Show Notes
John Kampfner über Identität und Geschichte der Hauptstadt: »Berlin ist niemals fertig« (SPIEGEL)
Ein bewundernder Blick auf Deutschland (Easy German Podcast 175)
Special Places in Berlin
Bergmannkiez (Berlin.de)
Viktoriapark (Google Maps)
Tempelhofer Feld (Google Maps)
Hasenheide (Google Maps)
Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation at Anhalter Bahnhof
Transcript
About John Kampfner
Manuel:
[0:00] Hello, listeners, it's Manuel, and I am back in the studio. It's been a little while, but today I'm very happy to welcome a special guest who is the perfect fit for this show. His name is John Kampfna. I've known him for a little while. John is an award-winning British journalist, broadcaster, author, and he actually started his career reporting from East Berlin back in the day. Today, he regularly writes for Foreign Policy, Politico, The Independent, and he writes books. You might have heard of one of his best-selling books, Why The Germans Do It Better, where he explores Germany's political, economic, cultural achievements. And while he's from the UK, John is truly something of a Germany and Berlin expert. He has lived here, considers himself a Berliner, and now also holds German citizenship, and he really has a deep understanding of what makes this city so unique. His newest book, In Search of Berlin, is a love letter to the city, tracing its almost 800-year history and its remarkable ability to reinvent itself. Of course, I'll post links to his books and his excellent newsletter in the show notes. And today, I'll be talking with John about his personal connection to Berlin, the current state of politics in Germany, and I'll ask him what advice and recommendations he has for all of you.
Berlin Then and Now
Manuel:
[1:39] John, Berlin and you go back decades.
John Kampfner:
[1:43] The love affair.
Manuel:
[1:43] It's a love affair. When was the first time you stepped foot in the city?
John Kampfner:
[1:48] Oh my God. I am so ancient. That's kind of betraying my age. But in the mid-80s. So I was a young, in my early 20s, a young Praktikant, a young trainee in Bonn, in the village that was the capital at the time, the sleepy village. And I just came to Berlin - and you had to either take the transit train or the drive through the transit roads or fly to the city - and fell in love with the place. And then pretty shortly ... I was a journalist then, as I said, a young journalist. And then I was sent by a British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, to be its correspondent to the German Democratic Republic, which was East Berlin. I insisted I wanted to live in East Berlin, not West Berlin, because that's where the action was. That started in mid-1988. I thought I was going to be there for a long time. I thought I was going to be the first of many correspondents there. It turned out I was the first and the last. Ich war dabei. I saw everything that happened before all the demonstrations, the anxieties, the extraordinary explosion of dissent. It was such an optimistic time. When one looks back now and thinks of ... sorry, my mind is wondering, when you think of Trump and all the terrible things happening now, that was such an optimistic time. When you thought you could build democracy in all kinds of places and saw the wall came down, which was, whatever people say, a huge surprise when it did happen. I stayed till unification. And then the day after, they sent me to Moscow. And then ... everything kicked off there.
Manuel:
[3:24] Wow. So you've been here on and off for decades. You've lived here.
John Kampfner:
[3:30] Yeah, I've never left in my mind.
Manuel:
[3:31] How do you feel about Berlin now? You kind of hinted at kind of this feeling of optimism and possibility is gone a little bit.
John Kampfner:
[3:42] So after Brexit, Britain's little local nightmare in 2016, the Referendum, I thought "Right, that's it. I've had it with that country." I mean, I love London, that's really where my original identity is from, but I just thought I cannot live in a place that so egregiously commits self-harm and harms Europe and doesn't feel itself European, so where do I go? I go to Berlin. And I was basically commuting 50-50 pretty much the whole time. My wife was based in London, she had a full-time job at the BBC, which she's since just recently left. And so now we are here full time. And as far as I'm concerned, that's the way it's going to be.
Manuel:
[4:27] And do you still feel excitement when you think of Berlin? If Berlin was a person, how would you describe this person?
