Somewhere Unique
22 August 2026 Berlin
I feel the potential draining from Berlin.
Last summer, they felled the street lamp in front of my house. Sawed off the hollow stem like a dead tree and hauled it away on a flatbed truck.
The lamp was a remnant of East Germany. The GDR’s planned economy had lined every street in every one of its cities with identical, raw concrete street lamps. Today, they’re weathered and worn; certainly longer energy efficient. Their time had finally come.
In fact, the city has long used these lamps with just one active lightbulb to save energy, creating a uniquely glum, orange light characteristic of nighttime East Berlin.
Right next to where the concrete post stood, the city erected a slender new metal street lamp with lights so bright that I can only presume them to be LEDs. It was a sensible renovation, arguably an improvement, and yet I couldn’t help but feel that something was getting lost in the process. The old East German lamps might not have looked pretty, but the light they cast was certainly unique: A subtle reminder of the city’s history, visible every night.
The different light sources in Berlin used to show the exact division of the city on satellite images, long after the country and its capital had reunified.
Berlin epitomizes change. This is a place that‘s never the same, never done, always metamorphosing and turning into something else.
Come here, and that change is exhilarating. But stay for long and you can start feeling uprooted.
Nothing ever stays the same. Neighborhoods transform. Entire districts go in and out of fashion. Buildings go up, places close down, entire train stations vanish and re-emerge.
The constant change isn’t limited to the built environment, it also sweeps up people: Most everyone is just passing through. Sometimes that means spending a decade in the city, sometimes even more, but eventually most people move somewhere else, often hastily because something else came up or simply because they stopped getting along with Berlin. Perhaps that’s why native Berliners joke that you can’t become a Berliner: most everybody who comes here eventually also leaves.
The effect is a sense of permanent transience. And as someone who moved here 16 years ago, I can’t help but wonder when my own time will come.
Lately, I’ve been feeling my ties to Berlin loosening up. I’m not falling out of love with the city, but I find it different, the overall vibe no longer quite in alignment with my own. I’m certainly not the same person I was in 2010, so for weeks I questioned if the change I noticed came from the city or myself. The answer is both: I’m noticing a slow erosion in what always felt like potential.
I hesitate to even throw that term around: Potential is a slippery term. It describes a state of almost-being there, a promise rather than an finished state. Why would that feeling of on-the-cuspness be important to me?
What I’ve settled on is a simple calculus: If I truly get to choose where to live, then I want it to be a place that excites and perhaps even mystifies me.
That’s exactly what potential achieves: In a city that’s forever changing, you’re in for a lot of surprises. And you can even get swept up by the momentum. You might not know what’s coming, might remain forever mystified. But you can’t deny the excitement.
It felt different than the (West) Germany I grew up in; a place full of tangible history. I remember first discovering the empty Tempelhof air field, my shock of being able to cycle across an airport runway next to one of Europe’s largest buildings. To learn about the Mauerweg, St. Augustinus church, Bären-Quell-Brauerei. Berlin was able to surprise me, over and over again.
It still happens every once in a while: turn a corner, go down an unknown street and run into a new place. A few days ago, I “found“ a new street just blocks from the apartment I’ve lived at for six years. Potential! Berlin seemingly always has a trick up its sleeve.
(a building being renovated had its front door open. I snuck in with my kid, looking at the unknown courtyard. Pristine East German mailboxes, time standing still in a hallway, surrounded by a city that pushes ever forward.)
A lot of that has to do with the city’s history. Having been largely destroyed in WWII and then divided and reunified, the city thrived on being an oddity: During the division, West Berlin was a weird exclave of West Germany while East Berlin turned into a socialist showcase.
This means I now live on the territory of a state that no longer exists, within the boundaries of another one. It means inhabiting the remnants of socialist capital with all the benefits of a Western democracy: Cracking concrete and mosaics in the East (they sure loved mosaics!), a strangely-preserved 1970s Germany in the West, all held together with post-reunion optimism, government cash injections, and a insistent optimism. A city that feels forgotten but also trying to be a capital. Sprinkle in som speculative 21st century tech culture (companies and services arriving and departing at breakneck speed), and you have yourself somewhere unique.
Any place that thrives on uniqueness necessarily comes with pros and cons.
There‘s an entire genre of opinion pieces complaining about Berlin, its difference from the rest of the county (a feature, not a bug). I don’t want to fall into that trap, and I don’t think that’s what’s happening to me either.
Like in England or France, people loathe their capital, consider its difference to the rest of the country not an asset but a liability. Don’t see how it’s a pressure valve for other-ness but rather consider it a fault to be corrected. But unlike England and France, the German capital isn’t posh; it’s rather more poor than the rest of the country. This isn’t loathing of a perceived elite but a combination of looking down, feeling that Berliners aren’t applying themselves, or simply doing it wrong.
Berlin can certainly be an acquired taste: It isn’t conventionally pretty. It’s chaotic, many things don’t work. It’s an easy target. But: the people writing the opinion pieces usually don’t understand that despite of its shortcomings, Berlin has that potential to it; they fail to see the sense of possibility.
Exhilarating like sth new could happen there, like the spawning ground for sth else, and yet it turned out to be just more of the same.
My fear is that the potential is draining away, one paved-over lot at a time. What I’m starting to miss is the very uniqueness that made Berlin Berlin. The signs are there: The slow-but-gradual alignment with vanilla Germany, hell, vanilla everything. The people, now different.
Do I feel this way because the potential hasn’t been fulfilled?
But something has been feeling different: Like that symbolic street lamp, the uniqueness is giving out. Potential is draining. Normalcy is settling in. The rough edges that characterize this city (for better or for worse) are disappearing.
It is disappearing, closing, cleared for more of the same.
Not just with buildings and tangible history, but also with people and potential, some which was and some that wasn’t ever fulfilled.
I also think there‘s been a realization brewing in me that the city is its people, the ones I know and interact with, not just some independent thing that exists independent from my own life. When people started moving away, the city shrank and changed face.