Windows on the World

“The form of the city changes faster, alas, than the human heart” – Charles Baudelaire

Berlin is a city of some 3.5 million people. But my day typically begins with just one.

Stumbling bleary-eyed from the bedroom to the kitchen, I catch sight of our opposite neighbour puffing on a cigarette, his large bulk leaning out of the window of his fifth floor ‘Plattenbau’ – the apartment blocks of pre-fabricated concrete with the pebble-dashed exterior thrown up in the 1980s. His presence is a reassuring constant. Berlin, as a city, feels in a constant state of flux: a mass of new buildings, roadworks, pop-up shops and tourists. The man – whose name I do not know – is mostly still, calmly inhaling the street life below along with the tar and the nicotine in his cigarette.

I imagine he has seen much change, enjoying a front row view on the transformation of the 'Scheunenviertel' (Barn Quarter) from a drab, lifeless district during the Cold War to the epicentre of the hipster scene today, replete with posh coffee shops, boutique stores, bearded men and young families pushing buggies.

And while the topography of the district and its personages may have altered dramatically in the past 25 years, Berlin’s history still lurks in its 'Hinterhöfe' (courtyards) and alleyways, away from the busy boulevards teeming with traffic.

Hidden behind imposing wooden doors are Art Deco hallways and grandiose staircases. Elsewhere, walls scarred with bullet holes are a reminder of the wounds inflicted on the city by World War Two.

Our neighbour is one of those left-behind relics, emerging from his window at half-hourly intervals, a cuckoo in a cuckoo clock popping out to survey the world before retreating behind the glass and the net curtains.

Our encounter takes place across the street. I observe him (and am observed) from my modern apartment block - built in 2012 with floor to ceiling glass windows. Like my flat, I too am new to the area, a resident of our neighbourhood for only the past two years.

The 'Scheunenviertel' has a history of welcoming foreigners. In the 1920s it was an overcrowded slum, housing Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe, described so vividly in Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz.

The streets here are narrower than in the neighbouring district of Prenzlauerberg to the north where wide tree-lined boulevards are flanked by Wilhelmine buildings.

In Almstadtstrasse in the 1920s, boarding houses rented out rooms at hourly rates allowing tradesmen without abode to get a few hours kip. Nowadays, Air BnB apartments offer shelter to tourists who throng the city for a few days to explore its history and sample its nightlife.

The district is still a haven for foreigners, many of them Italians and Spaniards fleeing economic crises in their own lands for better fortunes in the north. Cafes are populated by laptop-touting youngsters who nurse coffees as they pursue the next big idea for a new App or start-up.

And while the graffiti on buildings and general detritus mean Berlin still retains its ‘poor but sexy’ feel, the area is becomingly increasingly gentrified; a Jazz club on Rosenthalerstrasse is now a designer eyewear store; a wine and fish bar and blow-dry salon have opened in recent months. This could be New York not East Berlin. Several shops on the corner of Weinmeisterstrasse have closed, their boarded up windows a symptom of the rising commercial rents in the area.

Amid this unstoppable change, my neighbour appears increasingly out of place; a relic from Germany’s communist past stranded in a cosmopolitan capital. But with the world marching into disorder, he is a reminder that not everyone here is a globe-trotting liberal. He serves as my window into a working-class world, the past, a part of history, someone that should not be displaced but who has an equally deserving place at the heart of this city.