John Kampfner:
[4:35] That's so funny, I was asked that question ... I did an interview when my last book came out with Der Spiegel and that was the question they asked me as the final question. It was such a good question. I had never thought about it at the time I can't quite remember what I said, but I said along the lines of amazing, exciting, forever curious, neurotic, probably goes and sees their shrink once a week ... [As we do here!] As you do in Berlin! And that's the sort of place now. In my book, which we can we can talk about, the the final chapter is called Fear of the Normal, so to what degree was the Berlin of 1990s - through the wonderful era of the 1990s, poor but sexy, all the way through the 2000s - to what degree is all that gone and it's just become another gemütlich bourgeois German city, or not? And my answer on that is: I think it's kind of 50-50. I think it's still retained half of what makes this place wonderfully mad, but also it's much less of that than it used to be.
His Book: In Search of Berlin
Manuel:
[5:47] Mm. So this book in search of Berlin - 350 pages - what inspired you to write it?
John Kampfner:
[5:54] So I had done a previous book - when I've been on this show and other Easy German shows before - called Why the Germans Do It Better, which was my great cri de coeur against Britain in 2020. And looking ... It's funny, if you think of Germany now, everybody is so down on Germany both within the country and outside the country. saying the economy's gone totally - I was going to use a rude word, but I won't - the economy's gone completely kind of rotten and the politics is in trouble, socially, it's divided, etc. I don't quite buy that, but it's certainly not the country that felt it was, four or five years ago. So I wrote that book and that was, dare I say it, a great success. And I thought, right, I just need to stay here. I need to explore here more. This was during the pandemic when you couldn't do too much. So I thought, what am I going to do? I'm going to walk the streets. I am really, really going to discover far more of the city than I knew, and my Berlin friends say, quite a lot more than a lot of them knew as well. So it is a history going back 750 years and more. Soon, in a couple of decades time, we'll have the 800th anniversary of the city. So it's a history but it's a personal history. It's a sort of Wanderung durch Berlin and it's intended to show what a city in flux the place is. It is really a migrant city. It is a city where people have come. They have usually come to get out of trauma. It's funny when you think of the city that has unleashed so much trauma in the 20th century, but it was a city where the traumatized gathered, and they created a new life. In a way, the closest comparison - not so much geographically, but I think spiritually - to Berlin, is New York. Or at least New York as it used to be, the place where migrant communities came, and they became part of the furniture. So, you know, whether you are a Russian from the 1920s, French from the Huguenots, or Jews that came in the Middle Ages, in some ways either survived or came back after the Holocaust, or up-to-date Ukrainians or Syrians or Afghans, or the huge Gastarbeiter wave of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, everybody has become a Berliner, and that's what makes the place so extraordinary.
Manuel:
[8:27] It's true. My dad left Poland during the time of communism and moved to Germany, to Münster, to West Germany, and was very happy there for all his life. And felt very comfortable. But he told me that he never really felt like he belonged until he moved to Berlin.
John Kampfner:
[8:47] Yeah.
Manuel:
[8:47] Where he told me he never felt like he belonged to Poland anymore, but he also didn't really belong to any other place in Germany. But Berlin, he feels like he belongs, or he used this term, he became "part of the furniture". I like that term.
Uniting Brits and Germans of a Younger Generation
Manuel:
[9:02] You told me before we started recording that so many people left the UK kind of pre- and post-Brexit and that you're actually looking for these people? What's that about?
John Kampfner:
[9:14] Yeah. So, I mean, there are no official estimates, but there's somewhere in the region of 20 to 30, the term I quite enjoy using: "refugees", people who basically fled the growing insularity of the UK. I mean, one of the great ... whether it was a cause or effects of Brexit, one of the things that so infuriates me about the country, although it's a country I still love in so many ways, is its insularity, its what I call monolingual monotony, its cultural reference points internationally, insofar as there are any, tend to be the United States, potentially Australia, It's always felt uncomfortable in different languages, in different mindsets. And to me, that's just an extraordinary tragedy. London bucked that trend, but London doesn't feel anything like as European as it used to, since 2016. I know so many French, Germans, Italians, whatever, who just thought, "Right, I've had it." And so many people have just come here. Now, there are many established organizations - and I'm part of several of them - brilliant organizations that were established in the Cold War during the time when the Brits, the French, and the Americans ran the western side of Berlin and the Soviets ran the eastern side of Berlin and across Germany, to different associations of Germans and Brits and whatever. They do admirable work and they always have done. But they do come across to me as quite old, both old in constitution, but also old in terms of the makeup of the places. And they don't speak to this wave of Brits, and I'm not just talking about Brits in this instance, this could apply to any nationality of young creatives, people in the creative industries, in culture, in the burgeoning tech sector, in science, in whatever, that have come here. And I'm really, really keen to create some sort of gathering. And as far as I'm aware, you know, the governments are quite interested in this idea in Berlin involving Brits and Germans of a younger generation, but particularly of the sort of knowledge economy.
