BERLIN -- Saturday morning in the new German capital and the streets had the air of a small provincial town. It was after 9, and I walked empty sidewalks past tightly sealed shops -- dirty, unshaven, my stomach growling. (I had just arrived on the overnight train from Krakow and learned that my room wouldn't be ready until 2.) I stepped into a phone booth and called the first name in my notebook, the sister of a friend whose husband was the manager of the Hotel Adlon.
"Hello!" the voice on the other end bellowed. "Johnny told me you were coming. Why don't you meet me for lunch at the Adlon.""I'm not very presentable," I said.
"Don't worry about it. I'll meet you in the lobby at 12."
A few hours later I was sipping chilled carrot soup (given an unexpected fizz by the curious infusion of ginger ale) in the sidewalk cafe of the elegant Adlon framed at one end by the Brandenburg Gate. In the space of a morning I had gone from short-term homeless person to feted friend of the family. It is only when traveling that one's fortunes change with such dramatic swiftness.
Soon Marylea's husband joined us, a youthful-looking man in blue blazer (a green kerchief erupting from the pocket) and wire-frame glasses. He took a seat and watched the parade on Unter den Linden with a look of proprietary contentment. He occupied the calm, luxurious eye of the storm. Behind the Adlon the British Embassy was going up, and next door, the U.S. Embassy was due to rise, as soon as we convinced the local government to reroute a street (security measures). To the south soared the cranes and freshly sprouted corporate headquarters of Potsdamer Platz; a little to the north sat the Reichstag, with its novel glass hump (the "transparent republic"), and the construction site of incipient government offices. A block to the east, giving the gracious tree-lined avenue a slightly morbid cast, the former Hungarian Embassy revealed the half-finished workings of a wrecker's ball. A large pipe, painted pink, rose on stilts and ran across the street near the Brandenburg Gate. It looked like an extravagant piece of public art.
"That's for carrying water from construction sites," Marylea explained. "The city is built on sand, and wherever they dig they find water."
I asked if, despite the upheaval, Unter den Linden had regained its status as the city's fashionable promenade.
"What you hear," said Marylea, "is that the people from the East say that the West has spoiled it, and that they don't want to come here anymore."
Jean K, taking in the passing crowds, remarked, "You see the worst-dressed people in this city."
I'd heard that Berlin had no sense of style.
"I don't think they even know how to spell 'style,' " he said.
My hotel, the Hackescher Markt, was tucked away on a small street with a hefty name (Grosse Prasidentenstrasse) in the heart of the district -- Mitte -- in the heart of the city. This, too, was the former East, and in 10 years it, along with Prenzlauer Berg to the north, had become Berlin's hot spot. The buildings were older than in the West, and more dilapidated, providing that atmosphere of urban decay so popular with the young. Yet things were changing: Whole tenements were now shrouded behind curtained scaffolding, and balconies landscaped with neatly boxed flowers. Old cafes had succumbed to the wiles of interior designers, providing modernistic and innovative backdrops, though on the long summer evenings patrons preferred to squeeze into the plain, tightly bunched picnic tables set up on the sidewalks. You felt sort of sorry for the designers, their works abandoned for the open-air equivalent of a beer hall.
Catty-corner from my hotel stood Hackesche Hofe, a collection of art deco buildings and courtyards that was like a Riverfront for adults: stylish high-ceilinged restaurants, bohemian cafes, an art movie house, a small theater offering a summer program -- appropriate, in this former Jewish quarter -- of klezmer music.
Along Oranienburger Strasse, up past the prostitutes in their thigh-high black leather boots, and the armed guards stationed in front of the Neue Synagogue, restaurants flourished. I asked a young man where I might eat, and he said: "There's a good Italian place on the next block, and a wonderful Thai place across the street. And if you like sushi, there's . . ."
He lived in Prenzlauer Berg, doing computer graphics on the top floor of an abandoned factory overlooking a beer garden. There seemed no better life. "You go down, have a sausage, see someone wearing crazy pants, and your head's already filled with new ideas."
