Berlin: Broken, Brash and Beautiful

Text and photos by Matthew le Cordeur.

Berlin. The old Jewish quarter. Winter. Bottle-blonde and self-tanned prostitutes of homogenous nature line Oranienburger Straße just before midnight, their pimp quarrelling with a drunk customer about the lowest-going rate. It’s Valentine’s Eve and business is dead.

Twenty years have passed since one people, divided by an unjust wall, tore it down in search of unification. Here on business for the Berlinale Film Festival, I am seduced by the darkness of this city. Built as a capital by Prussian kings and kaizers, Berliners have sought greatness time and again, but each time their dreams have been shattered. What remains is a lost city. One that is still trying to get to grips with its past.

I wonder about those dreams that were lost as a destroyed people spent years separated by the Berlin Wall. I think about their guilt of being a part of Adolf Hitler’s fantasies. There is a feeling that Berliners are still going through purgatory. There is a subtle mood that lingers around that makes me feel that they don’t want it to change.

It is hard to tell if all Berliners have found that common ground of unification since the wall came down, because today this city is a melting pot of cultural activism and thought. The serious nature of the film festival reveals that with all its socio-political movies. So too does walking the streets. They reveal the city’s vibrant cultural atmosphere, with its magnificent graffiti and juxtaposed buildings of different eras.

“We don’t do it here, on the street, you know? We have very nice rooms,” one woman says to me in a thick Eastern European accent. “You are so good looking, you shouldn’t be alone tonight.”

Her money belt strapped on top of her corset, the smooth-talking prostitute is standing outside the Neue Synagogue in Berlin Mitte, which was miraculously the only temple not to get destroyed by the Nazis or the Allied forces.

She seems quite persistent with her request and I could say, “Sure, Valentine’s Eve sex here we come”. Or I could say, “hell no”, and walk on by? Perhaps I’ll do what Gael Garcia Bernal does in Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth, which screened the night before at the Frederick Straße Palast a few metres away.

It took a mammoth of effort to watch and, although some Berlin audiences booed the film, it was superbly beautiful in its painful examination of abandonment. In one of the sub-plots, Bernal’s character paid a Filipino woman a fortune to go home and be with her son, but instead she looked for him, to be with him.

I think I’ll avoid all those options. Politely, I smile and squeeze past her to face the rest of the gauntlet.

Anyway, I hadn’t come down here in search of a plastic-looking Valentine. Earlier in the evening I had found myself at I Due Forni, an Italian cantina-style pizza restaurant decorated in revolutionary memorabilia and scribbled all over by famous punk musicians.

The Italian waiters were brash and hurried. I would only be served if I promised to eat and get out in an hour, because there were reservations for then. I was led to a 10-person table, which I had to share with other diners. I chose the “Incredible” pizza, with ham, walnuts, parmesan cheese, and fresh rocket on top. The pizza, as well as the loud bustling atmosphere was … incredible.

The restaurant is a place Andy Warhol would’ve eaten at when he came to Berlin, which he did a few times. Perhaps even his muse and film legend Joe Dallesandro (pictured right in Berlin) would have joined him. I’d seen him just the other night, at the opening of his autobiographical documentary, Little Joe. Now 60, the years have taken its toll on his once famed beauty. The film shows footage from his days in the Factory in New York where he acted – mostly in the nude – for Warhol and Paul Morrissey. When he wasn’t acting he was Warhol’s “personal body guard”. After the screening at the International Palast near Alexanderplatz, Dallesandro told us that not much art-making went on in the Factory. “I think Andy [Warhol] felt the same way. If someone commissioned him to do piece, he’d do it jokingly in a few seconds and get thousands for it.” Little Joe is a great for posterity, but the lack of other voices makes it slightly weak. “You can make another version of this when I am dead, then you can interview who you like,” said Dallesandro.

The arrival of yet another diner to the table, a former eastern German called Dr Uli Maier, made the meal a memorable one. Swapping stories, he told me he headed the prosthetic section of the city hospital. Maier shared his love for Berlin’s diverse subcultures and talked about his time cycling around the capital taking photos of people and places.

“I find myself often riding out to the Winterfeldmarkt on Saturdays,” he said as he drank wine out of a small glass goblet. “The people are interesting there and the quality of food is really good.”

He told me of all the fascinating places that Berlin’s nightlife has to offer, including a drug-infested club he discovered pounding away at 3 pm one Sunday afternoon. “I love taking friends on my own tour of Berlin,” he told me. “There are so many interesting places to see.”

