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Berlin's Main Drag: The Ku'damm (1988)

The heart of West Berlin is the Kurfürstendamm, an unusually wide thoroughfare that runs from the center of town to the edge of the Grunewald, the nicest garden suburb; and the apex of the Ku'damm, as it is commonly called, is the intersection with Joachimsthaler Strasse, near the center of town. It was Chancellor Bismarck who, a century ago, expanded a sometime hunting trail to a width of 175 feet. While Unter den Linden, now in the East, was the center of institutional life in Pre-War Berlin, housing as it did a major university, the principal opera, and the Staatsbibliothek, the Ku'damm housed the watering places of the freer spirits. With its four lanes split by islands of perpendicular parking spaces and its unusually wide sidewalks, the Ku'damm combines Madison Avenue with West 8th Street, adding a dash of Central Park in the summer.

One quality unique to West Berlin is its distinction as a show town, blessed not only with a great theater tradition but an abundance of street theatricality. No place in Berlin offers a better free show than the apex of the Ku'damm. At no hour of the day is it devoid of human traffic. It is here that Berliners come to see, and to be seen, sitting in cafes that jut half way onto the forty-foot wide sidewalks with an abundance of little tables surrounded by lawn chairs, all of them facing the street scene. In places like these, for only a few dollars, you can sip a drink and read your newspaper, from time to time looking above the newspaper to see if today's events might be more compelling than yesterday's.

The truth visible here is that West Berlin is a costume town, which is to say that people of all ages like to dress up. For the elderly, nothing is too elegant; for the young, no costume too outrageous. Old-timers recollect that twenty years ago some audacious young women went topless up the Ku'damm. But it was always like that here, even in the pre-Nazi period. The first person to tell me about the theatrical street was Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, the architectural historian born in 1903. Everything that seemed socially avant-garde in New York twenty years ago was, she said, popular on the Ku'damm in the 1920s! "Skirts up to here," she said, pointing proudly to the middle of her thigh.

There is no place in East Berlin at all comparable to the Ku'damm, and scarcely any place resembling it in West Germany either--not even in Munich. Nothing in my experience of New York is quite like it. The closest was perhaps St. Marks Place in the late 1960s, but its sidewalks were too narrow to allow much space for an audience. On that East Village street, there was so little distance between those being seen and those doing the looking, we tried, instead, not to be an audience. We used to joke at the time that nothing, but nothing, could make heads turn on St. Marks Place; but then one day I saw a row of costumed guys who proved me wrong: four West Point cadets in full uniform, walking as only they can--side by side, spread-eagled across the sidewalk. Likewise, on the Ku’damm these cadets would have been conspicuous.

As the city of Berlin was recently celebrating its 750th anniversary, the Ku'damm became the site of the Skulpturenboulevard. The Senat (or City Council), whose enthusiasm for public art rivals none, commissioned over a dozen sculptors, including an American long resident in Berlin, George Rickey, whose metal mobile at Breitscheidplatz moves in response to shifts in the wind. A hundred yards down from it, half way towards Wittenburgplatz, is an erotic figure of entwined limbs. Perhaps the most popular of this new bunch, it was done by Brigitte and Martin Matchinsky-Denninghoff and is meant to symbolize a Berlin divided into two parts that are nonetheless similar and entwined.

At the other end of the Ku'damm, where it becomes Rathenauplatz, Wolf Vostell, a distinguished German artist long resident in Berlin, did his trademark--a tail-upturned Cadillac partially entombed in concrete. That inspired a counter-sculpture, so to speak, by purportedly normal Berliners, of a concrete Trabant, a plastic car manufactured in East Germany. Within this latter art-vehicle are two figures who look like Gorby and Ronnie. The Vostell sculpture also inspired vociferous public protests. Inside the window of the Rathenauplatz stationery store is posted an article by the Israeli writer Ephraim Kishon, denouncing the sculpture in particular and modern art in general. The afternoon I was there, the public bus driver and his passenger were arguing about it, taking public culture as seriously as only Germans can.

At Breitscheidplatz is also the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtnis-Kirche, or Memorial Church, whose bombed-out frame remains one of the few reminders of the last World War. (Needless to say perhaps, it was destroyed not by the Nazis but the Allies!) In the adjacent contemporary building that has assumed some of its liturgical functions, there are concerts of religious music, especially of J. S. Bach, whose choral music especially is performed by German amateur groups with a competence similar to that of American amateur black choruses with spirituals. (Denying the myth of racial sympathy, a friend reminded me that both sets of choruses practice assiduously fifty weeks of the year.) Across the street, and a few yards down, is the Europacenter, a tall building whose upper floors house offices. On the lower floors are a plethora of fancy restaurants, snack bars, the best health club in town and, other than the best record store in Berlin, yet more shops similar to those out on the street.

