# Berlin: The City Where Anything Goes > Discover what makes Berlin so magnetic: a place where history and modern life blend into a one-of-a-kind atmosphere of freedom and creativity. Get to know the city. - URL: https://langandtrip.com.ua/en/article/berlin-misto-de-mozhlyvo-vse/ - Language: en - Published: 2024-07-09 - Categories: Culture, Historic Sites, Museums, Germany, Parties, Events --- Burlesque dancer Anya Pavlova unclasps her sparkling bra, tosses it aside and turns to face the roaring crowd. Inside the sweltering Hoochie Koo club, the temperature climbs another couple of degrees. A pair of feather fans conceal her nearly bare chest as she keeps dancing. Eventually even those are cast aside, and with a smile on her face the act reaches its climax. This is a typical night in Berlin, a place where, as Pavlova puts it, anything goes. As the summer sun sets over the city, it really does feel that way. Crowds pour into nightclubs like the ultra-hip Berghain or the bondage-and-erotica-themed KitKatClub to sweat and dance to some of the hottest techno on the planet. ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-29-1-2024.jpg) Long past midnight the next morning, they scatter through the streets, either heading to bed for a short rest before the next party or carrying on with the fun until night falls once again. This is nothing new. Burlesque dancers were stripping off on stage back in the 1920s and 30s, part of a scene that inspired the musical "Cabaret." Berlin's hedonists, who party from dusk till dawn, have always found a place for their entertainment, whatever form it takes. ## An Existential Crisis Apart from the grim years when the Wall split the city into the communist East and the capitalist West, and, of course, the even grimmer years of Nazi rule, laid-back Berlin has always been a city that knew how to enjoy life. It has also long lived a double life. While the city revels in its countercultural reputation, Berlin has a deeply square side too. It serves as the capital of Europe's most powerful economy, a federal bureaucracy with a reputation for stability and a passion for avoiding risk. Visiting Berlin? Insiders share their tips This coexistence is what makes Berlin such an intriguing city to visit, but how does it manage to keep such a split identity? Can its bohemian nature survive as hipsterization drives up the cost of living? And will it withstand Germany's broader existential crisis brought on by record numbers of migrants and asylum seekers who now call the country, and Berlin in particular, home? To understand how Berlin evolved and how it keeps reinventing itself in the face of repeated crises, you have to dive into its very turbulent history and meet the people who now embody its diverse and untamable spirit. ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-29-2-2024.jpg) "Berlin is not Germany," says Esra Rotthoff, a photographer who, as the daughter of a Turkish mother and a German father, is perhaps the most Berlin of them all. "It has always been different from the rest of Germany." Unlike other Germans, she says, Berliners tend to steer clear of materialistic ambitions. Rotthoff would know. She is an artistic associate at the Maxim Gorki Theater, a downtown venue named after the Soviet author and known for its political productions. The theater's walls are lined with the impassive faces of actors photographed by Rotthoff. "It's more about what you bring to the city in terms of concepts, maybe as an artist, or in terms of ideas," she says. "That's my sense of it. It's the general culture... probably." ## Living for Today ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-29-3-2024.jpg) One of those bringing artistic talent is Peggy Gou, a DJ of Korean heritage who made Berlin, the techno capital, her home three years ago. She is one of the latest wave of creative millennials flooding into a city now considered the pinnacle of European cool. "When I moved to Berlin," Gou says, spinning vinyl in a corner of the fashionable Soho House Berlin club, "I remember I was out on the street. I was trying to ask some questions, but I didn't meet a single person who was actually from Berlin!" For Gou, Berlin became an education. Working in a record shop and hitting techno clubs like Berghain, she mastered her craft. Now she is a fairly well-known DJ who earns decent money performing all over the world. The city's most important lesson? No surprise for a place that has lived through two world wars and the isolation of the Berlin Wall, it's the hedonistic mantra of "live for today." "Berlin made me realize you need to be in the right place, for the right DJ, the right crowd, the right sound system," she says. Berlin's attractions: The best places to visit in Germany's captivating capital But from the cutting edge of fashion, Gou senses change on the way, as money pours into her adopted home, professionalizing what was once an underground scene. "Three years ago I was like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm learning so much, I'm trying so many things, I'm still new to the city,'" she says. "But now, when people ask me, 'Do you like living in Berlin?', I answer, 'I like living in Berlin because I'm not there all the time.'" Admittedly, three years is a long time for this city. It is barely recognizable compared to the place that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a gray communist bloc on one side and a garish island of capitalism full of spies on the other. So much so that it is often hard to believe the events that took place here so recently. ## Orderly Chaos Relics of that era are still scattered across the city: Checkpoint Charlie, the TV tower and stretches of the Wall, such as the graffiti-covered East Side Gallery. In the heart of the city the Brandenburg Gate, once riddled with bullets and hidden behind the Wall, now proudly stands as a symbol of unity. Overlooking the gate towers the luxurious Hotel Adlon Kempinski, which Nazi leader Adolf Hitler disliked for its international clientele and which fell into neglect under communist East German rule, now reborn once more. Britain's Queen Elizabeth stayed twice in its modern presidential suite. So that no one forgets the darkest chapter of Berlin's recent history, just a few steps from the Brandenburg Gate lies the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a somber and haunting 4.7-acre site covered with a grid of gray concrete slabs. ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-29-4-2024.jpg) Built in 2005 by architect Peter Eisenman, it drew criticism from those who feel its blocks dehumanize the depravity of the Holocaust. Critics also say it fails to adequately answer how and why these victims died. But walking through the oppressive center of this memorial, taking in its size and scale, visitors can gain a fleeting sense of the orderly chaos created by the Nazi machine as it set about, from its seat of power in Berlin, exterminating millions of men, women and children. Berlin is certainly not afraid to confront its past. In the upscale suburb of Wannsee, where locals escape the summer heat by swimming and sunbathing around an idyllic lake, a rather grand mansion has been open to the public since 1992 as yet another monument to the horrific crimes of the Nazis. On January 20, 1942, the villa, now known as the House of the Wannsee Conference, hosted a meeting of 15 Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich, who gathered to discuss their plans to exterminate 11 million Jews across Europe. ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-29-5-2024.jpg) The chilling detachment with which they contemplated mass murder stands out in the surviving documents from the event, written in the banal language of middle management. Here is Heydrich's opening invitation: "I invite you to take part in such a meeting... which will be followed by breakfast." There is also a record of the discussion, which sets out unambiguously what they wanted. "In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution, Europe will be combed from west to east." ## A Warning from the Past Standing in the very room where the details of the Holocaust were decided, followed by brandy and cigars, it is hard to imagine how these men could plan the destruction of millions of people. The villa's beautiful setting only deepens the incomprehensibility of the scale of their actions. It also raises a question: How can a city recover from such evil? One remarkable woman who can answer that question is Margot Friedlander, a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor who, despite the persecution, torment and loss she endured before and after World War II, chose to return to Berlin in 2010, decades after moving to New York. Friedlander spent a year and three months in hiding in Berlin while the Nazis rounded up the city's Jews, sending many to their deaths in concentration camps. The willingness of non-Jewish Berliners to give her shelter saved her life many times over. ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-29-6-2024.jpg) Despite her age, she is an incredibly active woman, proudly showing off a calendar packed with speaking engagements, mostly telling young people about her experiences in the hope that a new generation will heed the warnings of the past. So why did she come home? In part, as Friedlander explains, because she felt the need to speak on behalf of those who died in the Holocaust, something she writes about in her book "Try to Make Your Life," named after her mother's final words to her as she was taken away by the Nazis. But also because, she says, for all that she went through, Berlin is her hometown, and its people once did everything they could to save her from a terrible fate. "I had a different feeling toward Germany, because I met Germans who did what was very, very forbidden," she says. "It could have cost them their heads. And that was part of my decision to return to Berlin too, because I met good people." "And now once again I have met wonderful people to whom I am very glad to reach out, because they are grateful \[that I\] do what I do, that I came back. And because they say, 'You belong here too.'" ## Bourgeois and Bohemian One consequence of Friedlander's return to Berlin was a recent decision to make her an honorary citizen of the city in recognition of her work. She cheerfully notes that she has lived far longer than previous holders of the title. "Hitler, Goring and Goebbels were honorary citizens too," she says. "And today a Jewish woman becomes an honorary citizen." She adds: "I still love Berlin and I wish I were a little younger, so I could take part in everything." Those "everythings" may or may not include Anya Pavlova's burlesque show at Hoochie Koo, a regular event held at Berlin's Roadrunner Rock & Motor Club. Pavlova, a Russian who moved to Berlin in 2017 to join the city's exotic cabaret scene, speaks eloquently about how the city's different sides get along with one another. In the former West Berlin "you have these bourgeois German grandmothers in furs and pearls," Pavlova says. And a 20-minute train ride away in the former East Berlin, "moms at the playground with tattoos on their necks and dreadlocks... with phones and beer in the middle of the day, while their kids play naked." "They just coexist. They just happen. And they don't really affect each other much, and that's what I find most enchanting about Berlin." Can this coexistence, this winning combination of the bourgeois and the bohemian, this sense of openness, survive as the city keeps gentrifying, prices rise and the world moves on? "Even in the past year I feel the pace is speeding up, more businesses are appearing," Pavlova laments. "But it's still a city where anything goes."