AS BERLIN marked the 35th anniversary of the building of the Wall yesterday and rejoiced once again at its destruction seven years ago, most of the city's hoteliers were surveying half-empty registers and gloomy balance sheets.
The fall of the Wall meant the disappearance of Berlin's biggest tourist attraction, and the city has struggled to attract visitors ever since, not least because a massive construction programme has turned the centre into one big building site.
Ghoulish visitors still make straight for a bleak expanse of rubble, earth, weeds and wire mesh just south of the Brandenburg Gate. There they can pose next to a few surviving slices of the Berlin Wall, which stand like brightly painted tombstones in the middle of the wilderness.
Just beyond this mock graveyard a short stretch of Wall remains intact. Energetic visitors can even climb into a concrete watchtower where East German border guards once played cards, smoked smelly Club cigarettes and took aim at their fellow citizens.
There is a fine view from here of the little green mound just to the north which marks the bunker where Hitler, Eva Braun, Joseph Goebbels, his wife and their six children died during the final days of the second World War.
This is Potsdamer Platz, once the busiest crossroads in Europe and later the barren, broken heart of Berlin, reduced to rubble by Royal Air Force bombers and then trapped in no man's land when the city was divided. But the minefields and dog-runs have now been replaced by cranes and mechanical diggers as Potsdamer Platz becomes the largest of an estimated 2,000 building sites in Berlin.
Sony and Daimler Benz are spending more than $500 million here to create a new centre for Germany's new capital.
Potsdamer Platz is one of hundreds of sites that have been attracting tourists throughout the summer as part of Schaustelle Berlin (Showsite Berlin) a festival celebrating the mud, dust and rubble of the city in transition. Bus tours of the main sites and guided tours of individual developments are always sold out and new tours are being added every week.
Visitors to Potsdamer Platz can view the sites from the top of the only surviving building, where a guide explains what is happening below, identifying which cranes belong to which projects.
A hundred metres away the Info Box, a bright red square on stilts, maps, charts, video shows and interactive computer displays provide a picture of how Berlin will look five, 10 or 25 years from now. The Info Box attracts more visitors than any museum or art gallery in the city, with Berliners outnumbering the tourists.
Financed by a group of businessmen, called Partners for Berlin, Schaustelle Berlin is a huge public relations exercise and an attempt to turn the building boom to its advantage.
Fearful that Berlin would lose its lure as an artistic capital amid the rattle of pneumatic drills, they hit on the idea of marrying culture and construction. As soon as the builders go home every evening, musicians and entertainers move in, transforming the sites into open-air theatres.
The Bathsheva Dance Company from Israel is dancing on top of a concrete slab at one site this week and a conceptual artist has devised a light installation to illuminate the hundreds of cranes that dominate the city's skyline.
Dozens of new bars and clubs have already sprung up in downmarket districts like the old Jewish quarter and Prenzlauerberg, but the smarter streets near the Brandenburg Gate are still dead after six in the evening. City planners are especially worried by Berliners' refusal to warm to the new-look Friedrichstrasse, dominated by new office blocks and expensive department stores.
Stretching south from the Jewish quarter to Checkpoint Charlie, Friedrichstrasse has been the backbone of Berlin since it was built by the Prussian king, Frederick William I, 200 years ago.
The street became the commercial centre of Berlin during the 19th century and by the 1920s it was also the hub of cafe society, boasting more theatres, music halls and cabarets than any other street in the city.
The most impressive new building on the street is Jean Nouvel's curved glass-fronted Galeries Lafayette, a branch of the Parisian department store that opened in a blaze of publicity earlier this year.
Less than six months later, the store is reporting disappointing sales figures amid rumours that the manager is about to be sacked and a near mutiny from staff over late overtime payments; not the best omen, perhaps, for the future of Friedrichstrasse as the commercial hub of the new Berlin.
