When we travel, it is often the past that attracts us as much as the present. Hip hotels or fashionable restaurants might be part of what we look for in a city-break. But we also want to see cathedrals and palaces, monuments and relics which speak of the history of the place - whether that’s the Granada of the Moors or the Manhattan of the Algonquin set.
Berlin, with a buzzing present and an extraordinary, and let’s say it, often awful past, clearly has both claims to our attention. For me, however, the history wins hands down - an interest fed by movies and books like Isherwood’s tales of life in the city between the wars, or more obscurely, Missie Vassiltchikov’s fascinating Berlin Diaries, 1940-45, not to mention war movies, culminating in Downfall, last year’s powerful recreation of the last days of the Third Reich.
But the book which got me hankering to visit Berlin this year is essentially a photography book: Berlin: Portrait of a City, just published by Taschen, a company renowned for producing excellent books.
Even by its standards, Berlin, edited by Hans Christian Adam, is outstanding, packed with photographs chronicling life (and of course, sometimes death) in this extraordinary city for the last hundred years, backed up with essays and quotations from sometime Berlin residents like David Bowie and Jeffrey Eugenides.
If this is a book which makes you want to visit Germany’s capital, it’s maybe not something you’d want to pack and take with you. For it is built on an appropriately heroic scale, a tome of a book which “just kept on getting bigger,” as someone at Taschen has said, “when we kept on finding more photographs.”
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And what photographs.
We see the bustling, belle epoque city of the early 1900s, and the patriotic crowds celebrating the start of World War I: a mirror image of their British counterparts, who were also expecting to be home by Christmas. There are flappers and cabaret artistes from what Berliners called the Golden Twenties; then the League of German Maidens, waving swastika flags to welcome a triumphant Hitler back from Vienna after the Anschluss; fur-clad ladies trudging past burning buildings after an air-raid in 1945; and the chains of women working to clear the rubble, brick by brick, a year later.
Looking through, some individuals stand out from the crowd. You find yourself asking what happened to the handsome young man in a flat cap photographed on the Unter der Linden in 1907. Or what became of the Bohemian girls sunbathing on a roof one balmy afternoon in the Twenties - or what happened to the photographer? (In the case of Erich Salomon, who took fine pictures throughout the 20s and 30s, we know: he died in one of the camps.)
And walking around the city, you find yourself asking what happened here?, a question that comes to mind wherever you are in Berlin, from the old Luftwaffe HQ, now the Finance Ministry, to a leafy street in Schoneberg.
Indeed, the first time I visited, to interview the author Jeffrey Eugenides, he told me that it had taken at least a year to stop wondering precisely that question, every time he entered a building old enough to have been around during the Third Reich.
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In fact some buildings are almost like characters in Berlin’s saga. In the Taschen book, the Brandenburg Gate crops often: with snipers on its roof during the revolution of 1919, playing a starring role in one of the Nazis’ parades, guarded by Russian troops when it marked the border between East and West Berlin, and finally surrounded the jubilant crowds celebrating New Year’s Eve in 1990, when the Wall had come down.
And then last month, I saw the Gate marking the end of a different kind of parade: an exuberant Gay Pride march, complete with drag queens, men in muscle chaps and lesbians dressed as sailors. Lovely. Hitler, needless to say, would not have approved.
The nearby Adlon Hotel, celebrating its centenary this year, also has a tale or two to tell. The Kaiser was a fan, and used to put up his grandest guests here, rather than the Royal Palace. The Hohenzollerns fell, but until 1945 the Adlon still flourished as the city’s most fashionable hotel. Marlene Dietrich’s first film part was brokered in the bar, while diarist Missie Vassiltikov recalled seeing Nazi bigwigs arrive for a swanky party.
Even as the Americans bombed by day and the British by night, the Adlon remained the fashionable place to be, not least because guests had access to the cellars, which functioned as a deep and especially swanky air-raid shelter. It survived the War, only to be gutted down when carousing Soviet soldiers discovered its still extensive wine cellars.
Partially repaired by the Communists, who pointedly used one wing of what for decades had been one of Europe’s most fashionable hotels as a hostel for apprentices, in 1984 the hotel was demolished - only to be rebuilt by the Kempinski group on its original site following Reunification, just like the rest of Pariser Platz, which had vanished into the no-man’s land around the Wall.
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Other once famous businesses from the period have disappeared. Horcher’s, which could be described as the Ivy of the Third Reich, is now in Madrid. (When Goebbels ordered the place closed down as part of his Total War policy, Goering responded by turning his restaurant of choice into a club for Luftwaffe officers, but reading the writing on the wall, in 1944 the Horcher family cannily relocated to Madrid - where you can still order Goering’s favourite dish, Viennese fried chicken). Another society restaurant, Borchardt, still flourishes on Franzosische Strasse, but next door to its bombed-out old premises.
At times you wonder just how much an old Berliner would recognise in this city, which seemes characterised as much by what’s missing as what remains - as in Potsdamer Platz, rebuilt in gleaming steel and glass, but entirely missing the buzz it seems to have in those old pictures. (Would we recognise Piccadilly Circus, just by the angles of the roads? I doubt it.) And today the streets and pavements of Berlin can seem too wide, built, as they were, for a much larger population. Then there are those symbolic ‘empty spaces’ in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, or the cemetery-like Holocaust Memorial, just behind the Adlon.
Hitler’s new Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer, has utterly vanished, replaced by a nondescript GDR apartment building, while its marble was used for the Soviet War Memorial. Strolling along, I saw that the site of the Chancellery is marked by a notice explaining its history, as is that of the old headquarters of the German railways which carried so many soldiers to the Front and so many of Hitler’s victims to the camps, and the old Gestapo building, an empty plot where there is now a display of prisoners’ mugshots.
(Once again, you ask yourself, what happened to them?) But as for the spot where the author of their sorrows, ended his life? The site of the Bunker - now a children’s playground - has no notice, no this-marks-the-spot plaque.
For it is a thin line between remembering the past and creating a pilgrimage site for dotty fans of the Third Reich.
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Commemorating the past, honouring the dead and at the same time looking forward is a tricky business. But for all the controversies surrounding indivudual projects, it is a trick Berlin often seems to pull off.
Norman Foster’s deft reworking of the Reichstag, a building frought with historical symbolism, is a case in point. In the Taschen book, we see it in ruins after the war, utterly desolate. Foster gave it a gleaming new glass dome - which visitors can climb, giving this Prussian monster of a building a human scale.
But he left the graffiti scrawled on some interior walls by troops of the Red Army in 1945. Some things simply can’t be wiped clean or whitewashed. Besides, for the historically minded, such wounds - and of course Berlin’s survival, against all the odds - is what makes this city so fascinating.
NEED TO KNOW
Original Travel (020 7978 7333) has Big Short Breaks to Berlin from £240pp including BA flights,private airport transfers and two nights B&B accommodation at the Bleibtreu Hotel. which is part of the Epoque group of hotels.The company can also arrange private guided walking tours or driving Trabants.