Manuel:
[11:42] So bring together the young British people in Berlin somehow.
John Kampfner:
[11:46] Yeah. And people who really want a stake in that conversation. And it's a conversation that should ... I mean, all conversations need to replenish, and all groups need to replenish and reflect the diversity in the original sense of the term, of the people they speak to. So it's just getting new voices. Because there are so many people here who have a stake inthe future of that relationship. So I'm really keen for people to get in touch with me.
Manuel:
[12:12] So what should I tell my British friends who live here or anyone who's listening who's from the UK and lives here or is going to live here, what should ... ?
John Kampfner:
[12:20] Just go onto my website which is jkampfner.net and there's a Contact me page on that, and please just just stick me a message and I will get back you, I promise.
The Political Situation in Germany
Manuel:
[12:34] Speaking of your website, you have a newsletter that I've been reading, and I know that you are very much following the upcoming federal elections here in Germany. [Yeah.] I think you used the phrase at some point: you like to "devour" everything about the elections. I thought that wasa great way to put it. [Junkie! Yeah.] Yeah! So obviously it's ... we don't have to get too much into kind of the very specific politics of it all, but it looks like our current kind of liberal-progressive coalition is going to be replaced by a more conservative government. How do you think this is going to affect the country, the city? What can we expect in terms of the next four years?
John Kampfner:
[13:23] So look, there's two ways of answering your questions. There's two ways of looking at the issue. Let me just kind of go meta first, and then I'll answer your sort of "Who's up, who's down, who's going to form the next government?" in a second. Liberal democracy - used to be called Western liberal democracy but I always thought that was insulting to many countries that embrace liberal democracy that were not sort of in the Western hemisphere - is in deep, deep crisis. I mean, that's just obvious. And the inauguration of Donald Trump, we've seen that, we're just at the foothills of the extraordinary destruction that he is going to wreak. We have no idea how far he's going to go. He probably doesn't either. But even a mild form of four years of Donald Trump is going to be horrific in almost all aspects of our lives. And in a sense, you reap what you sow, and we are hugely responsible for the rise of populists around Europe, around the world. I could name them all. Obviously the first wave was in 2016 with Brexit and the right ... [Who's we? Who's responsible?] All of us all of us, everybody listening, all of us, particularly our leaders, but you get - I've always taken the view, which is simplistic, I know - but you get the leaders you deserve. That sense of, we have kind of ridden a wave in which we have just assumed that there was one way of doing things that was the right way of doing it.
John Kampfner:
[14:52] If you look at the quality of our leaders at the moment, in France, President Macron is in deep trouble. He keeps on playing one side against the other just to buy himself time to stave off Marine Le Pen, and he's deeply unpopular. And when he arrived, a bit like Tony Blair back in 1997, a lot of people felt quite a lot of hope vested in him. Olaf Scholz, to me, has been an absolute disaster for Germany in every which way. I'll come back to him. Keir Starmer in Britain, he arrived on our Independence Day on the 4th of July last year. Nobody felt, "Oh my goodness, the guy is amazing. He's going to revolutionize the way we think." But people thought, "Well, after the disgrace and the chaos of the Boris Johnson and the conservative years, that sort of sense of humiliation that Britain felt at having this clown in charge of their country, at least we're going to get somebody sensible." And he is sensible, but he's completely lacking in charisma. And many people think he's lacking in ideas as well. In Joe Biden you had somebody who actually did bring in some interesting and good policies, but he just looked so old, he's he struggled so much to communicate, he left the door wide open for the far-right Republicans to move in.
