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| Home - City Guide - Berlin - City Overview | ||
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City Overview After a fifty year lull Berlin is back - back as the capital of a reunified Germany and back as one of Europe's great cities. After World War II Berlin was a crippled pawn, sandwiched between East and West, with a literal and metaphoric wall deeply dividing the two halves. Berlin even suffered the ignominy of losing its capital status as the West German government fled south to Bonn. Today the Cold War and the iconographic events of November 1989, that saw the Berlin Wall was torn to pieces by those who it had oppressed for so long, are starting to seem like a distant memory and all the talk in Berlin is of the future. The city is a forest of cranes as a new Berlin emerges from the dust and rubble of the no man's land that used to be its dead heart, in the biggest construction project in Europe since World War Two. Postdamer Platz is the most voluminous project, but the most symbolic recent construction is at the Reichstag. British architect Lord Foster has rejuvenated the German parliament with an impressive glass dome that symbolises the new transparency in German politics, that of a nation with nothing to hide that has freed itself from the ghosts of its past. Coupled with this avalanche of new construction is a city laden with historical charm, from the old streets of East Berlin where little has changed in fifty years, through to the grand architecture of Museumsinsel and Unter den Linden and the green lung of the Tiergarten park. Tourism is on the rise as visitors come to savour the intoxicating mix of old and new. Big business too is booming as government bodies flock back from Bonn and relocate in the capital, along with investment from many other parts of the country and from all over Europe. Key industries include electronics, manufacturing and information technology. Any first time visitors expecting a city blighted with the German clichÉs of boring bankers and efficient citizens with little time to let their hair down, will be pleasantly surprised by a city with some of the liveliest nightlife in Europe. In Berlin today there are everything from authentic beer halls and old Soviet era haunts, right through to buzzing style bars and Latino nightclubs. Berlin's climate is equally eclectic with hot summer days giving way to freezing temperatures, with clear blue skies, in winter. Today's quintessential Berlin experience is to laze through a summer day in the Tiergarten with the rabble of construction just out of earshot, sipping on a chilled pilsner beer, while you witness a city reinventing itself as one of the great European capitals. |
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