Atlantica - 01.01.2006, Side 30

The snow has started to fall. I’m hungry, wander-
ing a maze of back streets in East Berlin, trying
on instinct to retrace the route I took 15 months
ago that led me by chance to Pan Asia, a spectacular Thai
restaurant in the funky Mitte district.
My last visit to Berlin came during an unseasonable
warm spell in September, the sticky night air persuading
Berliners, dressed casually in shorts and tank tops, out of
their homes in large numbers. I prefer Berlin by winter.
The city seems to make more sense in the cold.
Like tonight. The winter weather has chased most
inside, and the streets are conspicuously empty, the grun-
gy buildings unusually dark. I’m suddenly transported to
a 1970s Cold War spy thriller. The mood of espionage is
palpable. I’m on the wrong side of the wall, I think to
myself as three men, sheltered from the elements by their
beige trench coats, approach me from down the vacant
sidewalk.
Of course there is no epic chase scene down back
alleys, into basement pubs. No secret codes to crack. The
strangers pass without incident. A few moments later I
stumble upon Vina Blanca, a Spanish Tapas restaurant in
Prenzlauer Berg.
Forget Thai. I head inside Vina Blanca to shake off
the cold. The cozy restaurant is modern, chic – various
wine bottles from across Spain line the walls. Songs from
Björk’s album Debut set the atmosphere. So much for my
Cold War spy thriller. This is a swanky bistro straight out
of Paris.
To warm up, I drink wine so delicious you could eat
it: Casteller Barrica from the Penedès region. Mid-meal,
I’m told the restaurant doesn’t take Visa, and the closest
bank machine is a twenty-minute walk. But I’m not going
to wind up in the kitchen washing dishes because Raul, a
27-year old waiter who moved from Barcelona to Berlin 17
months ago, kindly offers to drive me.
“I don’t like the weather,” Raul says, the snow sprin-
While some Germans might
be experiencing the doldrums of
economic stagnation, Berliners are
upbeat as their once-divided
city continues to modernize and
reinvent itself, writes Edward Weinman.
Photos by Páll Stefánsson.
Istanbul & You
Reconstructing Berlin
kling lightly as we motor down the empty street. I ask
Raul what he does like about the city. “Berlin is not as
beautiful as Paris or Rome, but Berlin is more bohemian.
I like the people.”
Back at Vina Blanca, Raul introduces me to Dang
Nowak, a filmmaker who is a regular at the restaurant.
An hour later, her friends Hanna Hahn and Jana Heinz
show up. A few glasses of wine later, we agree to meet
up the following night, and then Jana, who once spent a
miserable nine months in Casper, Wyoming, asks me how
long I’ve known Dang.
“About two hours,” I tell her.
“That’s Berlin,” Jana says. “The people are so friendly.”
BERLIN IS NO LONGER YOUR PARENTS’ cold war
city. The Berlin Wall, which cut the city into the demo-
cratic West and the communist East, was open for unre-
stricted travel on 9 November, 1989. For the majority
of today’s 20-somethings, the wall casts no shadow; it’s
nothing more than the cobbled bricks you find twisting
and winding along the streets of Berlin, marking the
wall’s former path.
“I was six when the wall came down, so I don’t remem-
ber it,” the car rental agent told me while giving me direc-
tions to my hotel. “But the old, like my grandmother, she
has a wall in her head. She remembers the war. You never
forget the bombs.”
Berlin is probably unrecognizable to the older Germans,
those who suddenly found themselves east of the wall
back in 1961, literally on the wrong side of the tracks.
Take Potsdamer Platz, located down from the
Brandenburg Gate, which borders East and West Berlin.
One of the busiest squares in Europe in pre-war days,
the central area was pummeled by Allied bombs, creat-
ing a vast wasteland of nothingness. This emptiness
then became no-man’s land once the wall was fully con-
structed. When the wall came crumbling down, there
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