John Kampfner:
[16:10] You just go across the piece in Italy and central Europe, wherever, the failure of good mainstream, in my view, liberal democracy to make the case for improving people's lives, for giving people hope, but also for giving a sense of what is this all for. Has been the gift that keeps on giving for far-right, occasionally far-left, but far-right populists around the world. And unless or until the SPD in Germany, the Labour Party in Britain, the Democrats in America, and you can extend that to the equivalent parties all around the world, produce a new kind of offer for the second quarter of the 21st century that speaks to the needs and the concerns and the economic travails of so many people, then democracy is properly screwed. It really, really is. And this idea I keep on hearing from sort of optimistic Germans and Brits and whoever, "Oh, we just hunker down and after four years of Trump, somebody kind of more like us will come back in." That's not going to happen. That really, really isn't.
John Kampfner:
[17:26] So back to Germany. Germany is really the epicenter of this, what I call vague notion of hope that sort of wasn't the post-war, post-unification and settlement, "Good," certainly up until the economic crisis, the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, "then we just need to keep on replicating it and everything will be fine." Forget that. That's not going to happen. And the fractiousness of the Ampel Koalition, the traffic light coalition, the three parties that dissolved in November, that really was the nadir. That was the low point, I think, of modern German politics. So what will happen now? So we have an acrimonious election campaign that certainly doesn't seem to have captured the public's imagination. There are posters everywhere, there's stuff online everywhere, but, you know ...
Manuel:
[18:19] No one really cares.
John Kampfner:
[18:19] No one really cares, and everybody, kind of ... there's a sort of element of fatalism about the whole thing.
Manuel:
[18:25] And both candidates, Merz for the CDU and Schultz for the SPD, are not beloved. Let's just say like no one likes either of the guys.
John Kampfner:
[18:34] Yeah, and so what's interesting is that the opinion polls don't seem to have moved very much. Now, does that mean they genuinely haven't moved very much, or the more alarming scenario they're not keeping pace with the way people are thinking? And are there more silent AfD voters than they are registering? I mean, already the AfD is on 20, 21 percent which is an extraordinary number. It's amazing how kind of quickly people get used to extreme situations.
Manuel:
[19:06] Yeah, one-fifth of Germans are willing to vote for a party that is provably extreme at least.
John Kampfner:
[19:17] And if you add to that, and I think the BSW, Sarah Wagenknecht's far-left meets far-right group, is equally dangerous in a different way. That's hovering around 5 percent. So that's already a quarter of the voters. And that's if the opinion polls are not understating them. So nevertheless, the firewall will continue.
Manuel:
[19:39] The firewall, meaning the democratic parties refuse to build coalitions with the AfD?
John Kampfner:
[19:46] Absolutely. And that will continue. The alarm bell - and I wrote a piece for The Guardian a few days ago, pointing to the alarm - that what happened in Austria recently has caused in Germany. In Austria, the Democratic Party said, "Right, we're going to club together to keep out the far right in Austria." And they couldn't agree on a coalition platform. That all dissolved, and so the president is having to invite the far right to take the government for the first time since the Second World War. They've been in the government, but they've never led the government in Austria. Could that happen here? In other words, whatever the final result, could the democratic parties not agree on a platform? I don't think that's possible. I think that would just be too horrific for Germany, and they will cobble something together. The bigger danger is what then follows. So the CDU are almost setting to win with polling numbers of around 30 percent. The center-right Christian Democrats, Friedrich Merz, who you've already mentioned, has taken the party further to the right than Angela Merkel did. But in a way, that's fine. If you want to vote conservative, vote conservative. You might as well have a conservative party that does that for you. The SPD is in the doldrums, thanks to the completely lackluster leadership of Schultz, around 14, 15, 16, 17 percent. He's a good campaigner. He might bring them up a bit. The Greens are in deep trouble all over the place. Numbers like that are even worse.
Manuel:
[21:17] They're so hated. But everybody hates them. It's incredible, because they seem so reasonable.
