Capital Glamour

The largest daily newspaper of Germany threw a party the other day. Not exactly a party, more a function. For politicans and clients, so the staging was quite regal. They had rented the Bode Museum in Berlin, an opulent place with massive halls overloaded with stucco and statures and treasures from mideaval times. Since the fine cuisine situation in Berlin is even more dire than in Munich, they had hired Käfer, the Bavarian equivalent of Dean & De Lucca, to do the catering, so there was great meats and finger foods and the signature dish of Bavarian pretension, pasta with truffles drowned in heavy cream sauce.

For me it was of course quite exciting to mingle in a room full of political A-list celebrities who I've known only from news photos. Our chancelorette Angela Merkel stopped by and since she lives only across the bridge from the museum hung out for quite a while to chat in length with the editor in chief and his deputy. There were her fierce social democrat counterparts in the grand coalition Mr. Müntefering and Mr. Gabriel, who sport Viking beards and the swagger of cruiser weight champs. Well, their grand coalitioning ain't no picknick, so it's good to know we got some Social Democrats in fighting condition there. Of course one shouldn't be blinded by the glamour of the moment and forget, that those were the Social Democrats who sold the German middle class down the river of big industry under a chancellor who not only had the time to sue the press for stories about his alleged unnatural hair color, but also the chutzpe to join Swiss media moguls and Russian oligarchs just weeks after stepping down from office. And despite her no-nonsense approach Chancelorette Merkel is of course a hardcore neo-liberal, shifting the tax burden further to the middle and lower classes, while neglecting her leadership responsibilities in the EU becaus of some anachronist Eastern European trust in the mighty US of A as her saviour.

Otherwise the capital glamour of Berlin tends to reconfirm the troubling news about German society's overaging. American functions like this tend to be sprinkled with the best, brightest and cutest of the young generation. All Berlin had to offer on the non-political celeb front was a graying director of TV comedies and an aging starlet named Jenny Elvers whose only claim to fame is that she got knocked up by one of the inmates of the local Big Brother TV show franchise. Well, there were some young, bright and cute people, but they were fellow journos, so that doesn't count as glamour.

My friend Niklas took me for a latenite spin around the city though. He's the art and architecture critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung's main competitor Frankfurter Allgemeine. Architecturally Berlin is quite glamorous. More in Grandmaster Flash „Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" kind of sense, than in the Frank Sinatra city hymn style. Still, we did some speeding on the twenty laned Stalin Allee (ok, it felt like twenty lane and it's not named after Stalin anymore), where the former Communist government built fabulously modern appartment high rises to pretend all's groovy in the Socialist world. There's an interesting mix of people living there now. On the one side you still have old party faithfuls and remnants of the high cadres of East German secret police, on the other side you have hip thirtysomethings who like the moderinst touch and urban feel of these places. Looking at their appartments you might think there's only few distinctions, since both tend to live in fabulous 60s and 70s furniture. Only the window drapes are an instant give-away, with the old commies hanging lace and the hipsters sporting aluminum or cotton.

We had some drinks at the Greenwich Bar, where everybody I visit in Berlin always has drinks, we drove by Reem Koohlhaas' fabulous embassy for the Netherlands and the beautiful rows of Gründerzeit houses in Berlin West, the next morning I met his incredibly cute new daughter, who know how to play her toddler charm to the max, I had lunch with one of Germany's star scribes Lothar Müller, whose anglo-saxon writing sensibilites are a refreshing non-ideological breeze, I visited my old mentor Markus whose new offices have a direct view of the zoo, so he looks out on Flamingos and beavers and monkeys, who make surreal tropical noises, I collected juicy stories and rumors about German media, where the fight for a pole position in the run to be the successor to newsweekly Spiegel's editor in chief Stefan Aust has blessed us with some infighting and scheming worthy of a Hollywood bitch battle. I left in the afternoon from Berlin's main airport, which still looks like the airport for Kalamazoo. Hey! This is our capital. By very recent choice.