The snow don't fall softly here - it falls like monsoon rain, obliterating everything and everybody. In the west of the city this isn't such a bad thing. It thankfully covers so many gaudy, neon fast-food advertisements (a Zipperburger? - nein danke). Once you pass through what remains of the Anti-Fascist Protection Cordon (that's "The Wall" to you decadent and bourgeois lot) into the east of the city, it's not such a good thing as the "white rain" has covered the Stalin-meets-Bauhaus architecture of the mightily impressive Karl Mark Allee.
Deeper and deeper into the east, we fetch up at a vast, underground velodrome that is thronged with thousands upon thousands of denim- and leather-clad adolescent males who are head-banging with military precision, playing air guitar as if it's about to go out of fashion (which it already has, but never mind) and aiming irony-free "devil horn" salutes at the band on stage. You'd be forgiven for thinking you'd just crossed the icy, gothic threshold of an "Uber Thrash Metal Convention" but take another look at that "band" on the stage. It's not a band at all - it's the Berlin Symphony Orchestra (top of the pops in the classical world, I believe) being conducted by the Julliard-trained Michael Kamen. Yikes!
Chill out, though, for in front of those men in suits blowing into unfeasibly large metal objects and running a bow over what look like tiny shaped guitars that they balance on their necks (technical term: violin), stand (or rather slouch menacingly) the figures of James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich and Jason Newsted. Collectively known as Metallica, they're from the US and are the biggest rock band in the world, courtesy of 65 million albums sold. Impressed? You'd better be.
Metallica vs. The Berlin Symphony Orchestra is tonight's live bout and, so far, they're just about equal on points. Every big orchestral flourish and full-on symphonic blast from the besuited men in the red corner is matched by a sturm und drang metal racket from the young contenders in the blue corner. It's not until the metallers hit into Nothing Else Matters and Enter The Sandman that their bulldozer riffs win the day and they're carted off victorious by a group of young men who have evidently just wandered off the Spinal Tap stage set.
Metal vs. Classical has a long and not so honourable past - it's usually just a bunch of classical heads putting their own high-brow spin on some horrific Deep Purple tracks and hoping people will buy the resultant cachophony for the sheer novelty of it. Tonight, though, it's different - Metallica and the Berlin S.O. are playing live together, running through the metallers' greatest hits.
The whole crazy idea was thought up earlier this year when Metallica, who have "consistently dared to fail" as they put it themselves, teamed up with San Francisco's Berkeley Community Theatre - a gig which went so well that it has just been released as a live album. During the summer, they reprised the experience with an orchestra in New York in another brace of sold-out gigs and tonight they're doing their only classical-enhanced gig in Europe.
It's loud, bloody loud (as Metallica always are) and the lush arrangements going on behind them serve to draw a poignancy out of the music that wasn't readily noticeable before.
"I think the orchestra were considerably freaked out," says Metallica man Jason Newsted after the show. "I mean, we are as loud as f**k and we only play from memory, whereas those guys all play from paper - I couldn't play from paper if my life depended on it. We both made serious compromises during the rehearsals for the gig. We were educated in the school of Black Sabbath and they were all trained in music theory at the best music schools. But the whole idea of playing our songs with an orchestral backing is not supposed to be us against them, it's us with them," he says.
Would it be patronising to ask if the members of Metallica knew that much about classical music before these collaborations? "Oh no, we all had a big appreciation of classical before this all started," says Newsted. "You have to learn to listen to music differently and certainly I would have listened to a lot of Mozart, Bach and Wagner in the past. I hope some of our fans do, I hope they're open-minded like that.
"There are so many cool orchestras and so many cool dudes in the classical world. I would like to think that, as much as Metallica have learnt a lot more about classical music from playing with people like the Berlin S.O., they too have learnt from playing with us. We were constantly warning them beforehand that our music would probably sound insanely loud and aggressive to them and their music would probably sound really quiet to us. But that wasn't the case - they can really rock out when they want to. Maybe we'll both hear things and play things differently in future."
If any of today's rock bands were going to take the classical route - and release the ensuing sound on record - it was only ever going to be Metallica. They may be heads-down, sleeves-rolled-up, white-bread rock'n'rollers, but there's always been something in their attitudinal makeup which dares them to go places from which other rock/metal bands would invariably recoil.
Formed in 1980 and influenced by acts such as Motorhead and Saxon, Metallica succeeded largely without MTV or radio exposure but with an uncompromising approach to their music. By expanding out of the confines of riff-heavy speed and thrash metal, they imbued their sound with a rare sense of composition, adding complexity and depth at almost every turn. After 10 years in the metal underground, they crossed over with the release of Black Album in 1991 - it sold 10 million copies in the US alone.
Their die-hard fans (metal die-hards) accused them of "selling out" and took particular umbrage to the fact that in 1996 the band decided to cut their hair short and appear on the Lollapalooza tour (which is very much an alt.rock tour as opposed to a metal rock tour - the two camps don't get on).
Newsted is unrepentant: "It's probably quite a good thing that certain people don't like us. People should know by now that we're never going to take the easy option and that we'll always be doing challenging things with our music. In fact, the next thing I'd like to do is to come up with a new genre of music called `Heavy Hop' where you would have the heaviest players (like us) and the heaviest rappers doing the singing - people like Ice Cube, Dr Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg.
"I think that what people like DJ Shadow are doing now is amazing, all that bass and theremin sound. I went to record with him in the studio once - he had 300 records with him and I knew only two of them."
No fears, though, that Metallica will turn into a full-on drum'n'bass outfit - whatever they do in the future will be undercut by their trademark metal sound. Speaking of which, how do the band feel about so-called "extreme" music being blamed for the tragic events in US schools this year when innocent lives were lost to teenage gunmen. And, in a similar vein, how do they feel about reports that US bombers played Metallica albums in their cockpits in order to get "juiced up" as they flew over Iraq during the Gulf War?
"Well, just on the Gulf War story - I don't like it at all, especially when it involves killing innocent people. Maybe those bombers did listen to Metallica as they went on their mission, but people driving their Chevvys in Ohio listen to Metallica too," he says. "As regards blaming this sort of music for the tragic events in US schools, I just want to say that, when these commentators throw rocks at my livelihood and my passion, I reserve the right to reply. Instead of pointing a finger at music, why don't these people look at the breakdown of the church, the breakdown of families, and the examples being set to young people by adults.
"Take a look at the leaders of the world who bomb, shoot and kill in the name of peace or religion. The average person today, by the time he or she is 18 years old, will have seen around 40,000 simulated murders on video games.
"People need someone to point the finger at and the easiest thing is to point it at an emotional and expressive art. We're popular, so we can be attacked. Parents see their children wearing Metallica T-shirts and hear them playing our music. But how can you hold `aggressive' music responsible for people shooting other people. How can you hold music responsible for anything?"
Metallica's S&M (Symphony and Metallica) is out this week on the Universal label