It’s a scene Berliners have become accustomed to now that their home draws 9 million visitors every year: Strolling in the park and having to dodge Segways and “conference bikes” pedaled by seven drunken people at once; birdsong drowned out by a tour guide trying to condense a century of history into a narrative consumed like a half-pint of Pilsner.
For once this isn’t at Tiergarten park by the Brandenburg Gate, but at Planterwald, in former East Berlin, the venue for a festival last weekend which let local people play at being tourists in their own city.
The number of tourists in Berlin is a hot topic with the city’s residents at the moment: Earlier this year, many newspaper columns were devoted to the debate after a community meeting was convened in the popular Kreuzberg district under the banner “Help! The Tourists Are Coming!”
Last weekend’s festival, organized by Berlin’s leading modern theater, Hau, Lunapark Berlin was an attempt to ask what future there was for the 3.4 million people who actually live in the city.
“To many young tourists, Berlin appears to be one big pleasure zone,” Hau’s blurb said. “If tourism is Berlin’s biggest growth industry — making the city hope for 50,000 new jobs over the next few years — where will those who provide for the fun for the guests relax?”
“I’m not anti-tourist,” Hau’s curator, Stefanie Wenner, said on Saturday. “We are simply asking: Is Berlin just turning into one big amusement park for tourists?”
“In principle, I think it’s good that we receive so many guests, but I think it should be better controlled so that more of the money they bring in goes not into the coffers of private firms, but to the state,” she said. “Perhaps there should be a tourist tax, for example, where a few euros were added to the cost of each overnight stay.”
By a neat coincidence, Wenner’s festival was held in the grounds of what was once the only theme park in East Germany. The Kulturpark was built in 1969 as a socialist project to provide entertainment for the proletariat and celebrate 20 years of the German Democratic Republic.
MAGIC CARPET RIDE
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the attraction was renamed the Spreepark and taken over by a colorful West German family — two members of whom were jailed after 181kg of cocaine was found hidden inside the base of the 1001 Nights Magic Carpet Ride. The owner’s daughter, Sabrina Witte, guided visitors around the park and provide a warts-and-all history of how it tore her family apart.
The Spreepark closed in 2001 and has lain dormant for a decade, the enormous Ferris wheel poking up above the trees the only reminder of what once was. A family of noisy frogs have moved into the log flume’s lake, the spinning tea cups no longer send children dizzy and many of the swan boats have lost their heads.
It has long been a favorite haunt for teenagers looking for a trippy place to get stoned, but this past weekend was the first time in a decade that the park was open to the public.
For a 5 euro (US$7.15) entry fee, visitors to Lunapark Berlin could explore the grounds — by foot, Segway or conference bike, alone or on guided tours. The Trouble With Tourism Tour was led by a Northern Irish guide called Finn Ballard who told a stream of stories about the stupid things Berlin’s visitors say and do.
GETTING DIRECTIONS
“Once, I had someone say to me, ‘We really want to visit the Third Reich. Please can you show us on the map?’ What can you say? ‘Go to the end of the street and turn right at 1933,’” he said.
A particular bugbear is the way so many tourists see everything through a camera lens — or their mobile phone screens.
“They seem to think everything is a video game,” Ballard said.
“They take a Hipstamatic picture on their iPhone without even knowing what they are taking a picture of and post it on Facebook without even finding out,” he said, adding that while most of his guests are intelligent and well informed, he has seen tourists taking pictures of each other doing peace signs in the gas chambers at Sachsenhausen concentration camp just outside Berlin.
On this theme, one popular attraction at the festival was having your picture taken pretending to be a tourist at Checkpoint Charlie, the former border control between East and West which is now one of Berlin’s top tourist attractions.
‘BURN OUT MAN’
The highlight came on Saturday night with the lighting of the so-called “Burn Out Man” — a monstrous 5m tall wooden wicker man, which organizers said represented the ills of modern Berlin life.
“We’re against what has been called the neue Mudigkeitsgesellschaft — the tired society where everyone is mentally kaput and there is no distinction between work and leisure. We’re against the North American capitalist model which demands people work all the time,” said Nick Duric from the Showcase Beat Le Mot collective.
At 9pm, the Burn Out Man ceremony began with a marching band and choir singing a specially written song which railed against, among other things, the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant and capitalism.
Duric said Berlin’s ramshackle trademarks were being eroded by soulless capitalist projects — particularly a slick development just upstream called Mediaspree, home to the 02 venue, which is trying to position itself as the new centre of Berlin’s cultural life.
“All there is in Berlin is politics and art. People like the cultural landscape because it is chaotic, disorganized. Take that away and what will we have left?” he said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese