By PETER RICHTER

Berlin wants to radiate metropolitan elan, but it’s utterly broke. The largest city in Germany is also the cheapest. Everybody’s moving here, but the population has nevertheless shrunk over the past ten years. The charm of post-industrial debris is the only thing Berlin has to offer these newcomers. Not jobs and high salaries. Just about every important company and bank left after the war and very few have made any plans to come back. At the most, they’ll open up a branch office. There aren’t even any direct flights to the US from the German capital. Every attempt at getting one going has ended as a financial flop. Too few people in Business Class. Maybe that’s what’s symptomatic: no class, just class war.

So Berlin is more like the opposite of a metropolis. There’s a clash between the will and the way things really are. It’s possible that, here at the former pinnacle of idealist philosophy, the ideal will eventually overcome vile realities. But for that to happen, a pretty brutal bouncer policy is going have to be implemented. One that’s primarily about throwing people out. If Berlin is going work as a club, the guest list is going to have to be rewritten completely. Because the real Berlin is perpetually stomping into this Berlin of sheer will and imagination like a Marxist proletarian crashing a gala dinner. We can start right off with the culinary scene. In the city that traditionally sustains itself on fast food specialties such as the Currywurst, the Bulette or the Döner, countless proprietors have opened up locales that either look just like “Wallpaper” or go out of their way not to look like “Wallpaper,” which eventually leads to the same end. They’ve imported more star chefs than any other city in Germany. And a few of them have established quite a media presence unthinkable elsewhere, such as Kolja Kleeberg of “Vau,” for example. These places are sometimes so crammed with pretension you get the feeling you can only order in French. Better not to. Because when it comes to the service, the cosmopolitan flair ends right there, and there’s that familiar Berlin again: either it’s all too much or there’s a fit of prattling bravado, and in the worst of cases, both at once. Service, plain and simple, and discretion are rare. The same goes for many businesses that pass themselves off as international. The prices and personnel often present an immobilizing contrast between high and low. Since the end of the war, Berlin has been completely proletarianized. Social observer Alexander von Schönburg sees this primarily as a consequence of the Nazis’ expulsion and murder of the Jewish upper middle class. Later, the western part of the city would be dominated by bureaucrats, students, conscientious objectors avoiding military service and the retired. A subsidized society generally written off by reunified Germany as an unproductive relic of the Cold War. And the East had always been the poorer, more proletarian part of the city anyway, before the war as well. But after the partitioning of Berlin, a socialist elite arose here and the more bourgeois forces of the opposition in the GDR tended to be located in Dresden or Leipzig. So the problem is the people: they aren’t socially amenable. Where else could a genuine countess, namely, Isa von Hardenberg, earn her money by teaching people manners? The aristocracy has to more or less instruct a raw population yearning to sit at the table of the Berliner Republic how to use a fork and knife. It’s a bit like after the French Revolution. It must have frustrated a woman “with the charisma of a Prussian lake in winter” so much that she now operates a “Relocation Service”: she finds apartments for people with the appropriate amount of style and money, organizes the move, takes care of all the formalities, registers them at all the right clubs and hunts – just so they’ll come to Berlin. So they’ll enrich the Berlin comprised of the countess’s guest list. She distributes the contents of her address book throughout the schedule of important social events. Her criteria seem a bit unclear: “interesting personality and admirable character”. It becomes more clear, though, if you imagine this collection of names as a sort of filter, a social sieve, and take a look at who doesn’t make it through: the Berliners, the old local prominent layer. Little stocky men in bad suits with mustaches. Like Georg Gafron who, as head of a tabloid, a radio station and a television station, carries on the good fight against communism as if the world had forgotten to inform the poor man that the Cold War has been over for a while. He fled the East in the trunk of a Renault. And some say that all of West Berlin was like that Renault trunk, tight, compact and sticky. And when it was opened, there was a balled up little political and cultural personality in there, fearfully looking up and blinking in the bright sunlight. There were politicians and lobbyists with names like Peter Radunski or Axel Nawrocki or Klaus Landowsky who drove half the theater scene, the bid for the Olympics, and finally, the city’s budget into the ground. The only thing big about these little men were their mouths. The “Berliner Schnauze”, they call it. As it happens, it was also the defining trademark of actors like Günther Pfitzmann or Harold Juhnke. Heroes of the petit bourgeois who were, until recently anyway, nevertheless welcome guests at the galas. Not anymore. If the papers still delight in reporting on how much Juhnke has drunk and when, it’s not because it’s particularly suave, but rather, because he’s Germany’s most famous alcoholic. Juhnke’s son, Oliver, is failing to make the grade more and more often as well, having found himself portrayed in the gossip columns nearly every day as an adolescent playboy. His counterpart, the seemingly senile playboy and disco-owner Rolf Eden, is still sometimes passed around as a curiosity, and probably will be until, next to some young girlfriend he’s helped out financially, he finally falls asleep on the most photographed bed in Berlin. Of the old guard, only celebrity hairdresser Udo Walz is still considered satisfactory even though he still brags about having colored Ulrike Meinhof’s hair before she became a terrorist. She was seen as the Most Wanted Woman in the country on countless posters. But not really since her hair was so pretty.

