25 Years After the Berlin Wall Fell, a City of Freedom and Creativity Rises From Its Rubble

“Berlin is now Europe’s Silicon Valley.” Twenty-five years after the Berlin Wall fell, creative industries growing along its former route are changing this “poor but sexy” city. “Congratulations, the Berlin Wall has fallen”—a remark heard on the Paris Métro, addressed to all humanity.

Just a few days ago, Berlin was divided in two again. The line followed the same route, but this time it was made of 8,000 glowing balloons stretching 15 kilometers, rather than a brick wall. Last night, the “border of light” disappeared as the balloons rose into the sky.

You have probably guessed why: LICHTGRENZE—German for “border of light”—marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Twenty-five years later, Simon Schaefer can no longer pick out East Berliners by their clothes and expressions alone. But he vividly remembers the day the Wall fell, when he was 12. He grew up in West Berlin. That day, his parents went to see the crowds near the Wall. West Germans welcomed their East German compatriots with flowers and beer. People climbed onto the Wall, covered it in graffiti and broke off pieces to keep as souvenirs.

For safety’s sake, his parents left Schaefer at home. “I will never forgive them for that,” he told QDaily.

Today, Factory, the startup campus Schaefer founded, stands beside the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße in the Mitte district, on the site of a former brewery. From his office window, he sees a steady stream of visitors coming to remember the East Germans shot dead while trying to cross the Wall.

The Factory creative campus stands beside the Berlin Wall Memorial

Bernauer Straße is where East German soldier Hans Conrad Schumann defected to the West by leaping over a barbed-wire fence. You may have seen the famous black-and-white photograph in a history book. At the time, the Berlin Wall was still a makeshift barrier of barbed wire, yet to become a concrete wall 3.6 meters high and 1.2 meters thick. A German photographer captured Schumann in mid-leap. Sculptures and images of that moment now appear outside cafés and restaurants all along Bernauer Straße.

In the photograph, Bernauer Straße is empty, hemmed in by cold walls and barbed wire. Today, Mitte is one of Berlin’s liveliest creative communities. It houses the city’s most important government institutions, as well as many prominent galleries and design studios.

Before marveling at how much has changed, consider this: several communities like Mitte now lie along the Wall’s former route. Their growing creative industries have turned once bleak, run-down neighborhoods into new sources of prosperity for Berlin.

The timing feels almost fated. Many Germans of Schaefer’s generation, most of them born in the 1970s, saw the Wall fall when they were teenagers. After finishing school in the 1990s, many gravitated toward districts near it and began careers as designers in abandoned factories and basements. In just over a decade, they helped reshape Berlin’s population. Walk its streets today and most of the people you see are young. Berliners invariably call their city “young,” though it has just celebrated its 777th birthday.

The brothers Christopher and Marc Bauder, who designed the glowing-balloon installation, are part of that generation. “Berlin is unlike any other German city. People often say, ‘Berlin is not Germany.’ To them, Berlin is an island; to us, it is fertile ground,” Christopher Bauder told QDaily. In this case, his “fertile ground” can be taken literally: he means the land itself.

The Bauder brothers designed the glowing-balloon installation marking 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall

The Bauder brothers’ studio, WHITEvoid, is in Prenzlauer Berg, close to the former Wall. Once part of East Berlin, it was among the first creative districts to develop along the Wall. After reunification, many East Berlin factories closed because their products were poor and their businesses unprofitable, leaving workshops and warehouses empty. As unemployment soared, many East Berliners moved west, abandoning homes as well. The brothers got their first office for very little money.

An empty factory building in central Berlin’s Mitte district

Cheap rent and low living costs are the main reasons designers and artists have opened studios in Berlin. “Poor, but sexy,” as Mayor Klaus Wowereit famously described it. Berlin remains Europe’s least expensive capital apart from Lisbon, and many dilapidated buildings in its central districts still await renovation. In 2010, rents were roughly half those in Munich, in southern Germany.

Those empty, unrepaired buildings let young people establish themselves in Berlin cheaply. They also gave artists room to follow their ideas without worrying too much about commercial returns.

When the Bauder brothers arrived in Prenzlauer Berg 15 years ago, it already held a large community of artists, anarchists and poor students. Most occupied rooms and basements in empty buildings for nothing or next to nothing, often for years. This squatter movement, which ran from the 1980s until around 2000, helped make Berlin’s creative industries possible.

Schaefer started his own business in East Berlin in 2004: a sneaker shop. Rents were still cheap. “East Berlin was a testing ground for young people,” he said. “There were no rules.” Nightclubs, strip clubs and gay bars flourished. Rockers and hippies found kindred spirits, and neighbors did not complain even when parties lasted all night.

In East Berlin’s drab rooms, still marked by bullet holes from World War II, these young people found an outlet for their creativity. Electronic music, bars and a rebellious culture took root. Almost by accident, Berlin became Europe’s freest and most unconventional city.

Young squatters in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, photographed in 1981

Schaefer calls the people who gathered in East Berlin the “electronic-music generation.” Between 1997 and 2001, they founded many small companies in Berlin. Most began by designing flyers, websites and sets for parties or concerts. Schaefer himself once designed websites.

Hamburg-born Chris Middleton and two fellow students at the Technical University of Berlin took part in the squatter movement and belonged to that generation.

The three occupied a basement in East Berlin and opened a tiny bar. “Back then, East Berlin was like an abandoned city. The police had more important things to deal with. They paid no attention to young people like us,” Middleton said.

