Goodbye to Berlin, the modest capital of Europe

Stay informed with free updates

Simply register at Life and arts myFT Digest – Delivered straight to your inbox.

As I pack my bags after nine years in Berlin, I leave a city that seems trapped in a narrative of its own decline.

Veterans say he has jumped the shark. It is impossible to find apartments. Stains in the nursery are like hen’s teeth. Bureaucracy is strikingly analogous. Gentrification has flattened its anarchic soul. The nervousness has disappeared.

Some of this may be true. But it doesn’t reflect my experience. For me, Berlin is at the top of its game, a city that, if it weren’t so modest, could almost be the capital of Europe.

When I started as a Financial Times correspondent here in 2016, it all seemed a bit parochial. Its people were notoriously sullen and insular. Every day brought with it a brush with the “Berliner Schnauze,” the famous swear word of the locals.

In the intervening years, its harsh edges have softened. It has become much more international and less distrustful of foreigners. And, as English becomes more prevalent, it has become something of a global village.

Over the past nine years I have seen Berlin take in tens of thousands of refugees, first from Syria and then from Ukraine. It welcomed a wave of Brexit emigrants, desperate to preserve their links with Europe. And then, especially since 2022, it welcomed the Russian intelligentsia in exile, the artists, writers and human rights activists fleeing Putin’s dictatorship.

He grew up while clinging to his relative innocence. It is a capital city, yes, but not like London, which towers over the rest of the country. The place is not dominated by banks, because they are all in Frankfurt. The big media conglomerates are in Hamburg, the car manufacturers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Berlin is many things: the seat of government and a thriving technology center, but it is by no means a slave to Mammon.

That means public space hasn’t been privatized like elsewhere, and there are few of the dingy chains that make London’s high streets look so generic. The strangers you meet at parties still seem less interested in what you do for a living than in your thoughts about a certain “left-wing autonomous” technoclub or the latest premiere at the Schaubühne.

Still, those who say the city has gotten worse are right. A former mayor once described Berlin as “poor but sexy.” Some say it’s rich and boring now.

Exhibit A: the Am Tacheles complex on Oranienburger Strasse. It is an old department store that was half destroyed during the war and then taken over by a collective of artists after the fall of the Wall, becoming a symbol of Berlin’s rebellious spirit. I remember visiting there in the 1990s, the giant murals, the graffiti, the strange sculptures in the courtyard, the raw, seedy energy of the place. Now it’s a complex of offices, luxury apartments and luxury shops, all flashy and elegant, with its own private, for-profit photography museum.

Then there’s the small matter of the €130 million the Berlin government has cut from the city’s arts budget for next year. The cultural elite, long accustomed to receiving generous subsidies, is in an uproar: dozens of theater groups and marginal artists’ initiatives could close. An act of “self-inflicted cultural vandalism,” one prominent director called it.

But something tells me that Berlin will pull through. After all, this is a city that survived the near-death experience of Allied bombing and was on the front lines of the Cold War, divided in two by a 4-meter-high wall for 28 years.

Despite everything, it remains, in the words of an Irish friend of mine who has lived here for more than two decades, the “largest collection of black sheep in the world.” It is a sanctuary for renegades and misfits of all stripes, who coexist benignly with its more bourgeois groups. Citizens neighbors. Despite the rising cost of living here, it still seems to be full of creative people doing God knows what but always looking like they’re having a great time.

And as anyone who navigates its countless construction sites knows, it’s also a place of pure, limitless potentiality. As the art critic Karl Scheffler wrote in 1910: it is a city that is “condemned to continue becoming and never to be.” When I finally get on the plane to leave here after almost a decade in this city, what I will miss most will be that “becoming someone.”

Email Guy at chico.chazan@ft.com

Discover our latest stories first: follow the FT weekend on instagram and unknownand subscribe to our podcast Life and art wherever you listen