Pines Finding Your Feet in Berlin

A Guide to Making a Home in the Hauptstadt
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-3-95723-700-2
Verlag: Berlin Story Verlag GmbH
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

The essential guide for all international Berlin conquerors. Living in Berlin since 2008 New Yorker author Giulia Pines takes you by the hand and tells you what to expect as an expat. Her lively book gives the answers to every existential question regarding: history, official stuff, finding a place to live, learning German, getting around in the city, Berlin with children, work life, shopping, eating, culture, books, and other expat resources. Page through it for inspiration. Lean it to assuage your worst fears and help fuel your dreams. Use it as a companion, but don't assume that it possesses the power to dictate exactly what your experience of moving to Berlin will be. With 21 photographs by Paul Sullivan.

Giulia Pines was born in New York City, came to Berlin in 2008 and promptly fell in love with the city. Pines has written for Fodors, Time Out Berlin, NPR, Hemispheres, Slow Travel Berlin, Berlin.Unlike, and ExBerliner. She also co-wrote and co-edited Slow Travel Berlin's 100 Favourite Places.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pines, Giulia

Weitere Mitwirkende

Sullivan, Paul

Inhaltsverzeichnis

An Introduction 6
1. Welcome to Berlin 8
2. Berlin's Many Faces 17
3. The Official Stuff 41
4. Finding a Place to Live 59
5. Learning German 75
6. Getting Around in the City 84
7. Berlin with Kids 95
8. Student Life in Berlin 113
9. Work Life in Berlin 123
10. Shopping, Cooking, and Eating 140
11. Free Time and Entertainment 152
12. Expat Resources 169
13. Berlin in Books 176
Conclusion 184

Leseproben

WELCOME TO BERLIN

Much like that famous Winston Churchill quote about Russia, Berlin can often seem like a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” To young first-timers, it may seem impossible that a city this vibrant, this central, and this cosmopolitan could still be so cheap. To those who were born here, or perhaps have lived here for a good portion of their lives, it can be perplexing and somewhat laughable that anyone would care about this place: Berlin, after all, spent much of its life as a somewhat provincial outpost just within the borders of several great empires—before finding itself at the center of 20th century history. To everyone else, Berlin is simply a fascinating and bewildering place that, even in the years since its reunification, somehow seems to live outside the boundaries of normal time and space.

It’s quickly catching up on all counts, though, and visitors these days will find a city both thoroughly wrapped up in itself and embracing of all outsiders, a city where deep construction holes and swiftly rising ultra-modern buildings are just as common as old mainstay neighborhoods that don’t appear to have changed in a century, a city where a student can feel just as at home as an artist, or a high-powered politician, or a retiree, as long as he doesn’t take himself too seriously. The ubiquitous quote from Berlin’s longtime mayor Klaus Wowereit, that the city is “poor but sexy” has probably been used to sell everything from guidebooks to T-shirts by now, but those repeating it often ignore the greater significance of it: it is not the words that Wowereit (or “Wowi,” as he is known to his supporters) chose to use, but rather the fact that he said them at all: that even the mayor of a European capital is comfortable enough with his hometown to label it in such a way, and to be reasonably certain of no resulting backlash. Most would agree with him: Berlin has been penniless for far too long. But like many a penniless artist, its lack of money has forced it to get creative in other ways.

BERLIN IN THE 21st CENTURY

Berlin nowadays is a city still coming into its own, in more ways than one. In 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and only one year after official reunification, the German parliament voted, by an extremely small margin, to make Berlin the capital of reunified Germany. (During the divided years, Berlin had been the capital of East Germany, while the West German capital was moved to Bonn.) Ask many German politicians today, and publicly they’ll tell you that it was a good decision, but privately, perhaps they’re still struggling with it. Although the impressive, modern Regierungsviertel (government quarter) has come to define “new Berlin,” many politicians forced to work there may still long for their genteel homes in the south. In fact, the conventional cliché is that many still have homes there, staying in Berlin only as long as it takes to vote and attend a couple of high-powered luncheons, and then high-tailing it back to the other side of the Rhine. Now, with the addition of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s central intelligence agency, entire city blocks at the northern edge of Mitte, Berlin’s central district, have been overhauled. A barren stretch of the city has now been enlivened with shops, hotels, and cafés, all intended to service a swarm of government agents.