John Kampfner:
[21:24] Yeah, I mean, I don't know why. I mean, Habeck and Baerbock, the two leading figures, I think in a pretty unimpressive field, are pretty much the best that Germany has got, along with Boris Pistorius, the SPD defense minister, and a few people that people may not have heard of who may come through. But so Merz, assuming he wins, which is the pretty much unassailable assumption, will have - depending on how the cards fall and the very complicated parliamentary electoral arithmetic in this country - he will have to form a coalition with one, possibly even two of the parties. So will his first choice be SPD? Or will it be the Greens?
John Kampfner:
[22:03] Now, the nightmare scenario is that if he's forced by arithmetic to create another three-party coalition, you would then have, assuming - and I hope our listeners are still with me - assuming the liberals don't make 5 percent and don't get into parliament, you will have all the democratic parties in government, and you will have all the extremists in opposition. So the opposition would be only far-right, far-left parties. Fast forward four or five years, every government around the world at the moment - I mentioned the Brits recently - are in trouble and really struggle to bridge this gap between the expectations that the public has to sort things out very, very quickly, and the ability to deliver that in a four- or five-year time frame.
John Kampfner:
[22:54] So you can imagine a terrible scenario in '28, '29, in which whichever constellation of coalition is formed is really struggling. Trump has imposed tariffs. The economy continues to flatline. Everything is just a bit kind of gnarly and sort of miserable. And then goodness knows, you know ... And the AfD will have been showered with money from Elon Musk either directly or indirectly, and we could be in a really difficult situation. Anyway, I don't want to make people too miserable. I'm just saying that that is the possibility. And I just think it's really incumbent on everyone to not just shout out, but, you know, I love the German word, mitmachen, you know, get stuck in, get involved in trying to sort of revive a kind of new version of kind of democratic politics.
Move to Berlin now?
Manuel:
[23:44] So taking on the perspective of, let's say, a listener who's maybe in the US, has thought about moving to Germany for a while, listens to this podcast and thinks to themselves, now is the perfect time to move here, you know, leave the US. How should they be thinking about all of this? Is this not the time to move?
John Kampfner:
[24:06] I mean, the US is so interesting.
Manuel:
[24:08] Or another country. [Yeah, but the US ...] Do you still feel this is going to be a welcoming place?
John Kampfner:
[24:11] The US is a special case in that in 2016 when Trump won, so many people said, "Oh, my God, I've got to get out," and "I've got to get out to Canada," and wherever else. Canada's in trouble now as well. And most people didn't. It feels worse this time, but you can't think ... People's circumstances, it's ... you know, it's a big decision to leave a country. I wouldn't, and I don't wish to offend American listeners, there's no way I would live in America in the next four years. I ... you know, if I have to go there, I will go there really quickly and get the hell out as quickly as possible. And that's not an indictment on the people. That's an indictment of what the next four years of politics will bring. Anywhere else, I mean, these things are personal choices. I absolutely adore Berlin. I love Germany. You know, countries can have problems, but there is a sort of seriousness around this place, a sort of deliberativeness. Nobody is flippant about the way the world carries on and ... and there is a sort of earnestness, but at the same time madness of Berlin. I would, leaving aside the politics, I would hugely encourage anybody to come here.
Berlin Recommendations
Manuel:
[25:24] So let's talk about the city just a little bit more before you have to run. What is a place in Berlin, a spot that is maybe in your book or that people don't usually read about in a guidebook, that excites you?
