Berlin boogie

So there we were, rambling the hip Berlin sidewalks, hopscotching crumpled cigarette packs whose contents the locals so blithely puff, and glancing at the endless walls of colorful graffiti that looks like so much bubble-lettered gobbledygook, when we stumbled on a little shop that sells porcelain pups. Yes: glazed Great Danes and shiny Schnauzers. My brother and I peered in the windows, pointing, laughing, pining. Too bad the damn place was closed. We moved on, slightly crushed. Onward.

Berlin is a beaut. It may not be the prettiest or most charismatic city I’ve been to — you win, Paris, Istanbul and Tokyo — but it is relentlessly amicable, stylish, pulsing. The city, from which I just returned, has a big determined heart, still pulling itself out of the twin muck of Nazism and Communism, that makes it both a little staid and also, wildly, weirdly, the techno-rave dance capital of the world, a pent-up human energy explosion.

It’s an offbeat charmer, animated by a vibrant polyglot and a diverse people, be it leather-clad Eurotrash, Arab falafel slingers, or well-heeled bougies and their primly groomed doggies. It presents an alluring jumble of history and humanity, culture and cuisine, with a dash of decadence and the pesky ghosts of a bleak past that’s shudderingly recent.

We spent six full days stamping the streets, alleyways, museums and squares of this relatively young metropolis, whose US-backed west and USSR-backed east didn’t reconcile till the Wall came tumbling down in the great thaw of 1989. Much of the architecture looks shiny-new, replacements for the rubble left by ferocious Allied bombings during WWII.

Berlin was also rocked by rock ’n’ roll. We took a tour of  the city’s grungy, arty, DIY underbelly in a vintage 1972 Ford Econoline van driven by the shaggy founder of the Ramones Museum Berlin, which is really just a funky bar strewn with punk artifacts. It’s cool. The tour was happily heavy on David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s ‘70s stint in Berlin, which forged a collective creative milestone in rock, including Bowie’s wondrous “Heroes.” We can be heroes, just for one day. Or, in our case, six days.

A side note: For all its diversity — the Turkish and Arab worlds exert strong stakes — Berlin has blind spots. I saw fewer than three Black people in six days, and that’s troubling and hard to fathom for a US visitor. I googled this and read that most of the Black population lives in the so-called African Quarter, an area I’m pretty sure we didn’t hit and whose existence rather unsettles. Ignorance may place me out of my depth here; facts are elusive. And yet.

And now, a smattering of visuals — alas none of those porcelain pups that so capture the whimsy, artistry and dog-love of the bounty that’s Berlin …