Today, when I travel into Berlin week for week in gleaming, air-conditioned high-speed trains, or watch the trains coming and going at Berlin’s Zoo station, I realize what has changed in Berlin: the city has been reconnected with the rest of the world. On the gourmet storey of the exclusive KaDeWe department store I still feel a patriotic pride at being in the food department with the biggest selection in the world, where you really can find everything, but everything. And when you sit down to a meal at Borchardt’s restaurant in Berlin-Mitte, you are not only aware that the Crown Prince used to eat his steak and his lobster here, you sometimes also come face to face with the German Chancellor. Although it must be said that the Chancellor has been making himself a little scarce over the last few months, whereas the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joschka Fischer, is still sometimes spotted shopping incognito at local markets or the KaDeWe.

Berlin, the new Berlin, the pan-German Berlin – since 1990 again the capital of Germany – has left very little to remind you of the 28 years of partition, the biggest break in communication between the city’s four and a half million inhabitants in its history. Apart from a few remains, the Wall – a concept in itself – has vanished. Its concrete fragments have disappeared into the glass cabinets of collectors of devotional objects all over the world. Even the feeling of living in a divided city has faded. Not least because, in Berlin-Mitte, East and West really have mixed and formed something new – which is not necessarily the case in other parts of Berlin as yet. Furthermore, the new Berlin society – government people, lobbyists and the entourage of culture and entertainment who assemble around the Brandenburg Gate – also gravitate towards BerlinMitte. Here, grouped around one of the most beautiful squares in Germany, the Gendarmenmarkt, there is a profusion of beautiful hotels, restaurants, pubs, bars and cultural venues, giving grounds for the hope that Berlin can again become the pulsating heart of a Germany that has grown back together again. Berlin is on the right track.

And the people strolling on the Italian-style, terracotta-coloured part of Potsdamer Platz; the people sitting under trees in the summer amidst the almost convivial big-city anonymity; the people gazing in wonder at the festive redcarpet parade of stars at the Berlinale every winter on Marlene Dietrich Platz – these people do not fear for the city’s future: a city which reminds us of the Reichstag, having given it a new dome that shines out by night for miles around. The Reichstag, where the fate of Berlin has so often merged more closely with that of the whole of Germany than any other place. I am thinking of the Reichstag fire of 1933; of the terrible, bloody conquest of Berlin which finally transformed the city into a desert of rubble and was crowned by the Red Army taking the Reichstag; I am thinking of the great firework display in celebration of reunification, at which an enormous crowd fused the ensemble of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate with.

Berlin is still – or rather again – a young capital. After all, Berlin was a young capital even before 1945, when the city was reduced to rubble together with the barbaric Hitler regime. It did not become the capital of the Reich until 1871; it rapidly grew into a major city during the enormous boom of the ensuing Gründerjahre, or Founder Years; and it has repeatedly been marked and moulded by sudden twists of history. The cultural heyday of the Gründerjahre, the time of the poet Theodor Fontane – anyone who wants to imagine what it was like needs only to stroll along Potsdamer Strasse or look at the theatre at Gendarmenmarkt. Although no plays have been put on here for a long time, whenever the Golden Camera is awarded here, the building exudes the kind of splendour which in Fontane’s time – then with Prussian modesty – formed the basis for a wedding of German theatrical culture. Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin’s leading theatres, resided at Schiffbauerdamm, right in the middle of the divided city; it remains a very lively theatre that is not afraid of provocation. The „Threepenny Opera“ had its premiere here in 1929. Not far away is the „Palace of Tears,“ Friedrichstrasse station’s former East/West checkpoint notorious for its strict border controls. The Admiralspalast is also nearby, where the German parliament met after the Reichstag fire – and where Hitler declared war.

Berlin’s theatres and museums – a chapter of wealth and a wealth of history, whether you think of the huge ensemble of buildings on the Museum Island, where until recently you could still see bullet holes dating back to the battle for Berlin in 1945. Or the Schaubühne in the beautifully restored Mendelsohn building on Lehniner Platz, which advanced to became the best theatre in Germany in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. There is the Deutsches Theater, where Max Reinhardt once worked; there is the Volksbühne, which shaped its own post-GDR culture. There are two opera houses with old and new traditions, a left-over from the former division of the city. And there is the wonderfully light, almost fairy-tale Philharmonie concert hall, home to one of the greatest orchestras in the world, the Berlin Philharmonic, which Herbert von Karajan led to a perfection which made Berlin’s name famous all over the world in the middle of the Cold War.

Berlin was and is a multilingual city, an international city – ever since the Prussian kings with their Tolerance Edict brought the Huguenots to the city, giving the Prussian town a French flair. People with an eye for such things can still feel it today. And in Jägerstrasse – on the wall of a red-brick building which today is home to one of Berlin’s leading gourmet restaurants – there is a plaque commemorating the place where the Jewish intellectual Rahel Varnhagen once held her famous salon. Berlin was a city of German-Jewish culture, a city of pre-feminism. And despite its proverbial gruffness the city has remained tolerant until the present. Berlin is close to the East, the Polish border is not far, and in January and February you can feel the icy continental winds that blow from the depths of Russia. This climate could prompt the city to become a bridge between East and West: a highly promising prospect for a city, once the EU’s eastward enlargement has become established as a social reality. Berlin is on the right track – but still has a long way to go before it reaches its destination.