The First Days of Berlin. Ulrich Gutmair

art scene and an unbridled and all-embracing party culture emerged in Mitte in the years after the Wende – the ‘turning point’ around the fall of the Wall and reunification. Yet the city where this all happened now seems to have disappeared. Berlin has clothed itself in the myth of a young, tearaway city, while the substance of this profitable reputation has been gently hollowed out. Those anarchic years have become a selling point in the global competition for tourists, investors and businesses. New buildings have been erected on the vacant plots. The city centre has long since ceased to be the preserve of the squatters, ravers and artists who revived it after the fall of the Wall. The clubs have moved elsewhere, and most are now purveyors of professional entertainment. The early nineties seem like a dream you can only vaguely remember the next morning while the soundscape still echoes in your ear. The sound of the Wende encompasses not only breakbeat, house and techno but pneumatic drills and rubble chutes, the compressed scales of modems turning data into notes, nightingales singing at the best time for going out and the sound of a lark in the morning, as well as conversations on the edge of the dance floor, at gallery previews and in bars.

The man who sat by the kiosk outside Tacheles

      Klaus was dead, and the kiosk was gone. Day after day he had watched over the Oranienburger Tor. He would sit there in his lumberjack shirt on his camping chair next to the kiosk, books laid out on the little table behind him, waving to people walking past and engaging them in long conversation. Now, one chill December day in 2005, there was a cardboard sign leaning against the side of the kiosk with his photo and the words Klaus is dead on it. Someone had placed candles and flowers in front of the sign. Alongside them were offerings of bottles of beer and vodka to accompany him on his journey into the realm of the dead.

      A little while after Klaus Fahnert died, the kiosk vanished too – it’s visible next to the advertising column on 1950s black-and-white photos – and also the nearby snack stand. The small triangular space on the corner of Linienstrasse and Oranienburger Strasse where Klaus spent his days has been recobbled. It has looked clean and tidy ever since, as if this were a typical West German town grown fat on prosperous decades. Klaus lived in Mitte for fifteen years, for nearly ten of which he was to be found sitting next to Serdar Yildirim’s kiosk, diagonally across the road from Tacheles.

      Serdar Yildirim is a small, wiry man with dark shoulder-length hair. It took me a while to track down the former leaseholder of the old kiosk at Oranienburger Tor, though he wasn’t far away. After much enquiring, the friendliest vendor at Dada Falafel told me that the people from the kiosk had moved to the other side of the street. Serdar has set up shop in a repurposed shipping container next to Tacheles and sells articles such as postcards and T-shirts to tourists. He generally works nights. Serdar had known Klaus since late 1996.

‘Klaus was fit as a flea back then’, he says. ‘He walked up, stopped in front of the kiosk and asked for a beer. He told me he was married, had children and loved this part of town. That’s how we met. Then he started coming every day and one day he asked if he could sit next to the kiosk and sell a few books. I said, I don’t mind. If it doesn’t bother the wardens, it doesn’t bother me. He originally came from Bonn and whenever he saw the letters BN on a numberplate, he’d say, “That stands for Berlin Next.” Daytimes aren’t very busy in summer, not many customers, so I’d often sit down with him for a chat’, Serdar says, lighting another cigarette.

      By the time Klaus claimed his patch at Oranienburger Tor, Berliners and tourists in the know had long since moved on to other parts of the city to party. Tacheles was just a pesky hangover. The walls of the staircase were sprayed with coat after coat of graffiti, one on top of the other, tags stretching back to the palaeolithic era of the Berlin Republic, the first days and weeks after the fall of the Wall. It stank of beer and urine. Hawkers sold handicrafts on the first floor, and young Italians, Spaniards and Swedes sat in Café Zapata, trying to feel how Berlin must once have felt. For people from the neighbourhood, Klaus was part of the local furniture, whereas for most of the passers-by on their way to the underground station he was presumably just another dosser, lounging around in his camping chair in broad daylight next to a table of books. Klaus was a good fit with Tacheles, which had become one of new Berlin’s international tourist landmarks along with the Television Tower.

Approaching from the east, the party wall of Tacheles is visible from a long way off. It is painted with a large, vague likeness of a woman’s face, and above it is a question: ‘How long is now?’ Is the present a mathematically nonexpansible point in the stream of time that divides the past from the future, or is it more than that? The tourists you see ambling along Oranienburger Strasse have time for now. They wander around taking photos, clearly fascinated by Kunsthaus Tacheles. It’s a bit messy but colourful, slightly dilapidated yet alive. Which is what people all over the world imagine Berlin to be like.

      How long is now? It’s a question that sums up handily the spirit of the Wende, the tumultuous years before and after the East German revolution, the sense of a new departure laden with immense possibilities. Now is always. Life is in the present. Tourists intuitively grasp that. However, when they stand gazing at Tacheles and the large piece of empty land around the building, they see more than that. An old wound is being kept open here. Entering East Berlin from the West in 1989, you felt yourself catapulted back into the immediate post-war years; you were moving through an open-air museum. Nothing had been buried, everything lay uncovered. You could engage in archaeology simply by walking around.

      Then and for many years afterwards, the wastelands and the scarred house fronts showed that soldiers fought, right here, in the middle of the city. The walls were still pitted with bullet holes from the Battle of Berlin in April 1945. Visitors to Tacheles didn’t need to know that the former shopping arcade and department store were used by the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (the Nazi-endorsed German Labour Front, which replaced independent trade unions) and by the SS, or that French prisoners of war toiled away up in the attics. Directly after the fall of the Wall, there was no need for tour guides or information panels to convey the history of Berlin-Mitte. The history of the twentieth century was written into the cityscape – all you had to do was look. ‘Now’ means all the experiences, memories and history present at a given moment in time.

Around noon on 13 February 1990 Leo Kondeyne, Clemens Wallrodt and their friends pull up in an old fire engine outside what remains of the former department store in the Oranienburger Strasse. The squatters climb onto the roof of their vehicle and in through a first-floor window. It is evident from the back of the building that the GDR’s demolition experts carried out their task with great precision. They blew up the majority of the sprawling complex around its central dome because the East German capital’s urban planners wanted to build a street here. The building was still in use in the 1970s. The squatters stand in the large empty space behind the building and stare up into open rooms that have been cut in half.

      The complex was built by Franz Ahrens between 1907 and 1909 using reinforced concrete in the modern style. A glassroofed shopping arcade connected the large and still extant entrance arch on Oranienburger Strasse with Friedrichstrasse, and at its central point the arcade opened up into a dome. However, the idea of competing with the major department stores by linking a cluster of specialized shops to a centralized till system, thus making shopping easier, failed after only a year; the arcade-cum-department store closed down in 1914. In 1928 the building was acquired by the electrical company AEG, which renamed it Haus der Technik and exhibited its latest products in the spacious and luxurious showrooms. The first vacuum cleaners in Berlin were supposedly sold here.

      In 1933 Nazi organizations began to occupy parts of the building. It was later damaged during Allied bombing raids on the capital of the Third Reich. The bomb damage report for 16 December 1943, filed by Berlin’s anti-air-raid headquarters, indicates that the Haus der Technik was hit during the 160th bombing raid. Two hundred and fifty planes had flown over the city at around 7:30 that evening. The building sustained further bomb damage in 1944.

After the founding of the German Democratic Republic, it was used by the Free German Trade Union Federation and the College of Foreign Trade. The Oranienburger Tor Lichtspiele, a picture house, opened in the building first, followed by the Studio Camera Berlin,