Another recent improvement at Breitscheidplatz, where the Ku'damm runs into Tauenzien Strasse, is a large handsome fountain and a new café hospitable to jugglers, musicians, and other street artists in an area previously favored by the scruffy element (comparable to our Washington Square). Tauenzien Strasse, at least as far as Wittenburgplatz, is for all practical purposes an extension of the Ku'damm, for in Berlin the name of a thoroughfare changes at the border of a different part of town. (It would be as if, say, our own Fifth Avenue had another name north of Ninety-sixth Street.) The best way to introduce yourself to the thoroughfare, from end to end, is to take a double-decked bus numbered either 19 or 29 from Wittenburgplatz (the site of the legendary department store, the KaDeWe) on one end, to Rathenauplatz (and the nude beaches of Halensee) on the other. Be sure to try to sit in the front of the bus's upper deck, where you will feel as though you were riding an elephant.

On the north side of the Ku'damm, just west of its intersection with Joachimsthaler Strasse, is the Cafe Kranzler, perhaps the most obvious place for catching the Berlin show. With perhaps a hundred tables facing the street, it offers a menu featuring coffee, tea, ice creams, and, of course, cakes. Within a hundred yards beside it are several similar places, generally less elegant and favored by a variety of people, in all kinds of dress. One guidebook says there are nearly a hundred such watering holes--bars, restaurants and cafes--on the Ku'damm. Some of the best hotels are also on the Ku'damm (the Kempinski, still named after its Jewish founder); so are the fanciest shops, many of them putting their wares in kiosks right in the middle of the wide sidewalk.

What you are likely to see on the Ku'damm depends upon the hour of the day. Until 5:00 PM on a weekday, it will be fast-walking office workers and slow-walking tourists, with a mixture of decidedly non-Teutonic-looking people who are guest workers probably from Turkey or Yugoslavia. On weekends, the street crowd is mostly shoppers until 2:00 p.m., when all shops are forced to close; only on the first Saturday of every month can they remain open to 6:00 p.m. In the early evening, you see an unusually large number of older people, many of them stopping to talk to one another, if only for a few minutes, reminding us that Berlin today is a city inhabited by the old and the young. The very old live there, because they always have; they survived the war. Middle-aged people are more likely to immigrate to "West Germany," as Berliners call it, which is to say that other place several hundred miles to the west where there is a thriving industrial economy.

The early evening is the favorite time for window shopping, which is all you can do then, since shops are legally required to close by 6:30 p.m. every weekday night except Friday, when stores are open until 9 p.m. Among the items featured along the Ku'damm are top-drawer consumer products: antiques, electronic and photographic equipment, travel agencies, art, books, records, etc. Street vendors also arrive, with kitschy art and clothing; and there are street musicians. There are lines outside the moviehouses and the Schiller-Theater, which is half-way down toward Rathenauplatz. (Berlin's other major theaters are on streets closer to the center of town, but a few blocks away from the Ku'damm.)

As midnight approaches, the average age of those on the street drops twenty or thirty years. Young people (recently out of high school and their parents' homes) favor Berlin for two reasons: its universities are large and good, and young men residing in Berlin cannot be drafted into the West German army. (The legal reason for this is that West Berlin still isn't officially a part of West Germany. Even since the end of the War, it has the status of territory occupied by the four conquering powers!) When I lived in another student-town, Austin, Texas, the main street, Guadeloupe, was known as "the drag," meaning that it was where you went when there was nowhere else to go; but as a place full of things to see and do, Guadeloupe scarcely rivals the Ku'damm as a kind of ultimate drag.

As more young people become visible in the Ku'damm, the spirit of play extends into the night. Because West Berlin is not officially part of West Germany, its bars (called Kneipen) need not obey West German laws about closing hours. Thus, whereas West German kneipen must close by 1 a.m. at the latest, those in Berlin, according to law, need close for only one hour a day and that hour can be of their own choice. Towards midnight, the prostitutes come out as well, dressed not like hookers here but more conservatively, perhaps like secretaries (if only to distinguish themselves from the costume crowd); one has for years worn an immaculate white jacket. These Berliners announce their business by standing on the Ku'damm, at times in pairs, looking as though they are doing nothing other than their business.

When leftish young people want to protest something or other, it is here that they come, customarily breaking the windows of stores. "The whole Ku'damm," one of them told me, "is the symbol for capitalism and the bad parts of the system." (The rightist students, by contrast, begin their protests at the Berlin Wall.) Needless to say perhaps, many native Berliners avoid the Ku'damm. More than one told me that, except in the wintertime, it is filled with tourists, less from America than from West Germany. The "wessies," as they are called, have approximately the same status in Berlin as "bumpkins" do in New York. Berlin artists, say, prefer bars a few blocks away, while very young Berliners prefer to patronize Oranienstrasse, only a few miles away, in a section where punk fashions predominate (and, thus, both older Berliners and "wessies" never go).

I recently returned to West Berlin after a few years away; and if only to check out how the place had changed, I went up to the Ku'damm, first walking along the south side of the street, which has cafes favored by younger people, perhaps a mile or so, and then crossed over to the north side of the street for a walk back, before settling into a chair near the Kranzler. The experience reminded me that one of the key pleasures of city living is the pleasure of watching people, a variety of people. Woody Allen, recently asked why he disliked visiting Mia Farrow's house in bucolic Connecticut, answered, "But I never know what to do in the country. I like to be able to be in a place where, if I want to, I can go downstairs and there's stores and people around. I like to look at people. I like to watch people." To individuals with sensibilities like Allen's, the Ku'damm offers a feast.