John Kampfner:
[25:40] Oh, goodness. There are so, so many. I was thinking about this. So, in fact, I have a little list of places when ... you know, we have a constant stream of visitors from around the world coming to see us. And I just say, "Right, if you need a list, here you go," and I send it to them, of my sort of mad and wonderful places to visit, which assumes you've been to Berlin before. Because if you haven't been to Berlin before, you might as well do all the obvious stuff, the Brandenburg Gate, you know, blah, blah, blah ... the Reichstag, you know, the Holocaust Memorial, all that sort of stuff, all the obvious Berlin, you might as well do. This is for people who know the place a bit. So there are so many places. I mean, I love several parks. I love the whole area around Bergmannkiez in Kreuzberg. There are three amazing parks there: Victoria Park, Tempelhof, the great airport of the Americans post-war, which is now Berlin's largest hangout area - there's constant rumors that it's going to be developed, it's still the largest open space anywhere in a city, as far as I know, in the world - and Hasenheide, where the Great Elector used to hunt hares, hence the name, and during the pandemic it was the scene of the largest illegal raves all over Berlin as well. In terms of what kind of museums, there are two places I would hugely recommend and most Berliners have never been. The first, if you go to Spandau, the citadel, the castle in the west, which is one of the two founding areas of Berlin - it's right at the end of the U7 metro line and on the S-Bahn as well - it has got the most amazing exhibition of statues and busts that were basically knocked down, put in people's cellars, back gardens, whatever. It goes from Albert de Baer, who founded, supposedly, the city, all the way through to Lenin, who was on the top of what was then Lenin Square, and he lies on his head with the giant nail in his side that was used to knock him off the pedestal. It's this amazing car boot sale of German history. And the other one ...
Manuel:
[28:07] And this is in Zitadelle Spandau.
John Kampfner:
[28:09] Exactly.
Manuel:
[28:10] Yeah, we'll link it in the show notes.
John Kampfner:
[28:11] And the other one is very close to Anhalter Bahnhof, which was - that's the Anhalt station, that is now just a husk, it's just a front facade - this was in the 19th century during Berlin's boom years the most glamorous or one of the most glamorous train stations, and it continued to be so during the late 19th century which I think historically is the most interesting time, along with the early years, that I looked at. Anyway, Second World War, it was one of the train stations that shipped Jews to the concentration camps, along with Grunewald and one or two others. It was then bombed in Allied raids, as was most of the city. And then in 1945 and onwards, you had this enormous wave of Germans who were kicked out of their homes and their homelands in Central Europe, in what's now the Czech Republic and Poland mainly, and they were forced back into Germany, east and west, as it was then. And this was like this giant tent city around there.
John Kampfner:
[29:29] Now, subsequently, what happened was that their fate was never really talked about. And when you talk to many Germans, so many of their parents or grandparents, that happened to them. But the very notion, in the post-war era, of Germans as victims, was considered abhorrent pretty much by everybody. Germans were the perpetrators, so how could they be the victims too? But up to 10 million Germans were displaced with the Soviets moving westwards, and Poland and the Czech Republic and others having lost their eastern lands, gaining western lands off Germany.
John Kampfner:
[30:09] So they have created, and some amazing historians and curators have created, this documentation museum right off opposite Anhalter Bahnhof. Everybody I have sent there is completely mesmerized by a part of German history that's incredibly complicated, but it's really brilliantly set out in a very accessible way for just how people, you know, how did it come to be, and how did people lead their lives in that way, and what happened to all these people? And to me, it's a sign of the passage of time, but also a really mature debate about what happened to these 10 million Germans who left. And what they've done in this museum and this documentation center, is that they have combined the fate of these Germans with the fate of displaced people around the world, so people from the Balkans, from Syria, from Afghanistan, Iraq, from the Vietnam War, and going back in history as well. So to seeing this in the round. Anyway, that's really, really ... I wouldn't say it's great fun, but it's certainly amazingly fascinating.
Manuel:
[31:19] So this is called Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung at Anhalter Bahnhof.
John Kampfner:
[31:25] So those two, they will not be in the usual maps of ... or tour guides, itineraries necessarily. I think they're amazing.
Manuel:
[31:34] What do you do for fun? Do you go clubbing?
John Kampfner:
[31:36] Oh, I do.
Manuel:
[31:36] Have you been to Berghain?
John Kampfner:
[31:37] I have been once, once, even though I'm ancient now. I love the music scene. I go endlessly to theater here. I think there's some amazing theater in Berlin, some amazing art galleries. The winter is kind of fun because it's so sort of existential.
Manuel:
[31:57] That's funny that you call it fun, because everybody says the winter is ... "Don't come here in the winter. It's too gray. It's too cold. It's too ..."
John Kampfner:
[32:04] Well, so far this winter has been actually all right.
