Berlin is a city full of opportunities. The lack of a concept on the part of leading politicians, however, contributes to opportunities being wasted.
Franziska Giffey, still Governing Mayor of Berlin, at the LGBTQI stand of the International Tourism Exchange Photo: Fabian Sommer/dpa
Berlin is a wonderful city that does everything it can to prevent it from remaining wonderful. What kind of people and possibilities does this city have!
There are so many who see their future here, who find others here like them or not at all like them, who find inspiration, still a freedom that doesn’t exist anywhere else in this country, an internationality that the shrinking provincial Germany around it all the smaller, more tired, more insipid.
It still amazes me every day, every day really, with what persistence and sloppiness this city works against itself. And it’s not at all about vagabond construction sites that always seem like guerrilla actions by a city administration or non-administration, they appear and disappear so haphazardly.
Nor is it about bike lanes that simply end nowhere, as unfortunately is the horrific number of cyclist lives being pursued all the more fiercely by neon yellow police squads punishing those most at risk.
They say they love Berlin, but reject everything
So it’s only partly about this authoritarian gibberish, which is becoming increasingly evident, perhaps also a consequence of the post-pandemic obsession with rules, but we live in times of regressive modernity. It is also only partly about the city palace, with which so much started or is connected, the cold Hohenzollern heart there, where the contradictions, the openness or the new beginnings in this city could have their place, a house of the future , a place for everyone, maybe a Palace of the Republic, oh, what a beautiful name!
And only partially is it about the A 100 autobahn, which they now actually want to roll further into the city, as if fossil and individual mobility were still a promise and not a threat. It’s only partly about whole neighborhoods where the price per square meter is the only aesthetic premise, which means that only the cold wind of capitalism finds its home here. And it’s only partly about such stubbornly screwed up major projects as the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is being built against the objections of key voices from culture and criticism, a defiant temple for a present that already seems outdated.
It’s more about the self-denial in this city, especially by those who say that they love Berlin or are Berlin – and who reject what this city could stand for and what many who live here also stand for: solidarity, experimentation , the individuality, the change, the beauty, the darkness, the intelligence, the waste.
A coalition of aggressive lack of vision emerges
A coalition of faintheartedness that ensures that Berlin remains a city of spirited people and spiritlessness, in the constant dispute between past and future, whereby the present is all too often lost. They build a bastion against the future, a shoebox world – with which the Berlin malaise becomes symbolic for this country.
Because the capital is more than practiced failure, which everyone can make fun of without risk. The capital is just at the forefront of a country that has chosen to grow rich and sleepy in the shadow of world history, lulled by its own success story, which like so many success stories is usually over by the time it is told.
The lack of plan, the lack of conception, the lack of energy and elegance, all of this extends far beyond Berlin – where, in an act of self-empowerment of mediocrity, a government has now been elected that exactly reflects the insipidness of this city and the country: a coalition the aggressive lack of vision, undemanding, backward-looking, your own career as the horizon of possibilities. The one from the CDU is said to be a good networker; the other, that of the SPD, it says, “can” manage.
If only the right people were up there
Physiognomically, biographically and politically-thematically, this is a step backwards into the 90s – with the difference that the 90s, as they were, full of colour, fun and possibilities, seem to have been erased, negated as if they never existed.
Kai Wegner’s grumpy baldness, Franziska Giffey’s neat spasms: it’s like a correction of history, a denial of the city’s past, its ruptures, energy and openness. It’s like a belated triumph of the spoilsports over those who wanted and still want to make Berlin a cosmopolitan city.
Just as they are building streets in Berlin that are supposed to bring the city of the 19th century back to life, as if war, modernity, and two different German states hadn’t existed, an attitude is also gaining ground in politics that combines the lack of openness to the future with a Insistence on an artificially created history counteracted. What could this city become, what could it have become, if you had courage and the right people in the right positions.
From the outside it looks like lack of direction
But again, Berlin is just an extreme case of wasted opportunity in a country that is in a state of self-cocopoeia. The key issues for the future are being delegated, it is difficult to define one’s role in Europe – from the outside it looks like a lack of leadership, from the inside it looks like political self-abandonment, combined with a knotty protective jargon that hides all doubts behind smiley phrases.
So they can manage? Can the career? Or can they also have a future? The two of them seem to me like defiant stragglers who destroy what others have built, what could be beautiful and live.
