By Nicholas Kulish
BERLIN — To get Berliners arguing, bring up the new $3.4 billion airport rising just beyond the limits of this hip but economically strapped metropolis.
Supporters of Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport contend that it might be the salvation of a city that, despite its incredible historical resonance, has become an economic and geographic backwater. Detractors vehemently argue that the airport will be just another misguided drain of money by a local government critics say has failed to help Berlin realize its potential despite the city’s status as one of the hottest destinations on the planet.
City planners designed the airport as a symbol of their dream for Berlin, restored to greatness as the capital of a unified Germany. And so the fight now is about how Berlin has actually turned out: Germany’s cultural magnet and international beacon but also its national poorhouse, struggling to break out of a long slump. Berlin has the highest rate of residents on welfare — 18.6 percent — and received some $4 billion in state subsidies last year.
In a time of rising budget deficits, Germans are loath to bail out Greece in part because they have been bailing out their capital — and other stagnant parts of the former East Germany — for two decades.
The previous city government fell in 2001 after auditors discovered that a city-controlled bank had billions of dollars in bad loans. Faced with overwhelming debts, the current government promised when it took over to eliminate 15,000 city jobs and cut $1 billion a year in spending — but kept the expensive airport project. The paradox of Berlin, encapsulated in Mayor Klaus Wowereit’s catchphrase “poor but sexy,” has never been more fitting. Berlin was ever thus — broke and full of German dropouts and hipsters — but in recent years the city has drawn flocks of young people on budget airlines from around Europe and the world for the nightclubs and galleries flourishing in the city’s abandoned warehouses.
But those warehouses were empty in the first place because, for decades, forces beyond the city’s control stripped Berlin of its former industrial might.
The landlocked capital on the eastern fringe of the country will have closed three airports to open one: the budget airport currently at Schönefeld, the main airport, Tegel, and, in an emotionally charged shuttering in 2008, Tempelhof Airport, an architectural monument and symbol of freedom to West Berliners since the days of the Berlin Airlift. Officials placed their bets on the new mega-airport at Schönefeld, the size of 2,000 football fields with a terminal building as big as the Nazi-built Olympic stadium.
Critics say that after 14 years of lawsuits and delays, the enormous airport, scheduled to open next year with a capacity of 27 million passengers a year, will arrive too late for the depopulating region outside Berlin.
“It was planned in a phase of euphoria,” said Hanns Zischler, a Berlin writer and critic of the country’s urban planning. “You can’t build on expectations”.
City officials call the airport the top priority for economic development, which they say will generate 73,000 jobs for the region, while helping Berlin become the transit hub between Europe’s east and west, north and south.
Yet even Germany’s flagship airline, Lufthansa, will not be flying long-haul international routes to Berlin right away, continuing to rely on Frankfurt. “Berlin is not a capital city like London or Paris,” said Wolfgang Mayrhuber, Lufthansa’s chief executive, in a comment before the Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce that struck right at Berlin’s insecurities. “The economic revenues just aren’t there at the moment”.
Many of Berlin’s problems are not the same as those facing other industrial cities in decline like Detroit, but are a product of its unique history. Beginning in 1945, the Soviets literally carried factories home from their sector in the east as reparations for Nazi crimes.
Gradually, remaining factory owners gave up on the capitalist island of West Berlin during the 28 years that the Wall constricted the movement of goods and people. Finally the reunification of city and country brought an end to subsidies pressed by cold war adversaries.
City officials said they made hard decisions that are only now beginning to bear fruit. “We can’t pay for everything at once, but city development policy, city planning for the future, has to have the courage to think about the opportunities for the next 20, 30 years,” saidIngeborg Junge-Reyer, senator for city development in the Berlin government.
Unemployment, which reached 19 percent in 2005, fell to 14.1 percent last year. A high-technology center in Adlershof, near the new airport in Schönefeld, has attracted 814 firms ranging from biotechnology to media, employing more than 14,000 workers.
The new airport lies southeast of the city, where the company Henschel once made warplanes for Nazi Germany and the East German leader Erich Honecker kept his jets. Before workers could even begin erecting the monumental new structure they had to move the village of Diepensee and a local graveyard.
“It is no more or no less than building a small city,” said Ralf Kunkel, spokesman for Berlin airports, the skeleton of the 236-foot-high control tower standing in the background.
Pia Wedel, 34, who grew up in West Berlin, opposed closing Tempelhof Airport, but supports the new airport. “I think that Schönefeld is a must, because it’s what suits a big city,” she said.
Planners expect the armies of fickle hipsters to awaken Berlin from its permanent adolescence and turn it into a world capital of creative industries like art, fashion, music and film. But that does not necessarily set off an economic revival.
Ms. Wedel, who works in fashion, spent eight years trying to find a job in Berlin while working for Nike in the Netherlands and Frankfurt, and for Hugo Boss in tiny Metzingen, in southwest Germany. Last year she found a job as head of brand at the clothing designer Sisi Wasabi and returned home.
“You don’t earn a lot here. You come here because you want to live here,” she said. She was sitting under the soaring airfield apron at Tempelhof, sealed off from the wintry weather outside by a steel-frame, air-cushion membrane for the Bread & Butter fashion trade show.
Inside, show guides trundled by on the baggage-claim conveyor belt while the departures board read “Denim Base” and “Sport & Street,” and everything from leather jackets to sparkly baby shoes were on display.
Despite Berliners’ tendency to grumble, Ms. Wedel said the international visitors flooding Berlin’s fashion week demonstrated the potential and the improvement from a post-wall nadir. “You keep forgetting how bad it was 20 years ago,” she said.
