Berlin

Almost six years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. Five years ago, Germany was reunified. Four years ago, Berlin was declared capital once again, the parliament to be reinstalled in the old Reichstag in 1995. Still today, the two parts of the city are trying to fit together, and the government remains in Bonn. Berlin is a work in progress, and so great is the task that it is likely to continue for at least two

decades.

Emblematic of this process is the old Checkpoint Charlie, an enduring symbol of the Cold War. During the Wall period 1961-89, this was the main crossing point from allied-controlled West Berlin into Soviet-occupied East Berlin, and the only one which non-Germans were allowed to use. It was the scene of spy swops, of a tank confrontation, of attempted escapes, of high profile visits by US Presidents like Kennedy and Reagan.

Today the Wall has totally gone, the watchtowers too, and merely the East German control booth remains as a memorial. The souvenir sellers of the post-wall period are gone too. Bridging the very point where the crossing stood, a massive real estate hoarding fixed on scaffolding announces the development of "one of Europe's most attractive business addresses". Beyond in former East Berlin, a vast area is under assault by mechanical diggers, cement mixers and cranes.

On the western side, the old Cafe Adler where journalists, intelligence operatives and other wall-watchers would stake out is now a fashionable downbeat rendezvous for the young. A museum called The House At Checkpoint Charlie offers tourists insights into the history of the Wall; odd chunks of it are pinioned to the walls of its self-service cafe. The area is an active inner suburb mix of shops, offices, flats, restaurants, traffic and pedestrians centred upon an U-Bahn subway station.

Proceed through the checkpoint into the old east, past the building site and along Friedrichstrasse, or take an U-Bahn train one stop and emerge at Leipzigerstrasse, and you enter an almost dead world. In pre-war Berlin, these thoroughfares were a focus of activity, main commercial streets lined with shops and businesses, cafes and cabarets. Friedrichstrasse crossed Unter Den Linden, the grand boulevard of old Berlin, and led to a principal railway station thronged with people. By night it was notorious.

Today the heart of historic Berlin is virtually devoid of people or traffic. Bombed and shelled in 1945, declared state property by the GDR regime, the area became a mix of faceless modern reconstruction and neglected old buildings where state employees pretended to work whilst the government pretended to pay them. It is only slowly recovering from that, even while it becomes a sought-after location and land values soar. Roads are under excavation, elegant old buildings are in renovation and glassy new ones are under construction. Friedrichstrasse Station boasts flashy film shops, the revived Metropol Theater offers cheap imitations of London musicals, hot sausage stands punctuate a public square. Signs of life are coming back.

It's all so different across town on the Kurfurstendamm. This modern boulevard is the focus of western Berlin, deliberately developed as a consumerist playground with department stores, boutiques, shopping arcades, neon and fluorescent flashiness.

The Ku'damm (as it is popularly known) scene is centred on the Gedachtniskirche, a church composed of an 1895 belltower which

survived bombing, mixed with postwar structures to create an anti-war memorial. Around this, on a paved plaza between busy roads, gathers a rainbow coalition of young people, including many immigrants. Buskers and actors perform, police in green keep watch. Shoppers pass by laden with bags, many from the KaDeWe, Berlin's shopping Mecca which claims to be Europe's biggest store (though London's Harrods objects).

When you're in this environment, you could be in the shop-till-you-drop heart of any big European city, in London's Oxford Street, for example. Though Berlin is one on paper, east and west still have entirely different styles and souls. Nothing remotely like this exists in the old east. So Ossies (former East Germans) with cash take the rattly old S-Bahn train across town for shopping - whilst Wessies go east for culture, because historic central Berlin is there.

Let's go back east too. Bus 100 is the ideal choice, if you can get a seat, especially on top. This double-decker passes most of Berlin's major places of interest and is therefore a natural for tourists. It starts from Bahnhof Zoo, just off the Ku'damm and next to the excellent Berlin Zoo founded in 1844.

It heads off through the Tiergarten, Berlin's green heart, an oasis of woods, lawns, lakes and canals threaded with paths and cycle tracks. It passes the Siegessaule victory column, topped by a gilded female figure whom Berliners call "Gold Elsie", and a modern US-designed exhibition hall resembling a bulging giant clam which they call "Jimmy Carter's Smile".

