On change

The average person will look at the picture below and see a simple fast food stand in Berlin, home to one of Berlin's culinary specialties: currywurst.  And nothing more.

I look at the picture above and see it as a symbol of the unrelenting pace of change in Berlin over the last 22 years.

But first a history lesson.

The Berlin Wall stood for 28 years as an attempt to keep East Germans from escaping the harsh conditions of the Soviet-controlled sector.  When Hungary opened its borders to the west in 1989, however, tens of thousands of East Germans fled via Hungary, setting the stage for change.  The East German government, powerless to stop them, finally capitulated and opened its own border on November 9, 1989.  11 months later, East and West Germany officially reunited, and capitalism barreled east.

10 years later I moved in around the corner from the above curry stand, back when it was just a tiny place that no one had ever heard of.  As mentioned earlier, I took quite a liking to currywurst, and ate there several times a week.  When I lived across town the following year, I still came back to this stand, dragging friends with me.

It seems I was on to something...

In the intervening years, Curry 36 has expanded significantly, and thanks to mentions in Lonely Planet and other titans of travel, it now hosts gaggles of tourists around the clock.

Also in the intervening years, the idea of "ostalgie," (a play on the German words for "nostalgia" and "east,") has crept its way into the national zeitgeist.  It is a feeling - one could call it nostalgia in East Germans and perhaps curiosity in their West German counterparts - a desire to understand the way things were during the 40 years that East Germany existed.  This has since been marketed to tourists, and once they've finished their currywurst, the hordes who have descended on Berlin can indulge in the new DDR museum, visit the former headquarters of the Stasi, rent a Trabi to tour around Berlin, visit a permanent exhibit at the Germany History Museum on the DDR, and so much more.

Gone are the days when Hitler, WWII and the Holocaust guided German tourism.  It seems people have discovered this fascinating chapter in Germany's history, and now three simple letters rule Berlin as big business: DDR (the abbreviation for Deutsche Demokratische Republik, East Germany's official title).  It is, in essence, a rather ironic end to a regime that fought so hard against capitalism in the first place.