Berlin, O Berlin

This is an article from a weekly newsletter I get which this week happens to be about Berlin. It both has some good description of Berlin including many of the reasons I like it as well as being quite flattering for anyone living here by choice.

The Birds of Berlin

www.economicprincipals.com



BERLIN -- “Berlin, more than almost any other great city, is a city of
birds.” So wrote Otto Friedrich in “Before the Deluge,” the luminous portrait
of Berlin in the 1920s that he published in1972.

“One hears not only sparrows chirping in the midst of traffic on the
Kürfurstendamm but wood thrushes singing in the Glienicker Park. One sees
species one never expects to find in cities – magpies and nightingales and a
black-feathered, yellow-beaked diving grebe known as a ‘water-chicken.’ Even at
the Hilton Hotel, the traveling businessman wakes to the sound of peacocks
screeching in the night.”

To which it only need be added, thirty years later, now that pollution in the
former East Germany has been dramatically reduced, several varieties of herons
are once again abundant around the city’s many lakes as well.

Yet Berlin real estate today is among the greatest bargains in the world. The
city is economically moribund. It lacks a single direct fl;ight to any city in
the United States.

Probably no major city is less dense, at least on an appropriate measure.
Draw a circle around the city twenty five miles in diameter. Something like a
quarter of greater Berlin’s total area is is comprised of great swathes of
forest. Add to that the preservation of the countryside beyond, thanks fifty
years of slow East German growth (West Berlin was an island deep inside the
communist East) and you’ve got a greenbelt a hundred miles wide. Pass through
Potsdam in the south or Gatow in the west (the old British sector) and you are
in the country.

Berlin is “a new city,” said Mark Twain when he moved here with his family in
1891 to write a book, “The newest I have ever seen. Chicago would seem
venerable beside it.” (He moved back to America three years later.) Like the
Windy City, Berlin grew rapidly during the second-half of the 19th century from
a relatively small city to a great metropolis – after its Prussian kings
permitted Otto von Bismarck unify Germany and turn them, however briefly, into
emperors. (Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated in the closing days of World War I and a
republic was proclaimed.)

And like the Chicago, Berlin owes its prominence to water. Located at the
juncture of the Spree and Havel Rivers, far to the east of the industrial
valleys of the Ruhr and the Rhine, and well over a hundred miles from the
nearest Baltic port, it was nevertheless an improbable exporter of heavy
industrial goods to the rest of Germany and the world, for a hundred years.
Virtually all of that business is gone now.

Twain continued, “... The next feature that strikes one is the spaciousness,
the roominess of the city. There is no other city, in any country, whose streets
are so generally wide.... Only parts of Chicago are stately and beautiful,
whereas all of Berlin is stately and substantial, and it is not only in parts
but uniformly beautiful.”

Incredibly, not even the devastation of the Second World War changed that
aspect of the city very much. Berlin is still beautiful, as much as can be any
city that is located on an extensive plain. With its enormous central park,
leafy, sprawling neighborhoods and superb public transportation system, Berlin
is thoroughly liveable, like the New York City of fifty years ago or the Toronto
of today. Much of the Prussian splendor in its center survived or has been
restored.

East Germany was absorbed into West Germany in 1990. The capital was
returned to Berlin from Bonn in 1999. Since then, the Federal government has
poured money into the city. indeed, there is hardly a major architect in the
world who hasn’t built in Berlin. The city has three universities, three opera
companies and dozens of museums – none of them profitable, strictly speaking .
The old Prussian summer capital of Potsdam, another tax sink, is only half an
hour away by train.

Berlin, in short, is a city of vast amenity, on a par with London, Paris,
Rome and New York So far, low rents, high culture and the romance of Wim
Wenders’ 1987 classic Wings of Desire have produced mostly the bright kids the
locals call “rucksackers.” And it is fashionable to despair of the city’s
ability to ever again produce enough revenue to support itself. Comparisons to
Washington D.C. and Brussels abound.

But if Jane Jacobs if right, Berlin possesses exactly those attributes that
eventually will lead to its regeneration. Indeed, it is something of a test of
her conviction that diversity plus history breeds growth. Berlin is a a city
where smart people want to live. They will find ways to live here. And while it
is always dangerous to predict the flow of technology – last week I looked an
extensive 1965 comparison of the space program to the rail system – I have been
struck by the work of one of the laboratories I had come to Berlin to see, the
Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt U.

Berlin, like Boston, is moving into brain science. One of the promising
avenues of approach here turns out to have to do, curiously enough, with
birdsong. Hardly a week passes, therefore, without a talk by one researcher or
another on the “nonlinear dynamics perspective” on birdsong or “Spectra and
Waiting-Time Distributions in Firing Resonant and Non-Resonant Neurons.” Last
month Richard Hanloser of MIT was here to discuss “The generation of neural
sequences in a songbird.”

“Little is known about the biophysical and circuit mechanisms underlying the
generation and learning of complex motor sequences,” Hahnloser noted. But thanks
to recently-developed microscale devices for monitoring the activity of single
neurons in the brains of singing birds, “we are beginning to understand the
circuits that generate complex vocal sequences.” Where does it lead? Who knows?
But at least some part of Berlin once again is at the forefront of a
rapidly-advancing science, as it was in physics and quantum mechanics a hundred
years ago.

True, Berlin has many obstacles to overcome, before the city again begins to
throb with life and real estate values recover. Chief among barriers to these is
what Mark Twain described in 1881 as “The Awful German Language.” But then that
barrier to entry can also turn out to be advantage.

Plenty of smart people may be willing to learn German in order live in a city
with three opera companies where the loudest noise often is the chirping of the
birds. This is the country that invented the research university, industrial
research and development, not to mention the Protestant ethic and much of the
Welfare State. It would be would be foolish to count it out.


David Warsh