It is the mystique with which Maier spoke of Kunsthaus Tacheles that intrigued me the most and he told me to visit the place after dinner. “But be careful of pick-pockets,” he warned. “Also, the prostitutes along the way are quite pushy.”

I had been warned.

Passing the last seductress, who is being interrogated by an aging Berlin businessman, I approach the Tacheles, which stands in all its glorified destruction. Fearing nothing and expecting anything, I step within the main archway of the old Friedrichstadt-Passage.

Beyond the intriguing graffiti and impressive but crumbling archway is a squatter camp or hippie village - an artist’s paradise. Steel sculptures crowd a large tent that is filled with tourists and artists. In one corner sits a caravan that has been gutted and turned into a cinema. Outside a dark shack pulls me closer. As I get inside, I find myself in a type of bar. It is one in which the occupants seem stuck, trapped in a bohemian paradise.

I am a tourist in this fantasy. I know that much. There are local artists, but they’re hard to point out. There are also people who want to be locals and who try very hard to act that way. I leave the bar and I hear blends of sounds from punk to metal ring out from the different levels of the building above. The mystery of the place is certainly real.

Once a huge shopping centre built in 1907, the Tacheles (slang for "bringing to an end" in Yiddish) is now a mere a shell of a building. During the last century, it served as commercial outlets and then as the SS headquarters during Nazi rule. Adding to its rich history is that it held French prisoners of war. During the Battle of Berlin it was bombed extensively, but the solid archway remained and the building was used as a storage facility during the Cold War.

Due to a lack of upkeep over decades of war and communist rule, East Berlin authorities began destroying one of its great ruins in the eighties. In February 1990, authorities planned to destroy the rest of the building, but a group of artists occupied it and refused to let it be erased from the fabric of Berlin's history. Since then, Tacheles has been turned into a formal creative space and has attracted internationally acclaimed artists, who have exhibited and performed within the many venues of the shaky ruins.

Because of its cult status, the Tacheles is now a key tourist venue for daring foreigners and, as I enter the building, I hear a cacophony of different languages. Somehow the locals know I’m English.

"Do you want ganja?" a dealer casually asks as I climb up the colourful stairs. "No? How about some cocaine?"

Tourists, drunkards and artists create shadows in the corners of this dark building and the thought comes to me: Do things ever get ugly in this enclave of apocalyptic freedom? The thought inspires another. I need a drink.

The bar on the top floor seems like it is missing a wall, letting in the crisp winter breeze. I climb over a worn-out couch, where young teens nibble at each other's lips, to get to a small bar in the corner. A beer at last. I drink it fast and furious, needing a measure of merriment to make the place more comfortable.

Instead, I have a flashback to The Dust of Time by Theo Angelopoulos, which I had watched earlier that day at the Frederick Straße Palast, which I can see through the broken wall. Willem Dafoe, who I had heard earlier in the day at a talk, starred in the film. Intrigued by his spontaneous decision to act in the film after he bumped into Angelopoulos at another film festival, I felt I had to see it. It’s hard not to find this director’s film’s slightly boring in its excruciatingly slow, but poetic rhythm, but it’s a film that sits with you afterwards, lingering, bothering, and probing you to think more. My flashback is from a scene where the daughter of Dafoe’s character is found, having run away at the start of the film. She is at the top of a deserted building filled with vagrants who call the place their home. Standing on a window ledge about to kill herself, the teenager looks like she could be in the Tacheles standing in front of me. And that scares me just a little.

I don’t feel it now, but there is a possibility I am experiencing a dying institution. The building isn’t called “brining an end” for nothing. There is always a cloud of anxiety, of mistrust, of uncertainty that hangs over the crumbling masterpiece. The artists’ 20-year lease on the building expired a month before I was here. The owners could decide to lay this insane dream to bed and create something more economically and aesthetically pleasing for the benefit of the neighbourhood.

I leave the Kunsthaus Tacheles feeling enriched. There is a magic within these walls that has changed many person’s view on the world. People of all types have seen exhibitions, shows, gigs and films that have opened their eyes to a new meaning of how to live. And the history of the building itself – it’s resilience against all odds – is one of adaptability and courage. If this building can last two world wars - and a cold one with a divisive wall - and still emerge as a cultural landmark, imagine what each one of us can do.

The Tacheles is a microcosm of Berlin, where ageing and dysfunctional activism is cool, but is always under threat from the broader economical players in a place that so wants to move on with its life, to mature into a typically boring European city. Let’s hope Berlin and this fine piece of postmodern calamity can outlast such threats.