I Had To Go To France To Figure Out Germany

We're back from our 5 days in Paris, and have spent the last week playing catch up, yelling at our dipstick apartment super (I'll save that one for some other time), restocking the pantry, and cleaning up the joint in anticipation of a dinner party this weekend. But as the title suggests, it took a trip to Paris to help me sort out my feelings on the subject of Berlin, the last major city we visited some 7+ weeks ago (downtown core, the Mitte, pictured) when my parents were visiting. While I wouldn't call it "writer's block," I really couldn't think of anything to say about the place, nevermind it's considered one of the world's great cities. With a visit to another notable European city to put things into perspective, I think I can now say this about Berlin: Meh.

While we have friends who positively rave about Berlin and sneak up there every chance they get, Perhaps I'll qualify my comments by saying that given its size, we didn't have enough time to really get a feel for the place-- after all, its 3.4 million people would make Berlin the 3rd largest city in the USA behind New York and LA and well ahead of Chicago-- and its large area of 344 sq. miles makes it comparable to Dallas, a town synonymous with the word "sprawl" (by comparison, Paris has an area footprint of about 34 square miles). So spending less than 2.5 days there probably did not do Berlin justice. All the same, while it stirred some powerful memories for my Dad (who was in Berlin some 47 years ago as a GI), I found the vibe there to be very hard and gritty and the people to be pretty darned rude. It's not like they haven't heard English before-- but our Bavarian inflected German really seemed to grate on some people (remember, Berliners think Bavarians from southern Germany are all a bunch of dumb hicks-- mix in our American accents, and it seemed to bring out the worst). And despite its obvious place in world history, there really wasn't much to see there (we didn't visit the museums on account of time constraints, true enough). Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary flashpoint of East vs. West is little more than a hideously tacky street full of souvenir shops and guys in fake ill-fitting Russian army uniforms hustling money so you can take a picture with them, and some of the major monuments were moved or removed entirely. History's lessons indeed. But here's the crux and what what I really took home from France last week: Paris struck me as a city that truly wanted to be great, and did whatever it could to make that happen. Berlin seems to have had its greatness bestowed upon it due primarily to geographic and historical circumstances and not any sort of overt effort to become one of the world's major cities. Not everything was bad though-- Berlin is so busy remaking itself that it is an architectural geek's dream, and our brief walking tour of the former Communist-controlled East Berlin was a small treat, and I always treasure my all-too brief visits with my folks. But on the whole, I'll take Munich.