Lure of the bleak city

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This was published 12 years ago

Lure of the bleak city

City chic ... the German Historical Museum.

City chic ... the German Historical Museum.Credit: Getty Images

It's impossible not to warm to Berlin — even when there's a chill in the air, writes Adriaane Pielou.

DUSK is falling and it's not even 4pm. Perfect. Half an hour after checking in to my hotel on Unter den Linden, I am back in the gleaming marble lobby, happily wrapping my scarf around my neck and buttoning my coat. Bleak, cold, foggy weather is just right for Berlin, if, like me, you cannot get enough of the Cold War, Second World War and Weimar Republic - albeit from a very safe distance.

This is a grey, unbeautiful city crammed with history and ghosts, so the chill of winter, which continues here until late March, provides an atmospheric backdrop for dipping in and out of the extraordinarily good museums exploring its past, and warming up with coffee and cake in between.

Outside the hotel, I spy the Brandenburg Gate and Norman Foster's glittering Reichstag dome visible at one end of the broad boulevard; the cathedral and the tall television tower at the other.

I cross the street to Berlin Story, the world's only bookshop stocking solely books about a single city. The joy: 10,000 books about Berlin, many in English. It's hard to decide where to browse first - the stacks of guides or the shelves devoted to each period of the city's tumultuous history. Germany's formation in 1871, the First World War, the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, the rise of Nazism, the Second World War, the Cold War, the fall of the wall in 1989, reunification - each section is crammed with eyewitness accounts, academic reports, novels, diaries, biographies and books of photographs.

I run my fingers longingly over Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin - a book about his colourful life in the city in the '30s that inspired the film Cabaret - and add it to my pile, only to abandon it at the checkout. "Don't worry, we mail to anywhere in the world," the shop assistant says.

Next door, in the old Cafe Einstein, relishing the candlelit warmth I open the first of my three new guidebooks (a triumph of luggage-minded prudence over temptation) and wonder how many museum visits you can cram into a two-night stay. A lot of the most interesting are within walking distance of where I am, in Mitte, in the former East Berlin, but there are several farther afield, including one based in the old Stasi headquarters, on the city's eastern edge, and the Bauhaus museum, in the former West Berlin.

No time to waste, then. Soon after 6pm, I am pushing open the heavy wooden doors of Clarchens Ballhaus, in the heart of Mitte. This is not a museum but a museum piece. The city used to be full of dance halls and this, built in 1913, is the last that remains. In the shabby little lobby, the retired bouncer-type reading the paper in the dark, wooden coat-check booth looks like a George Grosz sketch.

I stand at the threshold and drink in the scene. White-aproned waiters tidy chairs at the long tables flanking the scuffed dance floor and musicians drift in to set up on the little stage. It's hard not to turn the clock back 75 years and see swastika-wearing louts sprawling at the tables but the only guests now are a group of tourists eating sausages. Ignored by the waiters, clearly used to sightseers, I stay a few minutes before setting out into the chilly night.

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Around the corner, then another, and across a cobbled street, I find the Hackescher Hof complex. A series of Jugendstil (art nouveau) apartment blocks linked by eight courtyards, it contains some of the most fashionable shops, bars and cafes in Mitte, as well as a cinema and, on the corner, the Hackescher Hof (hackescher-hof.de), an elegant, wood-floored restaurant. Dense, chewy bread and salty butter, seafood linguine, a slice of poppyseed tart and coffee come to less than €18 ($22).

Fortunately it is Thursday - late-opening night at the museums (they mostly close on Mondays) - and the next stop on my list will be open until 10pm. Guided by the television tower, I make my way along streets dotted with little design shops and, back on Unter den Linden, to the German Historical Museum. With exhibits explained in English as well as German, it is utterly absorbing. I spend most of my time in the section devoted to Berlin in the '20s and have to speed-walk though the Cold War galleries before being snapped at to leave by a weary guard.

The walk back to my hotel along Unter den Linden takes me past the Humboldt Box - a hideous temporary glass centre offering information about the rebuilding of the city centre - and Neue Wache, the national war memorial. Housed within the neoclassical former royal Prussian guard house, this is a silent shriek, empty but for the figure of a mother grieving over the corpse of her dead son, moonlight slanting on her from the open roof.

