be here.”

The mother looked at me while telling this story and said, “I had just lost one daughter a few weeks before and didn’t know if I would ever see her again. And then my other daughter says she wants to go to the West too. Because she couldn’t get an apartment. It was the worst day of my life.”

The mother walked back into the housing office. One of the women working there was an acquaintance and sees that the mother is near tears and pulls her aside to ask what’s wrong. The mother explains and the housing woman says, “I can take care of this.”

She goes into a back office and returns a few minutes later with a key, saying, “This one will work.” The mother goes outside and gives the key to her daughter, who’s overjoyed about the apartment and stops talking about going West. It was November 7, 1989.

Two days later, it’s all irrelevant, the mother tells me, the Wall is gone and the fear that families could be separated, never to reunite again, is gone. And she says that day, November 9, 1989, was one of the happiest days of her life, not just because they could travel freely, but because her newly shattered family was made whole once again.

A Berlin bus advertising one of the city's biggest brothels (Photo: Brett Neely, 2009)

Berlin is, and has been for a long time, broke. The city has lots of debt, it’s one of Germany’s least productive cities in terms of economic output, the number of citizens receiving social services is high. Etc. Sort of like DC, only much more livable and less dysfunctional.

You wouldn’t pull this revenue-generating measure off in DC though. The city’s transit agency has buses advertising for one of the city’s biggest brothels. Presumably that’s a lucrative ad contract to land.

The Artemis Web site even has a charmingly-written English section: “Artemis is a perfectly styled club, one of the most beautiful and largest wellness brothel establishments in Germany.”

Makes me think they’re marketing themselves to yoga-loving sex tourists.

Of course, Berlin lets anyone advertise on their buses. The southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg has cheeky ads on Berlin buses that say, “It’s nice here, but have you been to Baden-Wuerttemberg?” It’s hard for me to imagine Georgia or Arizona taking out that ad on a DC city bus.

View from the Kiki Blofeld terrace. Image by danny q via Flickr

Berlin’s awesome “beach-side” bars along the Spree River could be (temporarily) saved by the collapsing commercial real estate market. Thank you, Great Recession!

There’s a lot of empty space in this city thanks to the last economic collapse (hey there, End of Communism!) and a whole series of bars/beach clubs have popped up along the Spree on plots of abandoned land. They’re awesome, low-key, DIY places that mostly involve hanging out on the banks of the river and enjoying a reasonably-priced beer (click here for annoying NYT “Berlin is sooooooo awesome” coverage).

I was just  at Kiki Blofeld, one such place (pictured to the right), the other night when a friend told me that Bar 25, across the river was closing soon. Today’s Berliner Zeitung says the land’s owner, Berlin’s street-cleaning authority, has given the bar a temporary stay of execution. And the article says at least one bar appears saved because a property developer has stalled plans for a massive building project on that stretch of the river.

I don’t really understand the obsession with mega-projects in this city. They already went through that phase, check out the Olympic Stadium or the Reichsluftfahtrsministerium (I love spelling that out) to see how that worked out. But even the recent projects, like Potsdamer Platz, have been a commercial disaster. There are already big, new marquee buildings along the Spree further down, and those always seem empty when I go past. The fact is, the big companies that are going to move into that kind of high-end real estate are perfectly happy in Frankfurt, Munich or Stuttgart. Why would they want to come here? Unemployment is stubbornly high and incomes are low.

Sure, the recession has brought lots of human misery with it (and will continue despite the recent ‘recovery’), but at least Berliners may hold onto their open space along the river for a while longer.