Berlin, layers of History

BERLIN — A QUARTER-CENTURY ago today, the Berlin Wall fell, and since then this city has been on a roll. It’s one of the party capitals of the world and an affordable center for young artists and musicians, with enough layers of history to inspire a novelist for a few lifetimes. And its economy has benefited greatly from a growing start-up scene. In a country dominated by pleasant but boring cities, Berlin is Germany’s one truly cosmopolitan metropolis.

Many of these accomplishments are laid out in “Berlin Now: The City After the Wall,” a recent book by the German author Peter Schneider. He is right in saying that in recent decades no other city “has changed as much — and for the better — as Berlin,” lauding the sense of openness that has drawn immigrants, revived the shattered Jewish population and made the city a magnet for a creative class that is also luring cutting-edge businesses.

All of this is worth celebrating, but to longtime residents like me, the moves that made this possible all ended about 20 years ago. Since then, the city has been coasting, mostly consumed by small-bore issues instead of grasping the chance to become a truly great city. Berlin has tried to make a virtue of being a less polished version of London or Paris — in the words of its departing mayor, “poor, but sexy.” Yet that is more a reflection of a city whose ambitions rarely extend beyond narrow parochialism.

Given what happened during and after World War II, perhaps this isn’t surprising. One of the most dynamic cities of the early 20th century lost its elite to emigration or genocide, and then its infrastructure to saturation bombing and street-to-street fighting. In the aftermath, its great companies fled — Allianz and Siemens to Munich, Deutsche Bank to Frankfurt — while what remained of its middle class went anywhere to escape the rubble and isolation.