Berlin Redux
GLASS, ANDREW J.
PRUSSIAN GRANDEUR AND HIGH-TECH GLOSS Berlin Redux By Andrew J. Glass Berlin My paternal grandfather, Jakob Glass, a wealthy investment banker in prewar Poland, loved to travel but...
...Notwithstanding the advantages of a single market—and, for 11 EU members, a single currency—e-commerce across European frontiers lags well behind the frantic U.S...
...But while still in college he did spend a summer studying at Heidelberg University...
...Although a host of new high-tech and service industries are moving in, they have yet to take up the slack...
...As in the legendary era of Marlene Dietrich that followed World War I, though, Berlin has re-emerged as a bright and lively cultural metropolis...
...Its stock has doubled in value during the last year...
...But the surge in the 15-nation European Union (EU) is being held back by excessive regulation, chronic high unemployment and the reluctance to abandon outdated business practices...
...A somewhat seedier embodiment, in what was then East Germany, appears in One, Two, Three, a 1961 movie starring the late James Cagney in the role of C. R. MacNamara, a top CocaCola executive...
...Wired customers are increasingly using price rankings posted on the Internet to find the best deal...
...In part this is because most European telecommunications firms charge their customers by the minute, thereby cutting incentives for leisurely Internet trolling...
...Maybe they will even put him up, for $250 a night, at his Polish ancestor's favorite hotel, near the stone arch through which Nazi storm troopers marched to the East and German freedom seekers bolted to the West...
...training] instead of lifetime employment...
...Today it is a global electronics powerhouse, ranking behind General Electric and IBM in overall revenues...
...The cost of a 10-year lease on a jumbo 155-megabit data circuit between Paris and Berlin has fallen from S12 million two years ago to $2 million...
...Several former high Hungarian officials stood at the hotel's entrance...
...We would like to find a way to deal with the hi-tech revolution and still preserve that way of life.'" Information Age industries are vibrant and growing in a post-Cold War Europe that the Nazis could never have imagined even in their wildest 1,000-year fantasies...
...To show his gratitude, Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen had invited the Hungarians, among others, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Wall's demise...
...Large water-bearing steel pipes, painted in many pastel shades, line each major building site to keep it from being flooded because of Berlin's porous soil...
...Over the ensuing years he often roamed the world, yet he kept the pledge until his death in 1993...
...Unlike London or Paris, Berlin seems to have been wrenched from the sandy earth by some random force...
...In Berlin—then, as now, an eight-hour train trip from Warsaw—grandfather put up at the Adlon, near the Brandenburg Gate, on Unter den Linden...
...In going to Germany, Sam broke with the lordly travel pattern of his greatgrandfather, Jakob, and checked his bag at the economy counter...
...Thus the powerful Bundesbank, or central bank, was placed in Frankfurt...
...Perhaps that's because, before World War II, Berlin served not only as the political seat of government but also as the core of the nation's economic, industrial and military life...
...He never returned there after 1933, when the Nazis marched through the gate to trumpet by torchlight the advent of the Third Reich...
...They were among the figures who, defying longstanding Warsaw Pact policies, permitted tens of thousands of East Germans who had made their way to Hungary as ostensible tourists to flee to neighboring Austria...
...Not many in Congress would notice, yet 10 years after the Communist East Germans stood passively by as Kohl cut his deal with Moscow, unified Germany's capital remains politically divided...
...In Germany, they have fallen to less than 10 cents a minute, comparable to the prevailing rates in the United States...
...Federal subsidies and transfers from richer states in the west and the south currently make up only a fifth of Berlin's budget, compared with more than half prior to unification...
...And digital TV sets in German hotel rooms offer keyboard-enabled Internet access, albeit with a fast meter running...
...pace...
...Ten years later, they murdered him and most of my family...
...Nowadays German politicians of all stripes like to stay there, because it is a short stroll from the Reichstag...
...The developers have staked out as prime real estate the wide swath of former "no man's land," a still largely barren strip where Hitler's bunker is buried and the infamous Wall stood...
...Amid light beams that played off forests of cranes, Diepgen threw a big bash at the Town Hall, in the East, to mark German Unification Day...
