FTD-Serie: Texte zu den Business-English-Podcasts
Here you can find the texts for our Business English podcasts and improve your language skills.
Business English: The Prenzlauer Berg transformed
Reminiscing about the old Prenzlauerberg brings realisations of what it has become.We were carrying the photo from 1990. Our friend Connie had taken it with her beautiful East German camera. It shows Ulrich and me, looking absurdly young, posing beneath the Wasserturm, the 19th-century water tower that stands sentry over the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood in East Berlin. In the photo, little East German Trabant cars sit beside pockmarked grey houses. The Berlin wall, a short walk away, had fallen a few months before.
Back then Ulrich and I were students living in Prenzlauer Berg. Twenty years later, a passer-by photographed us in the same spot. The pictures, taken with my iPhone, show a sort of Dorian Gray effect: I now look absurdly old, Ulrich remains his eternal pale gaunt self, but the streets around us have been rejuvenated. The stucco 19th-century apartment blocks, which somehow survived the wartime bombing of Berlin, have been polished to reveal their beauty. The Trabants have given way to bicycles. Through the accidents of history in which this city specialises, the forgotten "Prenzlberg" has become Berlin's prettiest neighbourhood.
I arrived here as a 20-year-old student in 1990, soon after the wall fell. I had rented a room in a grey Prenzlberg building mottled with bullet holes, left by the street-fighting for Berlin in 1945. Nobody here had bothered much with renovations since.
I arrived as a naïf who had absorbed from the western media of cold war days the belief that democracy works magic. Prenzlauer Berg quickly taught me otherwise. Six breadwinners in our building had ceased to work since the wall fell. "I wish they'd put it up again tomorrow," our flirty neighbour told me. My landlord and housemate, a Soviet émigré named Alexei, had little patience with his spoiled western tenant. When I came home teary after another tussle with the Prussian bureaucrats who were barring me from the university because of one missing document, he barked: "When I asked to leave USSR, how many people do you think said 'No' to me?"
"Why did you want to leave the USSR?" I asked. "I didn't like it."
At university I met Ulrich. He was an East German who hadn't wanted to study history in the German Democratic Republic, as that would have been like eating communist ideology every day. After the wall fell, he began a history degree in West Berlin. He lived near me in Prenzlauer Berg. Over a dinner of black bread and sausage in his flat, and many subsequent conversations, he quietly educated me about neighbourhood life in East German times. I still remember some of his stories verbatim. We were not so different, despite having grown up in different universes, and I imagined that had I lived under communism, I might have experienced it much as Ulrich had.
Berlin's special Ks
Kollwitzplatz: One of the loveliest and most cosmopolitan squares in Berlin. Every Thursday afternoon, in keeping with the neighbourhood's reigning ideology, the Kollwitzplatz hosts an "ecological market".
Konnopke's: In 1930, Max Konnopke began selling sausages in night-time Berlin. Eighty years later, a queue forms at mealtimes at Konnopke's little stall beneath the arches of the Eberswalder Strasse underground station. The secret: Konnopke's special ketchup. Order it with Currywurst, a Berlin speciality, for a princely total of EUR1.90. Schönhauser Allee 44a, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, tel: +49 30.4427 765; www.konnopke-imbiss.de. Open 6am to 8pm weekdays, noon till 7pm on Saturdays.
Kulturbrauerei: The spirit of the neighbourhood's young artists of the communist era lives on in this castle of culture. The giant brick complex (25,000 square metres) was built in the 19th century as a brewery, fell into neglect under communism, and was reinvented in the 1990s as an arts centre. Schönhauser Allee 36, Berlin. www.kulturbrauerei-berlin.de. Information, tel: + 49.3044 31 51 52; info@kulturbrauerei.de
A unique atmosphere
He explained that the neighbourhood had been unique in East Germany. Its crumbling back courtyards had been invaded by young intellectuals and artists who didn't so much oppose communism as ignore it. Many Prenzlberger hadn't been allowed to go to university, so they taught themselves. In their way they were recognisable German Bildungsbürger, people who venerated the arts. There was a timelessness to their lives. You could make a career in the GDR but only by compromising, and so most Prenzlberger didn't bother. Instead, they read books, scavenged for records, and visited secret "art galleries" in friends' rooms. It later turned out that the Stasi, the secret police, had not merely known about this samizdat scene but had organised much of it.
Otherwise, the communist nomenklatura mostly stuck to their favourite neighbouring suburb of Pankow - a sort of New Jersey with big lawns - and let the "Prenzlberg" be. And so a microculture thrived amid squalor. Many artists squatted in single rooms. "There were barely telephones," Ulrich reminisced to me recently over dinner in Zander, one of the neighbourhood's chic new restaurants. "People stole electricity. Flats were heated by coal ovens. The toilet was off the staircase, and there was no shower, but I had a sink."
