A Victim of Its Own Success: Berlin Drowns in Tourist Hordes and Rising Rents

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Franz Schulz has a problem with gentrification. He, too, is a member of the Green Party, and is district mayor in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. "The best population is the one that's already there," says Schulz.

He talks about the many babies in Friedrichshain, the new clubs in Kreuzberg, the people with good incomes who want to move there and the investors planning to build high-rise buildings on the banks of the Spree River. Other politicians would be jumping for joy, but Schulz looks more worried than anything else.

He says that there is a Danish investment fund that has become notorious in Kreuzberg for buying up buildings and then jacking up rents or selling off the apartments, one by one. Schulz and the people in his district are fighting against gentrification and all the changes it brings.

Andrej Holm prefers to stay out of this dispute within the Green Party. He says that whether gentrification is good or bad can't be determined objectively. "There is no such thing as the ideal urban development that benefits everyone." A city, says Holm, is also characterized by "conflict and the struggle over scarce resources." But he is also sure of one thing: "Poverty is migrating from the inner city to the outskirts."

Declining Outskirts

The Heerstrasse Nord development in Spandau is a case in point: residential high-rises with small windows, some painted in bright colors and others gray. Old women speak Russian as they sit on benches in the parks between the buildings. Many ethnic German immigrants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union settled in Spandau. There are a few pubs and discount grocery stores, which have alcoholics standing outside them, drinking, in the afternoon. There isn't much else to Spandau, a sleepy city made of concrete. And there are no tourists.

There are even vacant apartments in Spandau, advertised on flyers hanging in glass cases between the buildings. One flyer describes a 26-square-meter (280-square-foot) apartment for €250 ($340), something of a bargain in the new Berlin.

Raed Saleh is a member of the Berlin city-state parliament for the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). He was born in the West Bank but grew up in the Heerstrasse development. "Now that Kreuzberg and Neukölln are trendy, people are coming here," he says. More than 800 people who receive welfare -- in other words, poor people -- have moved to Spandau in the space of a year, says Saleh. It's not a mass movement yet, but certainly a trend. The inner city is coming up in the world while the outer districts are declining.

A city never rests; it's always in motion. In Berlin, that motion currently consists of the poor moving to the outskirts, while central areas are either being gentrified or deteriorating as part of Partytown, depending on which phase of change a street happens to be in.

Growing Protests

How does all of this affect Berliners? Berliners are Germans, Turks, Americans, Israelis, Frenchmen, Arabs, or anyone who feels like a Berliner, something that happens quickly in this city. Nowadays, they no longer react to the "intensification of nervous stimulation" with a blasé attitude, as in the days of Georg Simmel. They no longer look the other way, because nowadays Berliners are indignant. There are protests everywhere; the city is overwrought.

The battle over flight paths has become a symbol of this turmoil. The new Berlin Brandenburg Airport opens next year, it will bring even more arrivals and departures, and more tourists, to Berlin. Residents in many districts of the city are protesting against the expected aircraft noise. The noise will affect people living near the Müggelsee lake in the east of the city most of all. They are now staging protests every Monday in the neighborhood of Friedrichshagen.

Paint bombs were tossed at new buildings two weeks ago, when thousands of people protested against high rents. The city's government, the Senate, recently announced that 15 clubs could be closed, many because of the complaints of nearby residents. The police keep a close eye on the Admiral Bridge in Kreuzberg to prevent the popular gathering place from being used for spontaneous nocturnal concerts, which have triggered protests from local residents. Daniel Dagan is protesting against illegal vacation rentals and Marion Mayr is protesting against a hostel.

For a large number of Berliners, Berlin has become too noisy and too expensive. They no longer want to be the creators of the Berlin vibe for others -- at their own expense.

Tourists 'Destroy' What They Seek

They want their city to be more of a home and less of a world metropolis. This is the city's current dilemma. It thrives because of its reputation as a cosmopolitan, tolerant and cool city. Tourism is one of the most important economic sectors in Berlin. The number of overnight stays increased by 10.2 percent last year, and in the first half of 2011 they were up by 6.5 percent. The boom continues, but many a Berliner would rather live in a city where life is as peaceful and slow-moving as in a small village.

Another problem is that the city could lose the very foundation of its success. German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger once said: "The tourist destroys what he seeks by finding it." In Berlin, tourists find what they seek by producing it themselves. In the process, the thing that attracted them to the city in the first place is displaced.

Perhaps the day will come when the budget tourists will realize that they aren't experiencing a Berlin party, but a party in Berlin, that they are in the process of destroying the authenticity they seek, and that they are the ones creating the mood that they had believed was the essence of this crazy city.

Tourists can't take Paris's historic buildings home with them, but they can with the Berlin vibe, especially if their only goal was to party all night on the cheap and urinate in a river. Perhaps the same thing will become available someplace else soon, and perhaps it'll be even more desolate. Partytown can move at any time.

'The City Must Change'

What can be done to preserve Berlin as both a world metropolis and a home to Berliners? In this respect, Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who is running for reelection on Sept. 18, has a radical point of view. When asked whether his Berliners should have to put up with all of this, he replies: "Yes, they do have to put up with it. The city must change. We've lived in a niche long enough."

Wowereit believes that those who want to prevent change are trying to keep the city in a protective bubble. His predecessor as mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, and his party colleague Klaus-Rüdiger Landowsky tried to do the same thing in the past, Wowereit says. "I remember well how terrible that was. It already stank back then."

The "Tim Raue" restaurant in Kreuzberg is the kind of place that exists only in Berlin. Tim Raue, who emerged from the Kreuzberg street gang scene, is now one of the city's top chefs. His restaurant is decorated with expensive wood and blue armchairs, and a painting on the wall depicts full garbage bags.

During a lunch at the restaurant with sociologist Heinz Bude, someone says: "The party zone in Kreuzberg is disgusting." But Bude is also opposed to the protests because, as he says, they are motivated by "small-mindedness" and a "romantic native population."

Ordering in English

In Bude's plan for Berlin, the tourists "can come, but they'll have to pay -- a lot." When that happens, things will fall into place. Besides, he says, Berliners should change their attitudes. At the moment, their city is a "consumerist space" for the world. "We shouldn't have the attitude that we're selling ourselves," says Bude, but that "we're offering something." In his view, the city needs to develop alternatives to tourism, like selling knowledge or products to the world that are unique to Berlin. This is starting to happen in fashion, says Bude.

If Berlin continues to place so much emphasis on budget tourism, it will indeed become a giant Ballermann before long. This could keep the city afloat, but it would be unpleasant and even a little undignified for such a large, old city. Berlin would no longer be Berlin.

"Do you have a reservation?" the waitress at The Bird restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg asks, speaking in English. Hamburgers are on the menu, and sweaty men drinking beer out of glass mugs dance around the table. One man yells that his name is Jake and that he was born "naked."

The waitresses wear tight shorts and ask: "Are you guys ready to order?" They don't speak German unless they have to. They serve American food, and English comes with the territory. At The Bird, there's not much left of Berlin.

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• Part 1: Berlin Drowns in Tourist Hordes and Rising Rents
• Part 2: 'Help, The Tourists Are Coming'
• Part 3: The Migration of Poverty