Opinion: The Biggest Small Town in Europe

"Berlin is a big city" - this is one of the first misconceptions you'll hear about Germany's capital.  

Well, I hate to break it to you, but it's simply not true. Berlin is a small town, even though it sprawls as far as the eye can see. Witness the sheer unfamiliarity that many Berliners have with normal big city features like, say, commuter trains and escalators. Letting people off the train before you board seems like common sense if you live in a big city, doesn't it? The fact that I see scads of people trying to do the exact opposite every rush hour, and have done for the past nine years, tells me that they're still quite new at this whole 'metropolis' thing. And it's quite possible that they always will be.

Or check out those big, extended families from Brandenburg that one regularly sees, frozen in fear at the top of the escalators in Alexanderplatz or Hauptbahnhof S-Bahn station.  It's so fast and steep!  Their panicked expressions cry. What foot shall I place on it first? What if it whisks me away and I never see my six half cousins + uncle Gunther again?!  Maybe there needs to be a training facility for this sort of thing in Berlin - you know, to break them in gently.

Berlin is huge in scale, yes, but it has the mentality of a small town, is what I'm getting at. Yes, the people may dress more 'urban' than they do in Baden Württemberg but when they do dress up, they still tend to be greeted by bemused or indignant stares from the locals. Oh look! the locals' faces cry, someone's wearing something with three colours in it! And then they go on to treat them like they're in the Display Cage at the Village Fair. As someone who has lived in both small towns and big cities, I recognise both approaches and delight in sitting back with a tub of currywurst-flavoured popcorn* to bear witness as they clash.

There's a darker side to those parochial attitudes, though, too. Witness the deep, irrational suspicion that is sometimes shown toward foreigners in the Ur-Berliner locales outside of the Ringbahn. This attitude seems more like it belongs in a village of fifty people than a city of 3.5 million. There are those who, unfortunately, still base their behaviour toward us foreigners on the assumption that anybody speaking with a non-Berlin accent is stupid or dangerous. The last time I was treated that way in England, I was walking through a Lake District village with two businesses and ten houses in it. So, I do find it a shock to find such attitudes in a major city - not just in Germany but in any country of the world. 

But on a good day I think, it is almost understandable (I said 'almost') that small town ideas prevail here; after all, Berlin was underpopulated for so many decades that it might have forgotten how big cities are. At the same time, I can't understand the people who write into Berliner Kurier to blame all of Berlin's problems on the fact that it is a "big" city. Give us city mice some credit! Cosmopolitan people the world over know how to cope in  a fast-paced, multicultural space. Berlin struggles more than most with those things because it is not most other big cities; in some respects, it's barely a city at all.

Of course, London is feeling less urban year on year too, as it's being flooded by the children of middle Englanders who bought their way onto the property ladder years ago, gradually pricing the more culturally mixed, working class communities out.  Berlin is slowly growing in the opposite direction, becoming more diverse and accepting year on year, but I still harbour doubts that it will ever really "catch up" to London or other big cities. That's a strength in some ways and a weakness in others. Berlin has lots of green space and mostly clean water, and who's gonna commit a really serious crime with the suspicious gazes of every other local locked on them? 

All the same, a part of me yearns for the metropolis that Berlin will never be... but why waste time trying to pretend it's something it's not? Doing so just ruins the peculiar charms of this can't-make-up-its-mind-what-it-actually-is city.  There is very little organic tension here, apart from the kind that's generated by wealthy poseurs. Almost everyone who comes here figures that out sooner or later.  So why not just save the act and enjoy the chill vibes... for however long they last?


* Currywurst popcorn does not actually exist, but if it's ever invented it will surely be invented by a Berliner.