New walls

Scene stealers: many Berliners feel the revamping of certain areas is turning their city into a refuge for the rich

Twenty years after it was toppled, the area around the Berlin Wall is becoming a battle­ground again. In the streets neighbouring Berlin’s Todesstreifen – the once heavily guarded “death strip” on the east side – a new conflict is brewing. This time, it is between wealthy newcomers to the German capital’s regenerated core, and less monied residents, who fear being displaced.

Silvia Kollitz, an anti-development activist, is a resident of Prenzlauer Berg, a once dilapidated but now chic district of east Berlin. She feels her local area, with its pretty, tree-lined streets and sleek cafés, is being turned into a refuge for the rich. “The new buildings being put up are just for people with lots of money – who don’t use state schools and look at the rest of us as ‘local colour’ from behind their locked gates and high walls,” she says.

While Kollitz and fellow activists are seeking to halt these changes, they are fighting a strong tide. For the first time since the second world war, Berlin is attracting the international wealthy. Shaking off its gloomy cold war past, the city’s rebuilt centre is now packed with designer emporia, five-star hotels – Berlin has more than New York – and restaurants, sandwiched between Prussian palaces and new ministry buildings.

Unemployment remains high in Berlin’s poorer suburbs – and throughout eastern Germany – but the old city core is vibrant, proving a magnet for entrepreneurs and media, advertising and IT companies. With the upcoming launch of a branch of the exclusive Soho House members’ club, the new elite will finally gain its own meeting place, located in a once bleak but now buzzing strip of Mitte.

Though property speculation has cooled during the recession, Berlin is still luring international buyers. Properties in east Berlin’s central districts and the grand east German suburb of Potsdam are still hugely sought after. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, one of Hollywood’s premier couples, bought a 6,500-square-foot penthouse in east Berlin recently.

The city’s revamp sits rather at odds with its sombre image as a historic battleground and counter-cultural stronghold. Even the German capital’s plushest quarters are gritty compared with London’s Chelsea or Paris’s 16th arrondissement.

While Berlin’s cityscape of faded Belle Époque tenements, brutalist communist relics and flashy, glass-clad new-builds is distinctive, its luxury shops and elegant hotels are never far from graffiti and vacant lots. An exclusive restaurant such as the Mitte district’s Fischers Fritz, for example, is barely a kilometre away from Koepi, a massive, squatted apartment building still holding out against developers. Why exactly would such a rough-edged place attract the wealthy?

Even the rich, it seems, can grow bored of a plush neighbourhood like New York’s Upper East Side, and crave something a little less static. While the atmosphere and appearance of Paris or Rome change little over time, Berlin is still reinventing itself, powered by a dynamism that makes other European cities feel stuffy.

“A third of the city’s population has changed since the wall came down,” says Andreas Stahlmann, a Berlin property developer. “So many people and buildings here are new; it’s a melting pot you can’t find anywhere else in Germany, or even really in Europe.”

More than 1m residents have arrived in the past 20 years, often filling spaces left by suburban drift and departing easterners. This huge population exchange has opened doors of opportunity. Large swathes of east Berlin have been declared a development zone by the government. Tax rebates of up to 70 per cent of reconstruction costs are offered to anyone renovating properties, making flats in the area’s handsome streets a doubly attractive investment.

Especially popular among the wealthy are Stahlmann’s penthouses – bright, new, open-plan spaces made by combining and revamping the roof spaces of old tenements. “The market is still going up, as many people want to move to this area,” he says.

Reasonable living costs combined with a footloose, outward-looking population have made the city attractive to start-ups and new media businesses. Dirk Weyel, chief operating officer and founding partner of Frogster Interactive, an online computer games company, is especially positive about Berlin’s working conditions, having helped build a company with 125 staff in just four years.

“The main attraction for us is that there is a large pool of educated workers here, with lots of independent-minded people [who are] used to working freelance on a project basis,” he says. “Prices may be rising, but Berlin’s still quite an affordable and diverse place when you compare it with other cities in Germany.”

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Nevertheless, many Berliners resent the way the city is changing. The leftwing anarchist communities, which set up headquarters in the east of the city following German reunification, now find their “occupied houses” [squats] threatened by development.

But the battle for the city’s soul is not just between the haves and have-nots – increasingly it is the middle class that is fighting encroachment by the wealthy. Kollitz, for example, works for the World Food Programme, and the anti-development coalition she belongs to is populated with media workers, academics and business people. Now that middle-class families are being outbid for flats by wealthy incomers, these first-wave gentrifiers are falling victim to the same trend they began.

While there is a certain irony to their position, their concerns are often justified. The CarLoft development, for example, offers flats at up to €1.6m ($2.4m) in Kreuzberg, a central Berlin district that, in spite of its grand old houses, remains one of the city’s poorest. It provides a unique way to escape the city’s car-burning spree [see box, right], as the development has a lift that enables residents to park their cars on their balconies.

While the burning of cars and anti-construction protests have so far failed to alter the transformation of central Berlin radically, they have succeeded in making wealthier residents painfully aware of the friction their arrival has created. Weyel, who lives just a few minutes from the Soho House venue in Mitte, has seen his new BMW vandalised and has even found difficulties hiring a venue locally for a meeting.

“We approached a club near my flat to hire a space for a shareholder meeting, but they turned us down because they said we were too capitalistic,” he says. “My colleagues visiting from western Germany couldn’t believe it.”

Nevertheless, Weyel has no plans to move out of the area. In fact, he expresses a surprising degree of sympathy with his antagonists, sharing their belief in preserving the city’s diversity.

“Berlin has always been a place where it’s not a problem if you look different or live your life in a different way,” he says. “Development is necessary, but that freedom and diversity isn’t something we want to lose.”

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Don’t park your Porsche in Kreuzberg’

To take part in the new favourite sport of Berlin’s anti-capitalist fringe, all you need is a disposable barbecue set, some matches and a fast pair of legs.

The objective is to scare the wealthy away from the old city centre by burning their cars. The rules go like this. First, you single out an expensive vehicle in a gentrifying area – Mercedes are the most popular targets. Then you light the barbecue set, slide it under the car and run.

Making a mark: the car-burning spree in Berlin has led to political debate

Such attacks on vehicles are now so common – there have been more than 200 in the past six months – that some Berliners even use them as a way of gauging whether an area is up-and-coming. The more burnings there have been in an area, the more desirable it must be to the new wealthy.

Incidents have taken place across the city, but as www.brennende-autos.de, a website that maps the city’s daily toll of car burnings, demonstrates, they cluster overwhelmingly in the central districts of Kreuzberg, Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, where the handsome streets of art nouveau tenements have become a battleground between wealthy incomers, poor long-term residents and the first wave of middle-income gentrifiers sandwiched in between.

While some arson attacks may be random acts of vandalism, the locations of many burnt cars, which are in areas of intense gentrification, suggest clear political intent.

With few arrests made, the attacks are proving a headache for residents and police. Last year, when the burning spree had just begun, Dieter Glietsch, Berlin’s chief of police, said: “Don’t park your Porsche in Kreuzberg.” His advice caused outrage among rightwing politicians, who accused him of capitulating to the arsonists.

The burning spree also earned criticism for Klaus Wowereit, Berlin’s charismatic mayor, who some feel is not doing enough to counter the leftist extremists in the city.

But not even burnt-out BMWs, it seems, can halt the embourgeoisement that is turning districts of Berlin into the equivalent of New York’s Brooklyn or London’s Clerkenwell.