Berlin is today, perhaps more than any other European city, the emblem of Europe’s decline. Every epoch has had its capital: Rome for Antiquity, Paris for the great continental civilization of earlier centuries, London for the Industrial Age. Berlin, then, may be called the capital of European decadence.
The difference is revealing. All those capitals — with the exception of Berlin — were, in one way or another, genuine economic, intellectual, and artistic centres before entering their phase of decline. Berlin, by contrast, seems almost to have been born under the sign of crisis. It became the symbol of collapse without ever having fully matured into a stable symbol of European greatness. Its historical role is thus peculiar: not the exhausted summit of a civilization, but decadence without true grandeur preceding it.
There was, perhaps, one fragile exception. For a brief and feverish moment, the years of Weimar suggested that Berlin might finally become something more than a Prussian administrative and military organism in permanent search of a great European soul. It began to generate artistic energy, intellectual provocation, metropolitan style, a modernity at once nervous and brilliant. But just as the city seemed ready to grow into something historically substantial, Germany — with its worship of order, its discipline, its anxieties, its famous German Angst — produced National Socialism. From that point onward, Berlin became marked above all by failure: failure of empire, failure of politics, failure of moral authority, failure of culture, failure of economic vocation.
Failure layered upon failure: that is what Berlin communicates when one walks through it today. One has the impression of generations condemned to reproduce the same void, handing down not a legacy, but an emptiness — an intergenerational vacuum disguised, from time to time, as rebellion, progress, freedom, or style.
And yet Berlin still lives off a slogan. “Arm, aber sexy” (poor but sexy) once sounded like the kind of phrase only a city fully aware of its own defects could afford to utter. It was ironic, shameless, and strangely convincing. Poverty, in that formula, still carried the aura of creativity; sexiness still suggested vitality, unpredictability, danger. For a certain period, Berlin managed to sell this image not only to the world, but also to itself.
That is no longer the case. The slogan survives, but mostly as a fossil from a different historical mood. The city that once transformed ruins into energy and marginality into style now seems increasingly unable to distinguish freedom from drift, individuality from performance, or rebellion from ritualized conformity.
What remains is no longer the creative chaos, nor the fire of protest that once defined the city after the war and, later, after the fall of the Wall: what remains is something else.
Berlin today feels like the perfect synthesis of modern Germany: a disoriented city in a disoriented country, in a disoriented continent. You walk through its streets and what you see, more and more often, are people without passion, without real life in their eyes.Individuals floating in carefully curated bubbles, smartphone zombies — Smombies — performing identities that only become believable after heavy digital manipulation. Everyone strives desperately to be “cool” and ends up as the n-th copy of millions of others doing exactly the same. People living “nebeneinander” rather than “miteinander”, next to one another rather than together, barely tolerating each other, cataphracted in their arrogance, rudeness, and individualism, as if sealed inside a peculiar rehash of the Protestant, hyper-consumerist, and hipster worldview. Can all these components coexist within the same body? In the postmodern era, everything is possible: take the inconsistency of metropolitan man, turn it from a flaw into a badge of pride, and you have the average Berliner.
Even freedom, the city’s most celebrated myth, seems deeply misunderstood.
You see people hovering around dressed in ways that scream difference — dog masks, gender-fluid aesthetics, deliberately chaotic outfits, eccentric accessories — and yet the result is strangely uniform. Not individuality, but replication. Not rebellion, but conformity disguised as transgression. They all live their Berliner dream — whatever that dream may still be — in a frantic, anxious way, as if stopping for a moment would expose the emptiness behind the performance.
And then come the contradictions, piled one on top of another like the debris of an exhausted civilization.
You have hardcore American capitalists becoming communists, former East German communists becoming hardcore capitalists, men becoming women, women becoming men, trad wives becoming hardcore feminists, and hardcore feminists becoming trad wives. Everything is reversible, interchangeable, wearable. Identities are picked up, dropped, and reshuffled with the speed of fashion trends. What ought to be the deepest expression of the self ends up looking like one more social performance among many. And in the end, who really cares? The American will eventually return home and become a proper capitalist again; many of the identity-changers will quietly revert to whatever they were before; no one will know, and no one will especially wish to know. What happens in Berlin stays in Berlin. The city offers the delicious temporary thrill of becoming one’s opposite, of trying on a different soul like an outfit for a season. Only one thing remains genuinely forbidden: being right-wing. That, unlike every other experiment, is not part of the tolerated carnival. Everything else is admissible. All of this feeds the same illusion: that this is still the coolest city on the planet.
A city where you may enter a club — perhaps — and enjoy a sort of all-you-can-f*ck freedom packaged as liberation. A city where soup kitchens have been aesthetically upgraded into minimalist eateries, where the quality of the food often remains just as miserable, but the price becomes ten times higher because the water is eco-friendly, the plates are artisanal, and the waiter is some new Gen Z hipster specimen covered in tattoos that look as if they had been drawn with a pen, a creature whose gender you cannot identify even after several honest attempts, speaking in a placeless international accent with many “because, you know bro, it’s like…”s and telling you, with a kind of unexplainable pride: “No German, sorry, only English.”
Even human interaction feels curated. Berlin, once proud of its rough local character, now increasingly resembles an Instagram set for internationally mobile narcissism.
And yet the same people who perform rebellion at home perform outrage abroad.
They march in the streets for Palestine, Ukraine, Gagauzia, or Palau — places they often would not even be able to locate on a world map — and yet they calmly accept, without the slightest scandal, that in their own country one may have to pay in order to profess one’s religion openly; that children are sorted according to their grades and sent, at a very early age, to schools for the more intelligent and the less intelligent; that most German media are appallingly aligned with the far left; and that one needs the very highest school grades to study medicine, even while there are not enough doctors and the country has to import them from Syria.
These things are, one is told, “historically grown” — historisch gewachsen — and therefore not really to be discussed, like the love of progressivism: we need more tolerance, more openness, more mercy, without knowing when enough is enough; as G. K. Chesterton would say, a blind “comparative of which we have not settled the superlative”.
After all, Berlin is the eternal wannabe-rebel capital of Germany: some things are simply to be accepted as they are. Just embrace the various forms of approved nonconformity which Berlin can offer you. Dissent and protest are reserved for after Feierabend on (casual) Friday, Saturday, and above all Sunday, when the shops are closed and one may choose between Kaffee und Kuchen, one quarter of the Pergamon Altar — requiring more years of restoration than the Sistine Chapel — or one of the city’s hundred protesting groups.
Berlin used to be raw.
Now it feels rehearsed.
Now it feels like a city acting out its own legend long after the meaning has died.
Still poor, yes.
But no longer sexy.
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