In addition, companies that jumped ship when the Wall went up, abandoning the city after the war for the southern regions that were safer for business interests, are returning. Once again, Berlin is proving itself ripe for business and industry, and nothing has reflected this trend more strongly than it’s emergence as the so-called “Silicon Allee,” the German home of international startups. In just the last five years, Berlin has been flooded with startup offices, some of them the European headquarters of companies that have already found a measure of success elsewhere, others merely German versions of already successful ideas. Most of these companies are relentlessly international, hiring employees from many parts of the world who speak many languages and have decidedly 21st century talents, like coding and social media expertise. In many ways, Berlin is the perfect city for startups, as the Berlin lifestyle and the startup lifestyle fit each other so well: both are laid back, unconventional, and value creative drive and innovation over long but less productive working hours. It’s no great shock that Berlin and Silicon Valley have become fast friends; it’s only surprising that it didn’t happen sooner.

Add to that the fact that every year, Berlin is flooded with students and artists, the former attracted by essentially free educations offered at multiple top universities, technical colleges, and trade schools, the latter lured in by the still relatively cheap rent and the buzz of creativity fueled by it. If a comparison must be made between Berlin and some other city, think of New York in the 80s, minus the crime. The historical explanation for Berlin’s low rents will be discussed later, but suffice it to say, they’ve been enough to give every artist, musician, or writer who might have been discouraged by the cost of living in most other cities a chance at some level of success here. With rents for studios or co-working spaces still only a couple of hundred Euros a month, and living costs still well under a thousand a month depending on the neighborhood, artists can afford to get creative without sacrificing precious time and energy on a boring day job. The dearth of drive, however, and the lack of a true challenge to overcome has its advantages and disadvantages. While some truly embrace the open, effortless lifestyle Berlin provides, others find the lack of outside pressure to succeed dulls their ambition, making it difficult to reach goals, much less set them in the first place. It is as if the entire city, having been bombed to shreds in WWII, has decided to remake itself not once, not twice, but over and over again. And its inhabitants, taking their cues from the city itself, have decided that the best way to live there is simply to follow suit.

It is hard to say whether Berlin attracts a certain type of person, or whether those who move here become that type after a certain amount of time, but as you navigate the neighborhoods and face the faces of this ever-changing city, you’ll find that those who choose to make it their home are of the most unconventional sort. Welcome to their midst; you are now one of them. Berlin today may be the seat of government, it may have several major universities, but really, it is the perfect blend of history and creativity that makes Berlin what it is today: perhaps not just a great 21st century city, but a model for what 21st century cities should be.

BERLIN HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL

Many, if not most, newly-minted Berliners are young enough not to remember the Berlin Wall, and for many of them those tumultuous, heady days when the Wall fell, taking Communism and the Eastern Bloc down with it, are only a vague recollection. So newcomers can often arrive with an embarrassingly limited knowledge of what Berlin was like before they got there. This is a shame, as having some idea of Berlin’s history can be crucial to understanding and appreciating it.

Starting from the beginning would fill a book on its own, but the most relevant recent history, and the story that makes for the most compelling reading, starts towards the beginning of the 20th century. Berlin started right where the city still looks its oldest, at the area where the Spree River parts to encircle Museum Island, where the Nikolaiviertel and the Fischerinsel still charm with their reconstructed period buildings. Two settlements—Berlin and Cölln—merged to form what would first be part of the Margravate of Brandenburg (still the name of the region surrounding Berlin today), then the capital of Prussia, and much later the center of the German Empire.

By the end of WWI, Berlin was still the capital, but it was hanging on by a thread due to overcrowding, lack of coal, and the simple fact that it was at the center of a defeated empire, now no longer a monarchy but a republic—the so-called Weimar Republic. Although the interwar years are the ones Berliners tend to wax nostalgic about (though few are still alive today who could remember them), the Roaring Twenties and the Golden Age they were not, but rather an exuberant, topsyturvy, dangerous world of excess, “divinely decadent” as the inimitable Sally Bowles, star of the Christopher Isherwood novel that would later become the musical , would have it. Here, Communists and Nazis clashed in the streets, the value of the German soared, and Jews, homosexuals, Roma people, and other so-called “undesirables” first began to suspect that their world was collapsing. But it was also a whirlwind of creativity, producing some of Germany’s greatest works of art, literature, music, and theater.

Still, high unemployment, exorbitant reparation payments (which caused inflation in the first place, as the German government frantically printed money and borrowed in order to pay back the victorious allies), and a feeling of an old order and a highly prized culture slipping away may have first led the public to vote Hitler: in just a few years, he went from a far right nuisance many assumed would not gain ground to the...

Über Autor(innen)

Giulia Pines was born in New York City, came to Berlin in 2008 and promptly fell in love with the city. Pines has written for Fodors, Time Out Berlin, NPR, Hemispheres, Slow Travel Berlin, Berlin.Unlike, and ExBerliner. She also co-wrote and co-edited Slow Travel Berlin's 100 Favourite Places.