Hip Berlin: Europe’s Capital of Cool

A chill wind is blowing through Mitte, the once drab district in central Berlin that is fast becoming hangout central for the world’s creative types. Davide Grazioli, used to warmer climes, pulls his black woolly hat over his head and strides up Kastanien Allee — now dubbed Casting Alley because of all the wannabe film directors and actors who frequent its cafés. Grazioli is an Italian artist whose work includes unraveled embroideries from India and skulls made of organic incense. Three years ago, he moved to Berlin from Milan with his wife and young daughter, and though his German is rudimentary, he’s reveling in the city. This year, he’s branched out into “sustainable fashion,” creating a men’s clothing collection made in Africa from organic cotton and linen colored with vegetable and other gentle dyes. Walking to his spacious studio, in one of Berlin’s countless courtyards, he stops off to admire handmade surfboards in a store, and then heads to his favorite café where a Korean barista makes him a cappuccino that meets his Italian standards. Berlin is “a place for new beginnings,” Grazioli says. “Being in an unfinished place has a huge impact on you. In Milan I wouldn’t have allowed myself to do something new.”

Germany has a lot of fine qualities, but being hip isn’t usually thought to be one of them. Up-and-coming artists, especially ones from abroad, used to flock to London, Amsterdam or New York City rather than Hamburg, Munich or Cologne. As for Berlin, it hasn’t been on the international cool list since Christopher Isherwood lived in the city in the early 1930s and chronicled the demise of its rambunctious culture under the Nazis. If foreigners came to visit, they were hippies, spies, U.S. Presidents or peeping tourists curious to catch a glimpse of communism from a safe distance.

(See pictures of Barack Obama visiting Berlin.)

But two decades after the Wall that cut through Berlin’s heart came tumbling down, the city is once again a happening place, drawing a host of international designers, writers, architects, musicians and visual artists like Grazioli, some just to visit, many to stay. The influx is transforming the city. “Yes, artists from all over the world are now living in Berlin and, some nights, they all seemed to end up on my living-room sofa,” says Jeffrey Eugenides, the American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who lived in Berlin from 1999 to 2003 and goes back every summer. “It’s a much wilder place than New York City. There are all kinds of trapdoors you can fall through. It’s a bit dangerous, but estimable. The dinner conversation is always serious and never about real estate.”

That’s true. While the cost of housing can be an obsession in other cities, Berlin’s plentiful supply of inexpensive pads is a key factor in its appeal. A big overhang of cheap apartments and abandoned factories and warehouses in the formerly communist eastern half has depressed prices throughout the city. Studio space is to be had for next to nothing. Even in Mitte, the center of Berlin’s new Szene, newly renovated apartments rent for less than one quarter of what you’d pay in London. That’s a big draw. But Berlin isn’t just cheap. Some flock there because it is not yet set in brick, stone and concrete, but in the process of redefining itself. Guido Axmann came to Berlin from Oldenburg, near Bremen, and switched from being a doctor to running a consultancy on environmental issues. “[The city] has physical space, but also mental space. It allows you to develop,” he says.

(See a pictorial history of the Berlin Wall.)

Counterculture to Capital
Berlin has always been different. During the Cold War era it was a magnet for young West German gays, punks and pacifists who got out of doing military service by moving there. They remain an important part of the culture: there are still squats in derelict buildings, and a vibrant, semilegal club scene. “The place still has an outlawish feel,” says James Docwra, who works for an agency that books DJs. But in the transition from hippy to hip, some of the anarchy of earlier times has gone, particularly since the government moved from Bonn in the 1990s. Birkenstocks have made way for handmade $400 Trippen boots “that express an individuality not found in the traditional mass market,” as the Berlin company’s founders, Angela Spieth and Michael Oehler, put it. Especially in parts of Mitte, there’s been a mini-invasion of BMWs and Mercedes in smartly restored streets that just a few years ago were pockmarked legacies of communist-era neglect.

In some ways, the city now is the way it used to be. Before World War II, what became East Berlin was the smart center of town. Unter den Linden, a treelined boulevard that was Germany’s answer to Paris’ Champs Elysées, led eastwards from the Brandenburg Gate to an island on the Spree packed with neoclassical museums. Behind that was Mitte and the residential district of Prenzlauer Berg. When the Wall went up, the East went down; fine apartment buildings, many of them damaged in the war, decayed further. Some areas were entirely razed to make way for the Wall and the death strips either side of it. West Berliners moved out into what had been leafy suburbs and the center of commercial life moved west. Now the city’s focal point has shifted back east again, but it’s an evolving process. There are still large areas of the eastern part of town that are filled with hideous communist-era concrete blocks, or just big holes waiting to be filled.

See pictures of modern day Germany.

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Out of this sometimes jarring juxtaposition of old and new is emerging an ethos of environmental correctness; this is a place where seemingly every second grocery store stocks only organic produce in a minimum of recyclable packaging, where new Mercedes owners apologize that they didn’t buy a hybrid, and where the most used adjective is the word sustainable. There’s even an acronym for this attitude, dreamed up by a consultant: LOHAS, which stands for Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability.

Whatever you call it, Christine Mayer has tapped into the zeitgeist brilliantly. She’s a professional theater costume designer who made herself a jacket out of a recycled army tent. Someone tried to buy it off her in the street, and her retail clothing business was born. She purchases old Swedish army tents and NATO navy sweaters in bulk, and then cuts and tailors them into a range of jackets, pants and coats. Upscale boutiques from Hong Kong to Zurich stock her gear. In her own store in the heart of Mitte, stylized photos of sullen models look down at the rows of clothes, which next spring will include dresses made of recycled dishcloths. “There are a lot of creative labels here, so you don’t stick out like a colorful chicken,” Mayer says.

(See a TIME Video on “A GPS Tour of the Berlin Wall.”)

That sort of artsy fashion, plus the underground music scene, plus 170 museums and a host of renovated monuments have all helped fuel a surge in tourism. The fact that discount airlines like easyJet have made Schönefeld Airport, in the former communist East, their German hub has also given the city a boost. The number of visitors from abroad is up 2.5 times since 2003. Just as dramatic is the influx of foreigners moving to Berlin to live — they now make up almost 1 in 7 of its 3.5 million inhabitants. The number of non-German Europeans living in Berlin has more than doubled since 2003. There are now more of them than Turks, who long made up the largest contingent of foreigners. In Mitte, almost 30% of the population comes from abroad; before the Wall came down, the only foreigners were a smattering of East bloc diplomats. The new arrivals are literally rejuvenating Berlin’s population: unlike the Germans themselves, whose birthrate is among the lowest in Europe, the foreigners are either bringing their children with them, or having them there. Mitte has the largest proportion of children under the age of 6. And that’s not counting Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who show up from time to time with their gaggle of kids in tow.

Diversity, Mother of Invention
Toh Peng Sun arrived from Singapore via Antwerp. He’s a fashion designer, and he now lives in a light-filled apartment along one of the city’s many canals. “Suddenly I could breathe,” he says. “This is a whole city of people who don’t fit in anywhere else.” Sun is still trying to figure out his own niche. He’s been working with his sister on plans for a brand he’s calling “Fashion for World Peace,” though so far, it’s just a logo and a promotional video. Watching him develop ideas is a professional business coach sent by the city to help Sun get his new brand off the ground. Berlin isn’t rich — in fact it has a massive budget deficit — but it still spends lavishly on culture, including financing three separate opera houses. The city government is trying to encourage local start-ups, especially in the fashion industry. The authorities are thrilled by Berlin’s new allure. “Our image here is completely decoupled from that of the rest of Germany,” gushes Christian Tänzler, the spokesman for the tourism office.

(Read: “Why the Berlin Wall Came Down.”)

Developing Berlin without destroying its sometimes still subversive culture is a difficult balancing act. The city doesn’t have set nightlife hours, so bars and clubs can open and close their doors whenever they like. That means Saturday nights usually start around midnight and at some of the best-known clubs — such as Berghain, which Britain’s DJ Mag this year named as the world’s best club — keep going until the following afternoon. There’s always a risk that gentrification will spoil the vibe. One of the biggest haunts in the early 1990s was Tresor, a subterranean space near Potsdamer Platz. The club shut down when the area was turned into a giant shopping mall. The Love Parade, an annual techno festival that drew as many as a million people to the streets of Berlin every summer, took place for the last time there in 2006 because of a dispute over who should pay for picking up the mounds of trash. “There’s a difficult relationship between the city and the club scene,” says Michael Matuschek, who worked as a DJ at Tresor during its glory years. But the clubbers can and do get their revenge: Matuschek says several promoters specialize in throwing illicit parties wherever they can.

The Leisure Principle
It’s 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon, and Davide Grazioli is sitting in a café with an Italian friend, Adalberto Andorlini, a producer who designs conferences. Tired of Milan, he and his family flew to Berlin and fell in love with it. “The kids didn’t want to go back to Italy,” Andorlini says. Life is very different from the pressure-cooker atmosphere he was once used to. “Here there’s a community of people with a lot of free time to see one another,” Andorlini says. “In Milan if you’re not working at 8 p.m. you’re not successful. I feel like I’m on holiday.” The conversation quickly turns to comparisons. “Berlin is like Paris in the ’30s,” Andorlini says. “It’s a place where artists gather and things spring out of nothing.” Grazioli isn’t so sure. “It’s more like New York in the ’60s,” he says. “All those abandoned lofts in SoHo.”

(See a TIME video on the the words — and deeds — that brought down the Berlin Wall.)

It’s an intriguing discussion, without an obvious right answer. But the fact that it’s even a topic of kaffeeklatsch in a trendy café on a Tuesday afternoon is just one more sign that Berlin is back.

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See pictures from 1989.