On Monday I took the S-Bahn train to Schoneberg to meet a friend of a friend at the Cafe Einstein. I peered out the window as we headed west, trying to see where the wall once ran, to locate that moment when socialist gray gave way to capitalist color, but it had all been blurred into an inner-city exhaustion of faded tenements and dusty trees.
On Nov. 9, 1989, the wall came down.
"The first few years there was a kind of curiosity on both sides -- the East was visiting the West and vice versa. Young people from the West went over and started renting apartments because they were cheap. Now sometimes they're more expensive than here. The good feeling has died down," said my friend Matthias. "People don't clap their hands now that the wall has come down. You make a point of going to the East, you don't just wander over. You think: I haven't been there for a while, I should go and see what's happened."
Matthias himself rarely went. "I don't want to. They complain. They have a different way of thinking. My wife works in the East and even now she comes home in the evening and says, 'It's good that I'm back in the West again."'
Yet he felt there had been an "Easternization" of Berlin. "It's difficult to pinpoint, but there are times when you definitely feel that we have become more Eastern."
Even while taking on the trappings of a great city. "Now you have poverty, and great wealth. Before, if you wanted to talk to a millionaire, you went to Frankfurt or Stuttgart. West Berlin was not a place to make money.
"But," he added, "how can you be a great metropolis without building on your traditions? Yet going back to your roots is a tricky business in Germany."
He found the architecture of the new Potsdamer Platz mediocre at best. "It is dictated by concepts other than aesthetic. The Arkaden (the new mall) has no connection to anything around it. It is as if it was dropped down with no reason."
And he did not rejoice in the city's new role as capital. "Berliners as a whole don't want to have much to do with government. Most politicians, when they come here, get a bad reception. Kennedy was the exception. Berlin was the only German city that wasn't Nazi; they never got a majority here. Berliners have always been very critical of authority.
"It shows in the language. The local dialect, the local accent, is associated with disrespect, a kind of roughness. It's a harsh place. My friends from the south come and they all complain about how impolite Berliners are."
The next morning, on my way to the Jewish Museum, I stopped by the Arkaden and experienced that strange sense of dislocation that is becoming more and more common in travel. It was a classic, airy mall, with Beanie Babies in shop windows, gargoyle bookends in the Museum Company store, a life-size cardboard cutout of Troy Aikman standing outside the Playoff Diner.
I left quickly and headed down to Kreuzberg, the neighborhood that, before the opening of the wall, and the ascension of Prenzlauer Berg, had been popular with the young, many of whom came to Berlin looking for an alternative to the materialism of other West German cities.
On Linden Strasse I found the new Jewish Museum, its severe, zinc-covered walls rising in dramatic contrast to the baroque Berlin Museum next door. Cut seemingly randomly across the facade were a few thin lines, like fissures, that constituted small windows. From one angle they resembled a fractured Star of David; elsewhere they looked like random defacements. The effect was one of dissolution.
Inside, the feeling continued. (Though it is not scheduled to open until October of 2000, guided tours are available, making this perhaps the only museum in the world to be viewed devoid of exhibits.) My last evening in Berlin I went across to the Hackesche Hofe to hear a concert of klezmer music. Jewish culture is experiencing a wave of interest in Berlin, as in Poland, especially among young non-Jews, and klezmer music is an accessible and, in Germany at least, intelligible aspect. The crowd bunched into the small theater was a mix of young and old, with jeaned twenty- and thirtysomethings predominating. After the concert I struck up a conversation with Detlef, the boyfriend of an American I'd met in Krakow.
"Even when the wall was up, Prenzlauer Berg was a place for artists and other creative people," he said.
"I never liked East Germans," he said. "They'd go around without smiling. But I didn't want reunification with West Germany. I wanted a revolution within East Germany."
He reflected a moment, this ex-revolutionary tuba player turned klezmer musician with a California girlfriend. "But I wouldn't change what happened for anything. I've never felt so good. Every day I feel better. Tomorrow I'll feel better than today."