A NEW ZEIT GEIST

ONCE "POOR BUT SEXY"AND KNOWN FOR ITS VIBRANT CLUBS, BERLIN HAS SMARTENED WITHOUT LOSING ITS OFFBEAT CREATIVITY

- RICK JORDAN

I first landed in Berlin in the late 1990s. I was a little late-a couple of years after the Wall fell, I was aware enough of its reputation to startle a teacher by announcing plans to run away there and open a club. But that first night, my girlfriend and I chanced on a bar owned by the Glaswegian cousin of queer artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, who was more accomplished at drinking than painting. I DJed with a pile of scratched 78s, he took us to a party in an afterhours record store run by Russian emigrés, and we ended the morning at a techno night in the basement of a mansion block on Karl-Marx-Allee, sweating among the Stalinist-era art deco.

It struck me then that Berlin was the only place in the world that could make this happen, and I've been returning ever since.

It's a city that seems to be in a constant state of flux and reinvention; its patina of history and subcultures overlapping like club flyers on a street wall. I've tried to get a handle on it from the revolving top of the Fernsehturm, clapping the raggle-taggle performers at Mauerpark's Bearpit Karaoke, browsing gallery shows at the KW Contemporary. Like New York, it's a city whose culture blurs with reality. It's hard to cycle under the Victory Column in Tiergarten without glimpsing Bruno Ganz's angel from Wings of Desire, or to walk past a late-night corner shop spätis without cutting in a Fassbinder scene. George Grosz faces peer out from crowded bars.