...America has lost the certainty and predictability of the foreign policies that it enjoyed, and we enjoyed, in the past," Schmidt told us...
...Well before his arrival, a hotel butler would lay out his personal cache in cherry wood cabinets that rested on marble floors festooned with oriental carpets...
...The government has already spent some $ 17 billion on official construction projects, including several fine museums, and is prepared to spend lots more...
...After 152 years in business, we're in the process of drastically changing our corporate culture," Karl-Hermann Baumann, chairman of Siemens powerful supervisory board, told us during a visit to Munich, where the company began anew after losing its Berlin assets...
...Nearly a dozen firms are laying fiber optic networks through Germany to link the Atlantic to the Urals, offering a broad communications backbone for the Internet...
...Since Schroder's election in September 1998 ended the 16-year reign of Helmut Kohl and the Christian Democrats, the government has felt itself shunted aside by the United States as it has fallen prey to a wave of pro-Kohl nostalgia at home...
...PRUSSIAN GRANDEUR AND HIGH-TECH GLOSS Berlin Redux By Andrew J. Glass Berlin My paternal grandfather, Jakob Glass, a wealthy investment banker in prewar Poland, loved to travel but disdained carrying any luggage whatsoever...
...But he has followed in Jakob's footsteps by recently beginning an investment banking career...
...The American nation as a whole is not interested in foreign politics at all, and, in Congress, I find very few people with a real interest in foreign policy...
...If his new Manhattan employers like his work, perhaps someday they will dispatch him to Berlin...
...Soon most everything, save the German Defense Ministry—still a sensitive issue for the Russians and some other Europeans—will come together again in Berlin...
...In doing so, they created further cracks in a decrepit East German Communist regime that would soon collapse...
...But the rapidly paced consolidation has run into some snags...
...We're becoming a lot less bureaucratic and a lot more entrepreneurial...
...There are no mighty rivers or harbors here, nor any natural wealth...
...Otherwise, says U.S...
...Often powered by Siemens switches, the Continent's 320 million people are fast being wired up for the next millennium...
...When a divided land rose from the ruins of World War II, the Western part opted for a decentralized, federated structure...
...The city has lost nearly 400,000 manufacturing jobs in the past decade...
...Despite the austerity measures instituted since 1994—which helped tear into the incumbent's vote total —a tenth of the capital's $23 billion budget this year had to be financed through fresh loans, adding to a debt burden that is the highest per person of any of the country's 16 states...
...Berlin's Social Democrats, Juniorpartners of the Christian Democrats, fared worst of all...
...These new neural networks have already had a definite impact on the European market...
...I strolled past the hotel a few weeks ago after visiting the newly reopened Reichstag, which once abutted the Western side of the Berlin Wall and where these days Germany's Parliament again sits in this reclaimed German capital...
...They blamed their poor showing on opposition to the Kosovo intervention in this traditional citadel of protest, and on the rancorous departure last March of Oskar Lafontaine, their one-time Finance Minister, party chairman and champion of sundry Leftist causes...
...the Federal Constitutional Court, the supreme judicial arbiter, located in Karlsruhe...
...But in one respect the building boom is somewhat deceptive...
...Siemens executives have so aggressively courted customers abroad, that 70 per cent of the company's business is international...
...Seen from the newly opened Reichstag dome, bright yellow cranes rise high above the scarred earth in virtually all directions, but most noticeably toward the east, where the Wall came tumbling down in November 1989...
...Fully a tenth of the city's 1.1 million workers are directly engaged in the rebuilding process...
...While the party was under way, neo-Nazis knocked over more than 100 gravestones at Berlin's Weissensee Jewish cemetery...
...But he was quite familiar with the Grand, once the favorite hangout of the Stasi, the East German secret police...
...to declining long-distance charges...
...I returned to my hotel, the Westin Grand on Friedrichstrasse, before the champagne corks popped...
...Entrepreneurs find themselves hampered, however, by habits and work rules ingrained in a social system (at least in Germany) essentially put into place by Otto von Bismarck over a century ago...
...And one reason it's working is because we're offering our people lifetime employability [i.e...
