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Mallorca on the Spree

Berlin Is Little More than a Beer-Drenched Tourist Paradise

By Reinhard Mohr

After the Wall fell, Berlin became a vibrant place teeming with creativity and excitement. But now Berlin has lost its soul and become a playground for the partying hordes of tourists who are driving away the very people who made the place so attractive and unique. It's gotten as bad as Mallorca.

Years ago, someone must have started telling people that sitting in outdoor cafés is a uniquely cool form of existence and that, in some way, it was probably the raison d'être of modern man.

Take, for example, Kollwitzplatz, a trendy little square in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood. On a recent, rather miserable July day, the sidewalks flanking the square were teeming with people sipping lattes at little French tables meant to make you feel like you are in Paris, along the French Riviera or in Italy. To fight off the drizzle, there are umbrellas. For the cold, there are heating lamps. It's all meant to give you that precious Mediterranean feeling.

The tables are set close together for the many locals enjoying brunch and lunch. In fact, it's hard to see what's really going on at the tables, as they are hidden behind a seamless sea of newspapers. Brunch isn't really what you think it is. People here seem to brunch all week long, even in the evening. You could practically brunch your way through till dawn.

Prenzlauer Berg's legendary perma-brunchers have also enjoyed a lively international street-music scene for quite a while. Starting in the late afternoon, you'll find all sorts of musicians weaving their way through the area bearing trumpets, accordions, clarinets and saxophones.

It often happens that the musicians get so packed in together that the only thing you can really hear is a cacophony of occasionally absurd proportions. Whole bands will toot, beat and strum their way through the streets. Some players are as young as 10 or 12 years old.

"That's the Roma and Sinti music line," a television actor dryly comments.

But the newest trend is a bit simpler. More and more, you'll find solo artists whose playing isn't quite so bombastic. They bring their own amplifiers along and plop themselves down right in the middle of the square's playground or under the balcony of one of the apartment buildings lining its periphery. Even as late as 11 p.m., chances are that there's some lonely itinerant musician out there drenching the neighborhood with sound waves.

Modern Day Drunken Crusades

There's no doubt that, over time, the amount of noise coming from the people sitting outside has grown worse. And when coffee and tea give way to beer and booze, the explosions of laughter emanating from tourist-filled tables just keeps getting louder and louder. People living nearby call the police. But that's not really all that unexpected: They do the same thing if they see a lonely mole burrowing its way through their perfectly manicured front yards.

Still, you can't really blame the people at the tables for letting off a little steam at the end of the day. They've already exhausted themselves snaking through the streets on rickety rental bikes as part of a "Berlin on Bike" tour. Go ahead. You've earned it. Party on.

But that's something you surely don't have to tell the herds of British teenagers marching around -- and around and around -- the city's Hackescher Markt area well past midnight. And instead of lugging around your average tourist accoutrements, like maps or digital cameras, these soldiers of insobriety are armed with half-empty beer bottles. Their cruelest moments come during the march between bars when their beer must hold out until, of course, they can duly shatter their glass bottles on the curbs.

These so-called "pub crawls," which come with an early bird rebate, are the crusades of the modern age. But whereas the latter are about journeying to holy cities to pray, the former are about drinking yourself a path to the emergency room. And occasionally these pub crawlers will end up in the company of police. How dare these hypersensitive dorks, these ignorant killjoys call the police to file a noise complaint at six o'clock in the morning!

The people making these calls must have slept through Berlin's metamorphosis into Mallorca East. And not just them.

Then & Now

This fall will find Berlin home to the massive festivities associated with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. At that time, people will be turning their attention to an era when the color spectrum in East Berlin stretched from gray to gray, when Oranienburger Strasse, now lined with colorful outdoor restaurants, was a desolate wasteland and when Hackescher Markt was an urban wilderness.

Then, without warning and with unexpected speed, came freedom and the exhilaration born of a new beginning. "Crazy" was the word on everyone's tongue, and "freedom" became more than something you talked about in civics class.

In the spring of 1999, Germany's federal government up-and-left Bonn and moved to the country's new official capital, which is always undergoing radical change. You would hear whispers about the new art scene, at night you could do sociological experiments in various subcultures and, in July, you could lose yourself in the enormous Love Parade techno party as it cavorted its way through the Tiergarten (even after it had morphed into a made-for-TV media spectacle).

But the fact is that the city was pulsating with life. And "the sound of Berlin" was more than a slogan splashed across the pages of brochures sent out by Berlin's official tourist marketing agency.