The guest list sieve has to be drawn tighter, and that was made particularly clear at the opening of the Jewish Museum. It was supposed to have been a first-class national event. But there they were, the leftovers of this increasingly irrelevant local scene, and even they had their autograph hunters. It was as if Schultheiss beer had been poured into the champagne. As for the regularly scheduled balls, segregation has come along a bit further. Irina Papst’s Aids gala at the Deutsche Oper, for example, left the stale “Hutparty” thrown by Ulla Klingbeil, wife of a former construction magnate, eating dust like a Stuttgart Porsche leaving behind a VW Beetle with Berlin license plates. Which more or less describes the origins of the guests at each event. It’s possible that a membership in the Friends of the National Gallery is an investment in one’s social future. After all, the director, Peter Klaus Schuster, is a man that makes your run-of-the-mill museum people look like paper clips. For him, it’s not about art, it’s about opera. Or maybe just operettas: long hair, combed back, little round eyes like those of the decadent bankers in the Grosz paintings in his collection and a manner of speaking so drenched in pathos that it turns every exhibition opening into a Wagnerian performance. Naturally, the man comes from Munich, and one can easily imagine him as a future point of crystallization for the educated sector of the chic contingent. He is for the Berlin art scene a bit what Shawne Borer-Fielding is for the diplomatic arena: for purists, a suspicious bird indeed, with loads of social charisma. The equivalent of Schuster’s undeniable competence would, in Borer-Fielding’s case, be her measurements and her titles as Miss Dallas 1993 and Miss Texas 1994. The American blonde is the wife of Swiss ambassador Thomas Borer and a natural eye-magnet alongside the bland representative of a country that sports an even more boring image than Germany does. In Berlin, this passes for exciting and interesting. But perhaps what’s truly interesting is that this calculated breach of etiquette and manners is perceived that way at all. The shrill and outlandish is a necessity the elite from Munich, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf or Hamburg have turned into a virtue along their ways here. As media maven-cum-gallerist Beate Wedekind says, “I love the decadence of the not quite finished yet. A street that stinks of sweat is simply more alive than the smell of a perfumed couple”. They’ve integrated the shrill and the supposedly decadent into the mythos of a New Berlin and it will take them a while to sweat it back out again on their velvet sofas.

At the moment, Berlin is seen as a place for risk-takers who could fall astoundingly higher and higher. Ariane Sommer, for example. An attractive girl known for being attractive and for being known. She was launched as a celebrity in perpetual motion by writer Joachim Bessing. A professional who ghostwrote the autobiography of the above-mentioned celebrity hairdresser Udo Walz and the homage to the legendary Paris Bar where the local hautevolee likes to dine and sip wine. He had a few photos of the beauty run on a double-page spread in the tabloid BZ and wrote the accompanying text: she speaks five languages, is a child of a diplomat and has the terrific manners and connections to match her curves – and she gives tours of night life in Berlin to famous visitors, the likes of Mick Jagger, for example, for a thousand marks a pop. As a VIP for VIPs, in a way. Highly unlikely, however, that Jagger or anyone else ever paid money for such services. Regardless, the strange phantom business was soon enough effectively closed up. Then, as a PR gag for star chef Markus Semmler, Ariane Sommer climbed into a tub full of mousse au chocolat. It was a bet, evidently. And when she reappeared in front of the cameras and the gossip columnists, she was the Aphrodite of PR borne from brown foam. Now she’s the undisputed Berlin party girl. Wherever she is, it’s a party. Wherever she isn’t, there’s no party going on.

At least not really. It’s as if Berlin were a tabula rasa, without a history, upon which one can effortlessly reinvent oneself and the Berlin one would like to live in. Looks that way, but isn’t necessarily so, of course. 90 Grad, the club for which Ariane Sommer used to distribute flyers, was once one of those techno and house locales with a primarily gay clientele when it originally shot up out of the ground in the early 90s. Then, three years ago, the former DJ of a very, very exclusive club came from Hamburg to say that he and a friend had taken over the place and now wanted to do something very, very exclusive with it. And how about coming to the opening with a few beautiful blondes in tow. But as opposed to all the others who tried to create a somewhat expensive and exclusive club for the Berlin late night scene, he actually did it. Because he reinterpreted existing structures. That’s symptomatic for Berlin. The rich and the beautiful attach themselves to the poor and the creative, they copy the night life of the 90s underground, the raves in the abandoned factory buildings, bunkers and all the other odd places of techno ruins romanticism. They try to find similar locations for their own events: old listening stations left over from the Cold War, for example. The place booked most often these days is the subway station next to the Reichstag since that line won’t be built because there’s not enough money for it. The first ruins of the New Berlin. You could call it party mimicry, the way they adjust to their social environment, still thought of as young, anarchic and a bit squandered. But it can only be a matter of time before these women grow tired of carrying their coats to the temporary toilets set up next to run-down locations or having their evening dresses snag on rusty nails. Until they tire of trying to cover their Berlin shabbiness with strained ironic gags, serving it up as a midnight snack of Currywurst made of lobster. The direction of this development might be seen in the deeds of Anna and Anno August Jagdfeld. A financially well-off married couple right at the top of the Berlin social framework. They’ve built the Quartier 206 for luxury shopping, renovated the town of Heiligendamm on the Baltic Sea as a reservation for the truly rich, not to mention the legendary Adlon Hotel, and soon, they’ll open the “China Club” there – for a 20,000 mark membership fee and 3000 marks in annual dues, genuine decision-makers are finally to have a place to chat in peace. Of course, at the moment, that sounds completely absurd. At the moment, it sounds like the megalomaniacal nonsense of two people who evidently think Germany still has a Kaiser and will soon be snapping up new colonies. And of course, it’s really too bad about all the money they’ll be pumping into their project and the best thing would be to have them disinherited, to carefully set them down in wheelchairs and roll them out to Heiligendamm where they can take in the view of the Baltic Sea. But in all likelihood, the Jagdfeld’s are completely on target. And the Berlin they want is a self-fulfilling prophesy. A lot of money and a lot of immigrating high society folk will eventually turn Berlin into a metropolis. But it won’t eradicate the fundamental discrepancy between the words “Berlin” and “metropolis”. Because then you can scratch the word “Berlin”. Berliners, after all, won’t be a part of it.