BERLIN
INS I D ER TI P S
Forget currywurst — Berlin’s best street food is a €5 (£4.30) gözleme flatbread, served in Neukölln’s Turkish market on Tuesdays and Fridays. Freshly cooked on-site, they’re best stuffed with spinach and cheese, doused in a garlic and lemon aioli sauce.
Fun, fleeting and inclusive, an evening at a performance art event in Berlin is great way to connect with its art scene — and its artists. For a handy guide to what’s coming next, see
visitberlin.de
Buying a Berlin Card or a one-day travel card? Most options cover just the central zones A and B. If you’re using it to reach Berlin Brandenburg Airport as well, you’ll need it to cover zone C too.
If you’re struggling to fit all the must-see art museums into your itinerary, remember that on Thursdays several are open until 8pm. These include the Hamburger Bahnhof (for contemporary works) and the Neue Nationalgalerie of 20th-century art, whose new presentation of post-war art was unveiled in November.
first it seems almost too sleek for Berlin. Until, that is, you discover its stairwell and landings. From top to bottom, they’re awash with
graffiti — a remnant from the days when the building was full of workshops and studios. It was a smart move to keep it. You pace the galleries in a contemplative mood, looking at the ‘finished’ works on the walls. Then, you head downstairs and you’re surrounded by manic, joyful energy, layered up endlessly as every new tagger made their mark and obliterated what came before. It feels like you’ve wandered into someone’s brain to watch its synapses endlessly firing. Meanwhile, across inner suburbs such as
Neukölln, to the south, graffiti still clambers up every bare wall. I take it all in with Tobi Allers, a historian, part-time DJ and cultural tour guide, who explains just how deep the roots of Berlin’s renaissance run. “Long before the Wall came down, West
Berlin was a counter-cultural hub,” he tells me — thanks to all the draft-dodgers who came here. “They think maybe 50,000 men avoided their national service in districts like this.” He also makes it clear just how low rents could be in the 1990s and early 2000s: you could work just five or six shifts a month in a bar and cover your basic living costs. Life is more expensive now. These days, he
says, the talk among Tobi’s generation is of rising rents and the squeeze gentrification is putting on the creative community. But that hasn’t stopped younger artists from piling in, as I discover when I attend a performance art event in what is arguably one of Neukölln’s loveliest streets, Weserstrasse. At its northwestern end, close to fashionable
Clockwise from top: The Teufelsberg; nightlife spot Paolo Pinkel; banana cake at Café Babette, near Weserstrasse, an area full of restaurants and bars. Previous pages: Berlin’s skyline
Kreuzberg, this long, tree-lined street buzzes with bars and restaurants. Along the roads that bisect it you can buy vintage vinyl, designer clothes and dusty antiques. But it’s peppered with grassroots art galleries too, such as Backhaus Projects at Westerstrasse 168. It’s here that I see Yi Ten Lai Fernández performing her work Mama y Papa as part of the group exhibition, Objects of Care. Elliot Waples is there, too. Fresh in
from America, he’s a young and inventive performance artist who left Brooklyn on
account of its eye-watering prices. For him, Berlin is now the obvious place to be. Not just because it’s still — relatively — cheap, but also thanks to its passion for his favourite art form. “It’s the only city I know where performance
art is showcased at every level of the art scene,” he says. Together with about 30 other onlookers we sit down to watch Yi Ten Lai pour water from an elegant oriental teapot into some exquisite cups, repeatedly. I can’t help but feel somehow soothed and nurtured by her careful ritual. We all sit there in silence for several minutes afterwards, until the mood of the room suddenly lifts. Everyone gets to their feet and resumes their conversations. In a city that’s changed so often and so
profoundly, the fleeting nature of that moment seems entirely appropriate. It’s also a real icebreaker. As we chatter on into the evening I wonder if, as a traveller, I’ve ever felt quite so connected, so quickly, to a city. But nothing I see — not even Yi Ten Lai’s
performance — can match the impact of the Teufelsberg, and I find my mind drifting back to my morning with Richard, even days later. In part, that’s down to the art, but it’s also because of the view. Berlin is, for the most part, a flat, low-rise
city. Look east, and even on a 375ft pile of rubble, you’re high enough to see right across the metropolis — which is sleek, resurgent and peppered with ever-more-expensive buildings. Look the other way, and pretty much all you can see are trees. Not just the 7,000 acres of the Grunewald: the lie of the land westwards is such that forests appear to reach out to every inch of the horizon. It’s as if, while Berlin has been busy rebuilding, Mother Nature has quietly been amassing her troops. In this era of accelerating climate change, it does seem a perfectly fair response. Meanwhile here, in the middle, stands this
ragged and weatherbeaten symbol of Berlin’s wrong turns and restarts. Its concrete is crumbling. Its tattered geodesic domes flap in the wind and, one day, the time will no doubt come to pull the whole thing down and move on. How brilliant, then, that on the cusp of whatever’s coming next, it’s been turned into a fierce and joyful palace of paint.
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