This is a city like a jig saw puzzle; assembled and disassembled by time. And still there are holes where once a security zone was. I see bullet holes in stone facades also. And museums made of slate, so many museums. There is a lot of gray and grit by the old Berlin Wall. And the murals commemorate where the wall once stood as a barrier but now burst in unity and celebration with colour. This is the East Side Gallery; a 1.3 km. stretch of The Berlin Wall still standing and converted into the worlds largest open-air art gallery.

From the remains of Reichstag and the Brandenburg gate to The Bundeskanzleramt and the Sony Center, I see the past — buildings erected in the 1800’s standing like sentinels next to todays state of the art modern day structures. Things looking more like computer screens than buildings. And virtually all the people in Mitte are artists dressed so funky that they might even have suits made of micro chips and mortar. Saint Augustine said that every city is a living body, and that seems to be everywhere here, all these people and places from the future and the past colliding, to make this place seem like a present always in flux and never quite locatable.

Tags: berlin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 16:52 and is filed under DEVELOPMENT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.