I had barely visited Prenzlauer Berg since 1991, and walking around it with Ulrich recently, nothing looked familiar. The facades, cleansed of brown coal dust, are suddenly luminous. The centrepiece of the neighbourhood, the Kollwitzplatz, is now surely Berlin's best square. In the middle of it sits a statue of Käthe Kollwitz, the Weimar-era sculptor and local resident who curiously resembles a cavewoman. She's surrounded by a playground for Prenzlauer Berg's innumerable children, a forest's worth of trees, and cafés and restaurants of every conceivable ethnicity, even German. The Kollwitzplatz is the Platonic ideal of a European square. It's also become a German byword: to describe someone as "typically Kollwitzplatz" is to evoke a vision of a vegetarian graphic designer with John Lennon glasses on a bicycle with a child's seat.
A few streets away an old brewery, boarded up in communist days, has become a magnificent arts centre, the Kulturbrauerei. The onetime freethinkers' cemetery is now a garden of reflection. I've heard of gentrification. This felt more like time travel.
Wandering around, I gradually grasped that Prenzlberg's luck was to have been ignored by history. Most of Berlin had been destroyed, first by wartime bombs and later by architects of the 1960s and 1970s. But Prenzlberg was only renovated in the 1990s, with the tax money of opulent west Germans.
More variety than sausage
No longer do Prenzlberger live by sausage alone. On the corner of my old street, the Göhrenerstrasse, I sat on the sunny terrace of the Al Hamra café drinking thick Arabic coffee for just EUR2. Next door was a Vietnamese café, and next to that a furniture restorer. On my old building opposite, the bullet holes were gone. I saw my younger self struggling through the front door, wind whistling through the broken windows, coal dust on everything.
The bourgeois bohemians from around western Europe who have colonised Prenzlberg stroll past pushing EUR1,000 buggies, talking of tango lessons. You're almost as likely to hear Spanish here now as the old working-class Berlin accent. One local café has even printed the bourgeois-bohemian creed on its facade: "We love coffee - we present art - we cook - we mix cocktails." Marx was right: "The dominant ideas of every age are the ideas of its ruling class."
Everything in the neighbourhood has changed, and yet a vestige of the old Prenzlberg spirit remains. The new lot may believe in success and branded sunglasses, but they also believe in books and music, even if books and music can never mean as much any more as back when Ulrich listened to Simon and Garfunkel records, learning English and absorbing every word.
Back then Ulrich had planned to become a librarian. It was a way to read fairly freely while the regime ignored you. Instead he now works in a museum dedicated to Germany's horrible past. He and his western girlfriend visit galleries not run by the Stasi, and take eating holidays in Piedmont. I asked him whether the meaning of the old Prenzlauer Berg had been lost. "I miss nothing," he said.
- 1
- 2
-
The Financial Times, 25.03.2010
© 2010 The Financial Times,
Suche in der FTD-Personendatenbank
© 1999 - 2012 Financial Times Deutschland
Aktuelle Nachrichten über Wirtschaft, Politik, Finanzen und Börsen
Börsen- und Finanzmarktdaten:
Bereitstellung der Kurs- und Marktinformationen erfolgt durch die Interactive Data Managed Solutions AG. Es wird keine Haftung für die Richtigkeit der Angaben übernommen!
Über FTD.de | Impressum | Datenschutz | Disclaimer | Mediadaten | E-Mail an FTD | Sitemap | Hilfe | Archiv
Mit ICRA gekennzeichnet
VW | Siemens | Apple | Gold | MBA | Business English | IQ-Test | Gehaltsrechner | Festgeld-Vergleich | Erbschaftssteuer
G+J Glossar
Partner-Angebote
Aktuelle Nachrichten über Wirtschaft, Politik, Finanzen und Börsen
Börsen- und Finanzmarktdaten:
Bereitstellung der Kurs- und Marktinformationen erfolgt durch die Interactive Data Managed Solutions AG. Es wird keine Haftung für die Richtigkeit der Angaben übernommen!
Über FTD.de | Impressum | Datenschutz | Disclaimer | Mediadaten | E-Mail an FTD | Sitemap | Hilfe | Archiv
Mit ICRA gekennzeichnet
VW | Siemens | Apple | Gold | MBA | Business English | IQ-Test | Gehaltsrechner | Festgeld-Vergleich | Erbschaftssteuer
G+J Glossar
Partner-Angebote