Prenzlauer Berg--21 June 2010The place where I will live during the next five weeks is characterized by the picture to the right. Old, classic buildings shoulder-to-shoulder with newly renovated classic buildings. Nearly 20 years of unified Berlin can be measured in the number of buildings remaining to be renovated. Every year fewer.
The building(s) in which our seminar members have our apartments is one such renovated building. It looks more like the building on the left from the street, but from inside, that is, from the courtyard, it's looking rather good. That can be seen from the second picture here.
This is in fact the view from my kitchen window. The man there on the scaffolding on the left is (slowly) replacing the stucco on the brick of the building. The old stucco had to have been removed before...or it fell off. Across the courtyard (and this is the second courtyard from the street) you can see what the completed renovation of a stucco building looks like. The spiral staircase is something new.That juxtaposition of old and new, disintegrating and gentrified, is repeated here in the stairwell of my part of Rhinower Str. 9.
As I walked up the stairs (and there are many: I live in an apartment on the 4th floor above ground (5th floor for Americans= 4.OG)), I noticed that one of the spindles had been replaced with a newly turned (or newly stripped of paint) one. Among the gray sticks, it looked pretty funny--a strange reversal of old and new. It's possible that the cost of renovating didn't necessarily allow for all of the spindles to be stripped of their old layers of paint, nor for new ones to be turned. But to have the single old (new?) spindle among the cheap (new?) ones was a sort of ironic echo on a small scale of the juxtaposition of old and new that pervades much of a neighborhood on the east side of where the Berlin Wall stood. What's new (i.e. gray sticks) isn't necessarily always an improvement. It just takes time and patience to restore what was good.
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