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Saturday, 8 November 2003
East and West Berlin ::
My colleague and I have been staying at a hotel in former East Berlin. Last night’s pizza place had what one of our companions jokingly called a “communist” atmosphere (in the U.S. I might just think of it “alternative,” as in Santa Cruz or Ithaca). The neighborhood here is an odd mixture of 7 to 15-story drab concrete tenemants (probably from the 60's and 70's), with a new Park Plaza hotel, new shops—signs of the creeping gentrification we’ve been told is the hallmark of the new East Berlin.
We took the S-bahn to an office we’d been to before, right at the edge of the former West Berlin, in what was once a bad neighborhood but is now quite different. It’s on the Spree River near a famous bridge (its name has escaped me, and my silly map does not include this area of this city, but I’m told that Hitler destroyed it to keep the Russians from crossing the Spree, though the Russians rebuilt it). As we walked from the train station towards the office, we passed through a beautiful neighborhood—wide tree-lined boulevards with large houses. We thought, ah, we’ve finally found the rich, decadent West Berlin. We passed a wide open space with a park. I thought, wow, how nice. When we got to the office, one of our hosts informed us that we’d walked through the section of East Berlin where the senior CP officials had once lived, that the wide open space had once been occupied by the Berlin Wall, and we’d missed the guard tower. It dawned on me that the name of the street should have clicked—Puschkinstrasse (sp?).
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