Ten years later, in the summer of 2009, things look quite a bit different. Broad stretches of what was once East Berlin -- in particular, the districts of Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain -- have turned into amusement parks. It's like a permanent spring break. It's quickly joining the raunchy ranks of Mallorca, Ibiza and Fort Lauderdale. The only thing missing seems to be beer bongs, huge glasses of sangria with colorful straws and your occasional Miss Wet T-Shirt Contest.

Twenty years after the fall of the Wall, Berlin has become less of a social laboratory and more of a beer-drenched tourist paradise.

Oranienburger Strasse, for example, is no longer just a stretch of road that has become world-famous for its paid female companionship in high-heels and lace. It's also overflowing with the kinds of tourists that the local scenesters go out of their way to avoid. The same thing goes for Hackescher Markt and the surrounding area, which has been almost completely annexed by the tourist industry.

And I'm not just talking about bars. The entire area is saturated with fast-food restaurants and fashion-label stores catering to tourists' needs. The last big traditional hangout from the post-reunification era, the Schwarzenraben cafe, closed its doors a year ago. And the remaining restaurants that have any ambition to serve up quality fare are giving way more and more to the droves of eateries catering to the types of tourists who think you can't really improve much on soft drinks and pizza.

Even in the anything-goes, multicultural Kreuzberg, a bitter battle is being waged between the locals and the joy-seekers from around the world who have colonized the once idyllic and quiet streets around Admiralbrücke bridge to transform them into a 24/7 party zone. Night revelers by the hundreds party with beer and loud music till dawn.

It's not a phenomenon that only affects the more Bohemian parts of Berlin. In the area around the Kurfürstendamm near the Kranzler-Eck, veritable mini orchestras parade up and down the sidewalks at such an ear-rattling volume that you almost get the feeling that there's some sort of open-air casting call for Germany's next up-and-coming heavy-metal band.

The City's Two Faces

Of course, if you look at things in terms of monetary figures, the picture is quite different. All of these money-spending tourists have been fabulous for the city's economic success -- especially in this age of crisis. A doubling in the number of tourists visiting the city since 1999 -- to almost 8 million guests and 18 million overnight stays in hotels and other lodgings -- has catapulted Berlin to the third spot on the list of Europe's most-visited major cities, behind London and Paris.

And, of course, it is a transformation most worthy of welcome that, rather than having Nazi soldiers or trigger-happy East German border guards marching around the Brandenburg Gate, you have teenagers from all over the world noshing on muffins and bagels to the sound of the Peruvian pan-flute combos that have taken over the entirety of Pariser Platz square.

But this is exactly where the problem starts. It's the price you apparently have to pay for this kind of progress. The place's charm has been flooded and crammed up, stoned and sloshed. So long sweet memory, wistfulness and transcendence -- hello racket!

Even Pariser Platz -- home to the US and French embassies and the five-star Adlon Hotel, among others -- has become a romping ground for insurgents waging a global jihad of noise terrorism that doesn't have anything to do with music anymore. Even small-town fairs have more charm than this senseless -- and incessant -- droning and blubbering.

This isn't about the fall of the West; it's about the end of an era in which the status quo was constantly being challenged, reshaped and transformed. Now Berlin has become an almost perfectly consumable setting.

And, last but not least, now we have the infamous "be Berlin/sei Berlin" city marketing campaign that wants to transform the lively process of change that Berlin has undergone over the last 20 years into a moneymaker, like a good that can be made pretty, packaged up and exported to all corners of the globe.

But what the people behind the campaign don't realize is that, over the long term, this kind of sales pitch undermines the mystique of decay and excitement that made Berlin such an attractive commodity all over the world in the first place.

It's like the process of sucking out all the aesthetic marrow that has happened to beautiful and picturesque places all over the world, from the heavenly beaches of Bali and Thailand to the fishing hamlets along the Mediterranean and the medieval towns inland. Places give up their flair in return for long, ant-like lines of tourists -- and the money they bring.

This is exactly what has happened to Berlin. The capital's list of top attractions, such as the Brandenburg Gate and Museum Island, has been expanded to include the notorious "Kiezkultur" ("neighborhood culture") being peddled across the world. And as time goes by, the very people who made these creative areas what they are are already fleeing from the onslaught of these experience-hungry masses.

Take, for example, the rather successful hatmaker Fiona Bennett, whose customers include Brad Pitt, Christina Aguilera and Katie Holmes. At the end of July, she'll be closing for good the doors of the shop she has had in Mitte for 10 years. For her, it's already too much when here friends visiting from New York gush about just how "fascinating" Berlin is. "I'm putting my feelers out about moving abroad," the native of England admits.

That's probably the kind of feeling Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had when he wrote: "Whoever doesn't want to follow the laws should abandon the place where they are enforced."