This shop doesn’t sell Schrippen (the Berliners’ word for bread rolls). This shop sells bagels, very cosmopolitan. Schrippen with holes. Berliners and tourists alike queue up every day for the deliciously topped, open pastry rings on the first floor of the Potsdamer Platz Arcades. For some it’s a quick lunch before going back to the office, for others a brief snack while discovering Berlin’s new city centre: Potsdamer Platz. Teenagers on school trips, groups of pensioners, museum enthusiasts with maps searching for the New National Gallery – Potsdamer Platz is where Berlin’s visitors meet working Berliners from the offices of the nearby corporate headquarters. This is the newest part of Berlin. During the years of Germany’s partition, the whole area was in no-man’s-land: a wasteland, a big nothing – this was where the Berlin Wall stood. It’s hard to imagine this today: all round the square the international architecture elite have created a futuristic-looking district. Beneath the glass sail roof of the Sony Centre, which glows like a UFO every evening, eight million visitors a year crane their necks to admire the spectacular glass-and-steel structure above them. Shops, restaurants, bars, cinemas, homes – there is everything here. A world in itself.
The KaDeWe department store on Tauentzienstrasse in “City West” is another cosmos in its own right in Berlin. For exactly 100 years now, what is still the biggest department store in continental Europe has been a byword for luxury shopping, and it has long-since become a tourist attraction. A stroll through its legendary food department should be part of everyone’s trip to Berlin. You should then follow the road on west to the Kurfürstendamm, or Ku’damm as the Berliners like to call it. Up until reunification, this was the city’s undisputed top shopping street, the business centre of what used to be West Berlin. For three-and-a-half kilometres, the Ku’damm is flanked by all the top names in design and fashion. But you should also check out the side streets to the left and right and discover the original bookstores, galleries and cafes, for example around Savigny Platz.
These days, the Ku’damm has to contend with competition from Friedrichstrasse in Mitte. Quartier 206, one of the most exclusive shopping addresses in Europe, developed here within a few years of reunification. When you enter the elegant mall with its black-and-white marble-mosaic floor, the word that comes to mind is “temple to consumerism”. And there is a direct underground link to the delicatessen section of Paris’s famous Galeries Lafayette – the only branch you will find outside France. And the escalator can take you up to three more exclusive floors. If you now feel you need something for the soul, check out Dussmann’s nearby “culture store”. Here you can browse through a range of two million books, CDs and DVDs. Just as well this Berlin institution is open until midnight, and sometimes even later...
Now, perhaps, it’s time for a breath of fresh air. The best place is just a few steps away: Berlin’s number-one boulevard Unter den Linden. This is Berlin at its most prestigious and cosmopolitan. Its noble, classicist palaces to the right and left of the 60-metre-wide avenue reflect the austere charm of Prussia. Almost a mile long, the majestic axis leads from the Brandenburg Gate to the Castle Bridge (Schlossbrücke), where the soon-be-reconstructed City Palace of the Prussian kings once stood. The first of the now 300 linden trees were planted in the mid-17th century. So strolling along Unter den Linden has a long tradition. It is real delight, and not only in summer when the trees are a lush green: in the winter, when it gets dark early, the linden trees are decorated with thousands of tiny lights. Berlin glows – and nowhere more beautifully than here.
