UNDERGROUND: This tunnel connects Berlin's main station with the Potsdamer square running under the river Spree and the government district. The station will be fully operational by 2006.
Restart Your Engines
Look around Germany and you see signs however fragile of renewal. Happy days aren't quite here again, and most people in Europe's former powerhouse are still too beaten down to recognize it, but it's time at last! for optimism
Posted Sunday, July 18, 2004; 8:34 BST
A huge glass-and-steel cocoon has taken shape along a desolate stretch of the River Spree in Berlin. The dazzling, futuristic structure is the roof of the city's new Central train station, designed to be the largest in Europe. When it's up and running in 2006, the €700 million station, with five sprawling levels of shops, bars, restaurants and cafés as well as two office complexes, will handle 240,000 passengers and 2,500 trains a day. "It's unique in regard to architectural design and technical achievement," says Gabriele Schlott, spokeswoman for Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway.
Despite the superlatives, the station is turning out to be a classic German compromise. To save time and money, Deutsche Bahn decided to slice 110 m off the length of the roof. Now passengers alighting from carriages at the front of trains, including the first-class sections, won't be sheltered by the building's crystalline carapace. When the weather is foul, as it often is in Berlin, they'll get wet. "We were very angry," says the station's architect, Jürgen Hilmer. "We didn't envision the station like this at all."
Forward-looking and flawed, the station is an apt metaphor for Germany itself. As the economy begins to stir from a decade of stagnation that has profoundly shaken the nation's self-confidence, Germans are again making ambitious plans for the future. Nobody is predicting a boom, but there are signs that Germany is ready to cast off its troubles and reassert itself as the economic engine of Europe. The economy is growing again, albeit slowly. The heart of Berlin, cut in two for 28 years by the infamous Wall, is now a showplace: the DZ Bank with its magnificent vaulted roof, the Jewish Museum with its zinc-clad, lightning-bolt shape and the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz with its phenomenal circus-tent glass roof are all signs of a capital and country bouncing back.
The nation is also reasserting itself on the political stage: embattled Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has patched up his strained relations with the U.S. and is pressing for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. Businesses are coming up with spectacular advances that should help restore the nation's reputation for innovation; Berlin-based Mental Images, to cite just one, won an Academy Award last year for its special-effects software. And Germans are on a roll in the arts the film Head On won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival this year, the first German victory there in nearly two decades. With recession keeping rents low, the capital is once again attracting the cutting edge in fashion and the arts. Perhaps most shocking of all, most Germans are actually feeling good about themselves. According to a recent poll published in Stern magazine, 75% of people in western Germany are "happy" with their lives. There's still room for improvement in the east, though, where only 40% of people are content. It will take some time for Germany to get back on track. But after years of brooding about what's wrong with Germany, here's a long-overdue look at what's right.
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