...He embarked on his annual grand tours of Europe without so much as a pocket comb, having deposited in advance splendid wardrobes and a full set of matching accessories at each of the various luxurious hostelries where he would be stopping...
...rivals...
...In the October elections to the local legislature —like Hamburg and Bremen, Berlin enjoys the status of a full German state— half the voters in the affluent western districts backed the Christian Democrats...
...From the well of the ultramodern purple-seated chamber, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder heads an uneasy coalition of Social Democrats and Green Party activists that has so far done little to tackle structural unemployment or rejigger a burdensome social welfare system that has retarded growth...
...It has been said that a third of the world's construction cranes are now at work in Shanghai...
...Forced from office by a Bundestag vote of no confidence in 1982, Schmidt was obliged to watch from the sidelines as Kohl masterfully presided over German reunification, bribing the longtime Communist occupiers with $60 billion (that largely went down Soviet rat holes) to get them out months ahead of the negotiated timetable...
...If that's so, then Berlin must be running a close second in a bold bid to reflate its shaky economy and restore some of its stately Prussian grandeur— along with a fresh topping of high-tech gloss...
...Nevertheless, there is good reason for the long-term optimism one senses here...
...and the Federal Crime Agency, the German counterpart of the FBI, was headquartered in Wiesbaden...
...Ambassador John Komblum, security concerns will make it impossible to build a new embassy in the open field near the bulldozed Wall, where it stood in 1941...
...It's all starting to come together," said Baumann, the Siemens chairman, as he stowed his tiny company-made phone and invited his guests to lunch...
...BERLIN is of course quite a different place—lodged smack in the midst of quite a different Europe—than the one that existed at the end of World War II...
...Meantime, Hamburg emerged as the center for many national news outlets, and vital national cultural institutions blossomed in such cities as Munich, the Bavarian capital, and Dusseldorf...
...Komblum adds: "The overall German view of things is, "We have a way of life here...
...One example is the predicament of Siemens AG, whose sprawling Berlin complex was flattened by Allied bombers and Soviet artillery...
...At that time my father, having escaped the Holocaust, vowed he would never again return to either Germany or Poland...
...Similar sentiments were voiced to a small group of visiting American journalists in Hamburg by Helmut Schmidt, Schroder's fellow Social Democrat, who, like Kohl, remains an elder statesman of German politics...
...And we're focusing our core business increasingly on information and communications technology...
...For every German mark in new official outlays, private developers are spending eight...
...Andrew J. Glass, a longtime New Leader contributor, is senior correspondent and a columnist for Cox Newspapers...
...Nor has he done muchto blunt opposition within his coalition's ranks to the new Germany's precedent-breaking military involvement in Kosovo...
...British architect Norman Foster has left in place some of the Red Army's graffiti from 1945, and has added an airy dome-shaped ceiling overlooking the city that invokes the next century...
...Now known as the Kempenski Adlon, the hotel has recently been restored to its prewar grandeur...
...Earlier, on the way in from Tegel Airport, the taxi driver said he had never heard of the Westin, part of an international chain that recently acquired the place as yet another dart on the board of the global economy...
...But even if Berlin's 3.4 million residents "play in the second league," as one official here put it, Germany, the leading power today in Europe, has made a clear commitment to this city of the kind its postwar leaders never extended to Bonn...
...Berlin continues to be Germany's slowest-growing state: Its economy shrank by 0.3 per cent last year and is still shrinking...
...Washington is in a stew: over Berlin's refusal to shift two streets near the Brandenburg Gate roughly 100 feet...
...The high-tech sector of the new pan-European economy, led by Siemens (and Finland's Nokia), is showing clear signs of being ready to compete with, and in some cases surpass, its U.S...
...The competitive wave has led, in turn...
...My son has yet to visit Poland either...
...But among the third of the city's population that lives in the east, two out of five voters chose the up and coming Party of Democratic Socialism, successor to the Communist Party that once ruled through fear...
...Eight years ago the German Parliament voted 337 to 320 to move from Bonn, its snug postwar seat by the Rhine, back into the restored Reichstag in the heart of Berlin...
Vol. 82 • November 1999 • No. 13