Manuel:
[32:06] Yes. It's been pretty good. Today it's really cold, but also kind of beautiful, the sun is coming out .. .
John Kampfner:
[32:11] Yeah, I think most of the time it's been, it's been pretty good. And then you kind of do stuff. You see friends, you do stuff, you do things, you hunker down, and it's got its own charm. But of course ... and there's very little Spring and very little Fall here in Berlin, it just kind of clicks from one to the other. And then once the summer happens, there's this explosion of stuff on the streets, music on the streets, festivals, whether it's music festivals, whether it's dance festivals, cultural festivals, just everything happens. And then, of course, you've got the lakes and the countryside around and everybody just kind of goes and hangs out.
Manuel:
[32:48] How do you make time for all of these things, given how many books you write and the things you do?
John Kampfner:
[32:54] I don't know. I just ... I always use the following phrase, "I've got lots of time to rest when I'm dead," so I might as well just kind of not bother resting and just do stuff.
Bureaucracy and the Housing Crisis
Manuel:
[33:04] You said earlier, despite kind of the pessimistic political prognosis that you have: everybody should move here it's a great place to live, [Yeah.] but then there's the problem of bureaucracy and not enough housing. How do you view those types of things?
John Kampfner:
[33:23] With difficulty. I mean they are both really really annoying. Hopefully the new government will start to deal with bureaucracy, I mean, just there are so many things that are wind up about this place. I mean, the cash economy really does my head in. I mean, I'm just used to most countries where I'm in London, go to Oslo, go to Paris, wherever, you just use these cards. The idea of even having cash in your pocket or whatever is just sort of belongs to the 19th century. So I completely don't understand this.
Manuel:
[33:50] It's changing now.
John Kampfner:
[33:51] Yeah, a little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit. I still always think, "Oh, shit, I don't have any cash, what am I going to do in this sort of cafe or restaurant or whatever?" And it's kind of def ... this is the bit of Berlin that I really think needs to change, this sort of defiant refusal to embrace the modern world. It's just like, okay, it's kind of quaint, but it's just silly.
Manuel:
[34:13] Do you have other examples other than cash?
John Kampfner:
[34:17] Well, the sort of the Schnauze. I mean, the lack of any sense of service economy. You know, bus drivers who kind of gnarl at you, and lots of cafes and restaurants ... I mean, my favorite story, I was in ... not far from here in Prenzlauer Berg, I was in some brunch place a year or two ago. The place was pretty much empty, and the guy just couldn't be bothered to give me a menu. And so I just went up to him very politely and said, you know, "Are you going to give me a menu anytime soon?" He looked at me and he said, "Look at me, how many legs how many arms do I have?" Right. And I just thought, "All right I've had it. I'm out of here, you're not getting my money. I'm going somewhere else." So I just think it needs to develop this kind of sort of service economy, and, you know, it does need to modernize. And the key is: how do you modernize but you keep your cool? And I think It's easily, easily done. So many cities in the world manage to do that.
John Kampfner:
[35:12] So those are the things. And, you know, I mean, whether it's your TV license or this or that, you still get ridiculous letters into your letterbox. I mean, have nobody heard of email? And you still exchange business cards, which in itself is an old concept, with people who give you their fax number. I mean, you know, again, that's sort of 19th century technology. So all that needs to kind of, you know, get moving with the times. But nevertheless, on the rent, yeah, I mean, goodness knows, rents used to be a quarter or a third of the equivalent, say, in London, Paris, New York. Now they're probably two-thirds, three-quarters. It's creeping up.
Manuel:
[35:51] It's changing quickly.
John Kampfner:
[35:53] It is changing.
Manuel:
[35:53] You know, it makes a big difference if your rental contract is from two or three or four years ago versus you're moving in now.
John Kampfner:
[36:02] Absolutely. And that changes people. And the artists and creatives and people who just want to do things and experiment, that becomes increasingly difficult. New York found that, London has found that, the big cities have found that. And that is what's going to happen, but I mean, you know, it's from a very, very different base. Berlin still has many, many years of cool and fun and distinctiveness. This Berlin exceptionalism may not be quite as sharp as it used to be, but it's still very much here.