karma chameleon

A generation after Berlin's reinvention as the after-hours king of Western Europe, the German capital enters a new chapter as a softer-edged city that has settled more fully into its own skin

- Rick Jordan

I first landed in Berlin in the late 1990s, in the heady years after the fall of the Wall. I was aware enough of its licentious 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. I DJ'd with a pile of scratched 78s, he took us to a party in an after-hours record store run by Russian émigrés, and we ended the morning at a techno night in the basement of a mansion block on Karl-Marx-Allee, sweating among the Stalinist decor.

I've been returning ever since. It's a city that exists in a state of constant 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 for the raggle-taggle performers at Mauerpark's Bearpit Karaoke, browsing gallery shows at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Like New York, it's a city whose cultural depictions blur with reality. It's hard to cycle under the Victory Column in Tiergarten without glimpsing Bruno Ganz's angel from the Wim Wenders movie Wings of Desire, or to walk past a late-night corner shop spätis without cutting in a Fassbinder scene. George Grosz caricatures peer from the walls of crowded bars.