Home for now/Berlin: Visitors may snigger at its goody- two-shoes inhabitants, but Berlin's honour system helps to make it a great place, writes Derek Scally
You hear the newspaper man long before you see him do the rounds of the cafés on my street in Berlin. He shows up at about 10 o'clock every evening, singing at the top of his lungs. Opera is his first love, he says, but he'll do a phonetically sung version of Maria from West Side Story if you're nice. He has been singing for 10 years and selling the Tagesspiegel newspaper for five. The paper round, his first regular gig, increases his likelihood of being discovered, he says. That he's still pounding the pavement instead of treading the boards doesn't bother him, because, he adds conspiratorially, he has other projects.
Everyone I meet in Berlin seems to have projects. The project may involve getting drunk every night and rolling home at dawn while enrolled at university until the age of 30, with all the associated student perks. Or the project might be a book, a band or a business idea. The point is that Berlin is a city where, if you want to, you can pursue your projects full time, work part time and still have a quality of life impossible in other European capitals.
Samuel Johnson once remarked that when a man is tired of London he is tired of life. He added: "For there is in London all that life can afford." Unfortunately, only the wealthy and the tourists can afford a lot of what life London has to offer these days. Berlin, on the other hand, is a city with everything a capital has to offer and within everyone's means. Unlike in London and Paris, high rents haven't squeezed the life and the lively out of Berlin. The city centre still belongs to Berliners, not bankers, thanks to the twists and turns of history.
Berlin is the only city I know where historical debates take place in the present tense. Such as whether it's wise that the only trace of the Berlin Wall through the city is a row of cobbles in the street. Such as whether the city should demolish the communist palace and replace it with a copy of the Prussian palace the East German authorities dynamited 50 years ago. Whether Prussian, Nazi or communist, Berlin's past is an active player in its present.
Like most people, I had no idea what Berlin looked like before I arrived, in 1999. My first glimpse proper of the city was the alien terrain of Alexanderplatz, a monstrous communist plaza of huge open spaces and grey concrete. Five years later I have the opposite impression of the city and am always amazed at how green Berlin is: 40 per cent of the city is green space and there are 200 kilometres of waterways.
I was allegedly in Berlin to study, but the only thing I remember learning at Humboldt University was that it once had the highest concentration of Stasi informers in all of East Germany. Other than that, lectures there were an unwelcome intrusion on my socialising, and by the middle of term I had joined my room-mate in the university of life.
No matter what time the phone in the apartment rang, day or night, it woke one or both of us. I developed a taste for good German beer, she favoured two-Deutschmark (€1) supermarket wine - and, after a few glasses, never failed to point out on the Tetrapak carton what she said were her favourite words in German: "Product of more than one country".
The summer of 1999 was a good time to arrive in Berlin. It marked the end of the post-unification era of grit under your feet and cranes above your head and the birth of the so-called Berliner Republik. It was the summer the government returned to Berlin, and the most striking symbol of the new era was the spectacular glass dome atop the Reichstag, once again the seat of power in Germany.
Fears about the new era have, five years on, yet to materialise. Berlin is still Berlin, a scruffy mongrel of a city with debts of €40 billion and where one in five is out of work. The city has spent a decade in recession, with little or no industry or prospects, yet Berlin shows how an economic minus can sometimes be a plus. The cost of living is very low, with a typical 700-square-foot two-bedroom apartment, with 12-foot ceilings in a century-old building, going for about €450 a month, including bills.
Berlin always had two city centres, west and east, something the Berlin Wall solidified in concrete form for nearly three decades. Some 15 years after unification, native Berliners stick to their side of town as they have always done while new Berliners can enjoy two cities for the price of one. If you are tired of Berlin you are tired not of life but of your neighbourhood, so move a few miles in any direction and start again.
Probably my favourite thing about living in Berlin is the fact that so much of the city works on the honour system - and that the honour system works. You can run up a tab in a bar without digging into your pocket for each round. In some wine bars you help yourself to as much wine as you want and pay what you want as you leave.
Workmen digging up a pavement pile the paving stones nearby and nobody steals them. Berlin has a train network that would make a Dubliner weep - and without a single turnstile. It works on the honour system too: the only thing standing between you and buying or not buying a ticket is your guilty conscience. When the occasional inspector gets on a train, everyone has tickets. The visitors who laugh at the goody-two-shoes Germans who do everything by the rules don't realise that the joke's on them: the honour system makes Berlin so much more pleasant and far less hassle. It's nice to be treated like an adult.
Still, Berlin is a poor and by no means glamorous city. Far too many Berliners for my liking are trapped in the 1980s: Macgyver-style mullets and leather waistcoats are regular sights on the streets and Never Ending Story is a regular sound on the radio.
Berlin is also a flickering 60-watt bulb in terms of star power, which makes things less interesting for some but more pleasant for the rest of us. Velvet ropes and ignorant bouncers don't exist, you can always get a seat in a bar and restaurant reservations are rarely necessary, even in the most up-market eateries.
A friend remarked last week after a night out, in a voice slick with irony: "Berlin's the only city in the world where you can get a table beside Lionel Richie without a reservation."
Germans call Berlin the city that's always becoming, never being. Every chance Berlin had to become something in the last century was cut short: Weimar Berlin was crushed by Nazism, the West Berlin walled-city party was ended by German unification. Only the history yet to be written will decide if the Berliner Republik is just the latest incarnation or this great city's best chance to finally make something of itself.
Three things I miss about Ireland
Friendliness The way of dealing with a stranger or customer in Berlin is to start hostilely and increase the belligerence by degrees. Why be friendly? Irish people's easy familiarity makes the day more pleasant. Why not be friendly? If you have a problem in Ireland you'll get help. Here people say they can't help you when they mean they won't help you.
Living in a small country You can keep your eye on everything and know everyone and what they're up to.
Barry's Tea If every reader would send just one packet . . .
Where to go if you're in Berlin
Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag Dome One August night in 1961 the Brandenburg Gate found itself in a no-man's-land of the Cold War, where it sat for nearly 30 years. Now it has just been renovated to its original splendour. The crowning glory of the renovated Reichstag, nearby, is the dome, a miracle of architecture with ramps that allow you to walk to the top and peer out over Berlin or look into the parliament chamber below.
Soviet War Memorial, Treptower Park A huge statue of a Soviet soldier guards this graveyard of 3,000 fallen soldiers. Stunning stone friezes tell the story of the second World War as Soviet propaganda would have it - something you rarely get these days, and all in the words of Joe Stalin.
Palast der Republik It looks like a scrappy 1970s building in a business park, but this was once the pride of East Germany, the communist show parliament. Now a shell that is likely to be torn down, it's a depressing but compelling example of how carelessly Germany deals with its most recent past.
Fernsehturm East Germany is alive and well and living 200 metres up in the revolving restaurant of this television tower, an engineering marvel built 35 years ago as much to wow the West as to transmit television pictures.
Potsdamer Platz Once Europe's busiest crossroads, then a no-man's-land, now a shiny new part of the city centre with striking architecture and a huge if rather soulless selection of shops and cinemas.