Bars like theirs were everywhere in East Berlin. Tresor, later a stronghold of electronic music, also began there. At their bar, Middleton and his friends met people who shared their interests. Through the contacts they gradually made—believe it or not—they began their design careers.

Kinzo’s three founders, with Chris Middleton at far left. Photo: Franziska Rieder

Friends brought them jobs building stage sets and designing exhibition stands and offices. The three eventually founded Kinzo, a design studio in Mitte, which offered more options than Prenzlauer Berg, the district that had developed earlier. Along with an office, they rented a workshop cheaply to make the office furniture they designed. The turning point came in 2007, when Kinzo designed offices at the headquarters of German publishing group Axel Springer. Its custom Kinzo Air desk won a Red Dot Award.

Kinzo became one of Berlin’s leading office designers. Its clients include Adidas headquarters and SoundCloud’s office at Factory. Curiously, it won the SoundCloud job because a DJ who had once worked at the bar later joined the company.

SoundCloud Berlin’s office, designed by Kinzo. Photo: Werner Huthmacher

Contacts are only one advantage of the community. Its studios and services also complement one another: a nearby studio designed Kinzo’s catalog, for instance. Mitte has plenty of cafés and bars where designers and artists meet, talk and spark ideas.

But Middleton says Mitte’s rents have doubled in ten years. The change in Prenzlauer Berg is more pronounced. “If I were choosing now, I wouldn’t put my studio in Prenzlauer Berg,” Christopher Bauder said. “Most people living here now are parents with children. Rents have gone up, and the atmosphere has changed.”

These districts are being gentrified. Once unruly arts neighborhoods, they are becoming increasingly upscale. Bars have moved out, and artists have left. Renovated old buildings are in demand, and middle-class families are moving in.

Part of that change comes from the electronic-music generation growing up.

“Berlin is now Europe’s Silicon Valley,” Schaefer told QDaily. He compares Berlin’s electronic-music culture to the 1960s hippie movement in San Francisco, which helped shape Silicon Valley’s spirit. His Factory campus houses Silicon Valley names such as Twitter, and Google is one of its partners. The restaurant is unfinished, but demand already exceeds the supply of Factory’s newly renovated offices. Schaefer has decided to put up another building in front of the one that still looks new.

Simon Schaefer, founder of Factory Berlin

The former website designer and sneaker-shop owner now speaks at length in fluent English to reporters from the BBC and CNN, attracting more attention than the executives in his building. He knows the Wall is one of Factory’s selling points. Those companies could have put their headquarters in southern German cities with better transport links and stronger economies.

As Schaefer has built his career, capital from around the world has flowed into Berlin, helping its creative and design industries mature.

Schaefer already plans to put up another building in Kreuzberg, which developed as a creative district after Mitte. It has displaced Mitte as designers’ new favorite. “Kreuzberg is what Prenzlauer Berg was ten years ago,” Marc Bauder said.

Kreuzberg has a large Turkish immigrant community and a thriving mix of cultures. Its streets are covered in colorful graffiti and full of eccentrically dressed young people. Though it is late autumn, many people still sit beside the road, drinking coffee and chatting at leisure.

According to Jana Borkamp, the district councilor responsible for economic, municipal and cultural affairs, the Berlin Wall once surrounded Kreuzberg on three sides. After the Wall fell, the district found itself at Berlin’s geographic center. Many abandoned buildings were slated for demolition and rebuilding, but artists resisted and moved in, making Kreuzberg one of the squatter movement’s centers. The government then paid the district little attention until 2009, when it began considering ways to support its cultural industries.

That was the year Michael Schneider moved his studio from Cologne to Kreuzberg. He wanted, he said, “a fresh change.” He had worked in product design at the well-known American studio Phoenix Design.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Schneider was on the Paris Métro. Someone nearby heard him speaking German with a companion, leaned over and said to them, “Congratulations, the Berlin Wall has fallen.” Schneider recalled: “I hadn’t seen the news for days. I could hardly believe it.” Later, he drove to Berlin and noticed an unfamiliar smell on the highway. The fuel used by East German cars had a different composition from West German fuel—and smelled different too.

After moving to Berlin, Schneider could rent a studio of more than 100 square meters in Kreuzberg for just 1,200 euros a month. A comparable space in Cologne would have cost about twice as much. In Kreuzberg, the government pays to renovate buildings, then offers them to artists and designers at low rents. It also helps them find investors and clients around the world. Schneider mainly designs home furnishings and interiors. His clients span the globe and include Songfa Ceramics in Guangdong, China.

Design Schneider’s studio in Kreuzberg

Kreuzberg will certainly not be the last creative district beside the former Wall. Others are beginning to take shape. Some say Neukölln will be next; others point to Lichtenberg. Wherever the next one is, the process will continue. Artists and designers are still moving to Berlin from Britain, the United States, Scandinavia and even Mexico.

“Berlin used to be young and wild. Now it has grown up,” Christopher Bauder said. “Creativity will become part of everyday life here.”

Last night, more than 100,000 Germans came to Berlin for the weekend. They would soon find the trip worthwhile. In front of the Brandenburg Gate, Mayor Klaus Wowereit gave a moving speech. Openly gay, he is widely seen as the first to establish Berlin’s atmosphere of freedom and tolerance. With Angela Merkel, Mikhail Gorbachev, former president Joachim Gauck and others looking on, the Bauder brothers’ balloon “Berlin Wall” rose into the sky, as if looking down on a city that had never seemed so alive. The designers are said to have chosen the balloons’ lightness and brightness as a deliberate contrast to concrete’s weight and hardness—much like Berlin today and Berlin then.

Cover image: Streamingmuseum.org