Then the grim grey bulk of the Reichstag heaves into view, redolent of Hitler's rise to power, of the evil of Nazi rule, of the blackest years of this century. Dem Deutschen Volke - "To The German People" - is carved disturbingly large on its neoclassical pediment. Avenging Soviet bulletholes scar its facade, despite a renovation. The old parliament is due for big changes aimed to give it a renaissance. After Christo's wrapping of it this summer, noted British architect Norman Foster aims to recreate the discredited edifice in a positive spirit as the new home of the Bundestag (national parliament). Success will be a key element in the psychic, as much as the physical, transformation of Berlin. Good luck, Norm.

Then the double-decker veers right, swings left, and makes a triumphal entry through the Brandenburg Gate. Symbol of Berlin and of Prussian militarism, of Cold War division and of reunification, of victory and of defeat, traversed by Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler and Marshal Zhukhov, the massive ceremonial gateway has been thoroughly democratised and now only buses, taxis and bicycles may pass through it.

Bus 100 then proceeds down Unter den Linden, the lime-tree lined boulevard along which strolled Berlin high society in the old days, now a dull parade of modern buildings, austere monuments and heavy institutions like the Russian Embassy, in whose front garden a bust of Lenin suffocates inside a plywood box. One supposes that he could neither be removed nor remain in view, so on went the box in an absurd political compromise.

A poster pillar, in ghostly fashion, displays the monochrome image of Marlene Dietrich advertising a cinematheque. It is haunting to

recall that this iconic Berliner was a star of Unter den Linden's vibrant pre-war cinema and theatre scene and herself frequented the avenue's fashionable restaurants and cafes. Now the modern Comic Opera and venerable State Opera are the only traces of glamour in a deserted street.

Alight and stroll northwards - locomotion is so easy in this city in any way you choose - and you come to a survival of old Berlin that is one of Europe's most singular sights. Museum Island is a stunning monument to the diligence and doggedness of German archaeologists and art historians. On a wedge-shaped island in the River Spree stands a cluster of grandiose neoclassical edifices that house extraordinary collections of art objects, especially from the ancient world. The Pergamon Museum, for example, contains a good part of an exceptional Greek temple and of the monumental gateway to Babylon.

The museum scene is another emblem of Berlin's transition. Endowed with a wealth of institutions, mostly in the old east, and of valuable artifacts, mostly in the old west, the city is renovating the buildings and shifting the contents around, until one day the whole museum system has been rationalised. So today Nefertiti emits her mystic smile in the Egyptian Museum at Charlottenburg, but tomorrow, who knows?

Berlin has plenty of light sides, is indeed the most spacious, the greenest and the best watered of all big European cities. It's easy to get around and contains a variety of attractions. Who knowing its media reputation would imagine, for instance, that it is a great pleasure boating city laced with rivers, canals and lakes? But the burden of history lies heavy upon it, and will do for some time. Berlin is like no other city because it has borne the brunt of 20th century history, and its role as the perpetrator of two world wars and the focal hotspot of the Cold War colours almost everything.

Indeed, it is the frisson given by its history that is Berlin's major attraction. The effect comes from just about anything: the battered Reichstag (thoughts of the suspicious fire, the Soviet soldiers flying the red flag from its roof) or an open space (a bomb site? a location of the Wall?), a public housing estate (what was there before the bombing?) or an old man (what did he do in the war?).

Berliners themselves have a famous acid humour which helps them weather the vicissitudes of their history, exemplified by their love of nicknames. Berliners born after the war can be highly resentful of history's burden, though. One 40-year-old said, "All my life I have thought 'I didn't ask to be born in this place with this history, I did not choose it, and I am sick of hearing about it'."

In any event, Berlin is certainly now recreating itself. Given the continuation of Germany's immense prosperity, the city will eventually become an organic whole again and an affluent one. Gone will be the experience of stepping out of a sophisticated restaurant into a dilapidated subway station, or of leaving a delicacy-crammed supermarket and walking into a no man's land. Berlin will join the rest of orderly, wealthy Germany. And beyond that, what?

There are two opposing views about the future of Berlin. One says that it will become the focal city of Europe, the meeting point of the continent, Europe's leading metropolis. The other says that it will certainly become "a big town in Germany", as opposed to the small town of Bonn, and an outstanding European city, but that it has too many frightening ghosts for the rest of Europe to allow it to become predominant. We shall see. Meanwhile the work goes on.