The Gentrification of Berlin

    Has Berlin been lost to the bankers?  That’s the assertion of the English novelist Philip Hensher.  The city has ‘always been a home for the dispossessed, the alienated, the hard up, the politically engaged and minorities of all sorts,’ he wrote last week in the Independent.  But now – thanks to rising rents pricing low-earners out of the market – ‘Berlin’s purpose is vanishing’.  According to Hensher, the city’s artists, anarchists and drop outs are now looking for a new nirvana.



    Hold on a moment.  Property prices are spiralling in Berlin but from a very low base.  In the days when the Red Army stood ready to invade West Berlin, rent was dirt cheap.  Nikita Khrushchev notoriously called the city ‘the testicles of the West’, boasting that ‘every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.’  His posturing did little to increase property values and West Germans – many of whom paradoxically came to the divided city to avoid conscription into the Bundeswehr – were attracted by low rent and lower taxes.  Even a decade after the fall of the Wall, Berliners paid less than half of the going rate for a similar property in Hamburg.  Today rents in Munich are still about four times higher than those in Berlin.

    But the gap has started to narrow and residents who long enjoyed (one of the few) advantages of potential invasion are grumbling.  Last year in a most entertaining – and totally pointless – manner, members of a group called Hedonist International protested about increasing rents by dancing naked in newly-modernised apartments.  In Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, young men and women pranced around wearing little more than Mickey Mouse masks and calling out 'Die Wohnung ist zu teuer!'  (This apartment is too expensive!)  One gentleman even sported on his posterior the message, 'Mietwucher ist für den Arsch!'



    Then last week thousands of police assembled outside Liebig 14, a former squat-turned-commune in Friedrichshain.  The owner had decided to convert the building into luxury apartments and the residents reacted by surrounding their home in barbed wire and erecting concrete barricades across the entrance hall.

    But to say that Berlin has ‘always been a home for the dispossessed, the alienated, the hard up, the politically engaged and minorities of all sorts’ is an oversimplification.  This city’s dynamism has always depended on the co-habitation of extremes.  History – from the robber barons of the 15th century to the Stasi in the last half of the 20th century - moulded conformity into the majority of residents.  Under the Hohenzollern princes, Berlin became the capital of Absolutism.  Yet it’s human nature that a conformist society produces radicals.  Rebellion grows out of convention – it’s the correlate.  So on Berlin’s stable foundations, built by the steady labours and hidden fears of the dutiful, hard-working burghers, the rebel, the free-thinker, the dispossessed could question, experiment, even dream of nirvana.  Add foreigners into the mix – on average one in seven Berliners has always been an incomer or foreigner – and you have the secret for Berlin’s dynamism.

    So the problem today isn’t with bankers.  The city hasn’t been ‘lost’ to them, as Hensher suggests (not without his tongue in his cheek).  Bankers, entrepreneurs and business people are essential in every capital.  The real danger to Berlin – as to all Western cities - is homogenisation, that this dynamic, mixed and infuriating capital will – because of property prices - become more and more conformist. 

    Perhaps the anarchists, wanabee novelists and rebels (with or without Mickey Mouse masks) will be forced to migrate to the Berlin equivalent of Hoxton or Hoboken.  The city will change but it won’t be destroyed, nor will its purpose ‘vanish’.  Berlin will be what it has always been; a flawed, volatile, conformist and aspirational capital.