Is Berlin the most engrossing city in Europe? By the following evening, I can't think of anywhere else - literally, in the world - that I want to come back to sooner. First, I'm back at the German Historical Museum for an hour, then to David Chipperfield's brilliant bare-brick restoration of the Neues Museum (ancient art) - one of the five on the nearby Museum Island - then on to the Reichstag's viewing platform, then displays of everyday life in East Germany at the DDR Museum and, finally, going down into the U-Bahn system to get to the Story of Berlin museum. Each visit has been pure pleasure.

Plans to find a good cafe have been abandoned as those in the museums are fine but Anna Blume, Bar Gagarin, the original Cafe Einstein on Kurfurstenstrasse and Literaturhaus are all recommended by the "city lifestyle" guide I meet for tea as rain pours, Henrik Tidefjaerd.

"Everyone talks about the crazy creativity in Berlin - and it's true," he says. "Young people are moving here from all over the world because rents are fantastically low and great cafes - and clubs, galleries and fashion stores - open literally every week. But if you have an interest in 20th-century history, as I do, there really is nowhere like it.

"To walk through bunkers where Berliners sheltered from bombing during the war, to see Hitler's own bunker, to stand in the room in Wannsee where the Germans discussed the Final Solution - those are incredible experiences."

Henrik is Swedish but has lived in Berlin for the past 12 years and set up his own guide service, Berlinagenten. "And despite all my years here I have not seen all there is to see," he says.

You definitely can't see all of Berlin in two nights and three days, so I have to forget the Stasi Museum and several others. But public transport is extremely efficient, so there's no time wasted getting from A to B. There are shortcuts, too. The 100 bus from Unter den Linden goes past many key sights; book a table for lunch at the Dachgarten restaurant on top of the Reichstag to avoid the long queue and gain direct access to Foster's dome and views across the city.

Even getting lost brings benefits. On my last morning, I get out at the wrong stop en route to the Unterwelten (underworld) experience, a tour of some of the city's infamous bunkers. But even here, at the Nordbahnhof S-Bahn station, I discover a fascinating exhibition dedicated to photographs of "ghost stations". During the Cold War, Berlin was walled up underground as well as overground and, after 1961, certain stations, including this one, had tunnels bricked up so that East Berliners couldn't escape into West Berlin.

I arrive at the booking office for the tour in English with just minutes to spare. One of the engineers responsible for excavating the bunkers - first opened to visitors in 2005 - leads the group, taking us through a series of concrete structures created during the digging of the U-Bahn system. It has become one of the most popular tours in the city but lasts longer than I'd expected. I rush back to my hotel - having switched to the fabulous Grand Hyatt in Potsdamer Platz for my second night - to check out.

"You should come back in summer - then you can sail a boat on one of our many lakes," says the receptionist, making a sad face at the drizzle.

Summer? Is she kidding? I want to come back this winter. Telegraph, London

Trip notes

Getting there

Lufthansa flies from Sydney to Berlin with stopovers in

south-east Asia and Munich or Frankfurt, lufthansa.com.au.

Staying there

When Germany's capital moved from Bonn to Berlin, every luxury hotel group in the world felt obliged to have an outpost in the city and the resulting glut means tour operators can get competitive deals at many five-star hotels.

The best places to stay are on or around Unter den Linden in former East Berlin — where the five-star Westin Grand (+49 302 0270; westingrandberlin.com) has big, minimalist rooms, excellent breakfasts and a grand staircase to the marble lobby — and the glitzy Potsdamer Platz. Here, the five-star Grand Hyatt (+49 30 2553 1234; berlin.grand.hyatt.com) occupies one of the most exciting buildings in the area, all well-thought-out comfort amid brutalist concrete and glass, with a buzzing bar and restaurant.

A little further out, expect to pay about €95 ($115) a night for a clean, perfectly decent hotel room.

Need to know

Avoid Mondays, when most museums are shut, but most stay open late on Thursdays. Shops mostly open from 10am to 8pm and are closed on Sundays.

The Berlin WelcomeCard (berlin-welcomecard.de) can be taken for 48 hours (€17.90), 72 hours (€23.90) or five days (€30.90). It gives free use of public transport and discounts of between 25 per cent and 50 per cent on entry to 200 attractions. The Museum Pass costs €19 for free entry to 55 museums over 72 hours. +49 3025 0025 2333, visitberlin.de.

Berlin in Your Pocket, a useful A5 monthly city guide, and the Exberliner magazine are available from book stalls for €1.75 and €2.90 respectively.

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