WILKOMMEN IN BERLIN
They say that if you've lived in Berlin for ten years, you're a Berliner. The constant feeling of transition here keeps everyone and everything moving. Living here for as little as four months, you begin to feel a change in the patterns and scenery.
Berlin is a big city - four times bigger than Paris - but a great deal more manageable than London. There are somewhere between 3.4 and 4.2 million inhabitants depending on where you set the city boundaries. Since the wall came down 17 years ago it's been a breeding ground for post-division creativity, and a magnet for artists from all over the world.
There are some very obvious reasons why Berlin has attracted and retained so many artists. Despite its status as a capital city, living costs are about a third of the equivalent in London and Paris. In central Berlin, you can acquire a two-bedroom apartment in great condition for around €100,000.
Artists can easily find live-in studios to rent for about €260 a month, with rooms in flat-shares for as little as €170 in some of the coolest parts of the city. There's now a great deal of surplus room available, which explains why prices have remained so low. Some construction projects have proved over-ambitious as exclusive office spaces and apartment buildings remain empty - and yet there are plans for more building.
Before the wall came down, West Berliners were not required by law to partake in the compulsory military or civil service - an obligation that remains in Germany today. This exemption attracted a great deal of pacifists, partisans, social and political activists, and of course artists. Musicians, artists and filmmakers were and still are subsidised by the government under 'contribution to culture' funding.
Those who weren't or aren't subsidised have the option of universities, art schools or film schools that are 100 percent funded by the state - foreign students included - and in which the recipients enjoy huge discounts on daily necessities like travel. The average age of a graduate across Germany is 29.
If you're not a student, you can also purchase a monthly travel ticket here for about €50, which entitles you to any mode of the efficient, 24-hour transport system that Berlin offers - parties and late-night exhibitions are never a problem.
In Berlin, wherever you go in the central suburbs you will come across house galleries. They're actually all that they say they are: converted ground-floor flats with the front windows open. It's in one of these that I meet David Bruhl: home-gallery owner, painter and exhibitor. David is a 68-year-old East Berliner - born in 1938 he doesn't recall much of Nazi Germany, but does remember the end of the Second World War. His family tried to start afresh, but found themselves on the 'wrong' side of the wall.
"Art in whatever form has always been used to express the things we can't express with words," he muses. "Painting allows me to say more than I ever could in conversation." David has never left Berlin for more than a week: "I don't need to; there is enough to do in Berlin for five lifetimes, and I only have one. I get all of my inspiration from here."
"It's very easy to feel at home in Berlin," opines fellow artist Vincent Boelaarts: "It's very creative and feels very safe. Friedrichhain has so many galleries and so many interesting people; the punks, squatters families, students, business people."
Vincent is a Dutch painter (naturally named after van Gogh - his father is a big fan) who lives in a studio, an old red-brick school building in the East of Berlin. The school has been renovated and now boasts 'collective' status. The space is amazing, with high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows; he pays €260 a month. The building hosts its own private gallery space on the ground floor, in which the artists take it in turns to exhibit their work.
"In my first month in Berlin, I got a gallery," ponders Vincent. "That's really quick; quicker than I ever have before. And now that I've had one - and I have another soon - that brings in interest and gives me a stronger platform to go to some of the bigger galleries." Vincent's new space is in Kreuzberg, a district just south of the centre well-known for its art, culture and Turkish influence.
It was a pretty simple process. "I got to know the guy that owned the drink shop opposite my flat; he knew a woman that owned a gallery," he recalls. "We met, chatted and I took the pictures of my work along. She liked the stuff so invited me to show my work for a month."
As we chat, Vincent's refers on a number of occasions to 'Die Brueke' (The Bridge), a revolutionary group of artists including Kirchner and Bleyl. Vincent's plans involve others: "I will either get either involved with a group, or found a group with similar ideas about art and what we want to tell," he explains. "There are great opportunities to do that here. It's always good to talk about art, to show what you've done and to look at others' work that can inspire."
With so many small galleries willing to give unknown artists a chance, could the quality of the work have suffered through overabundance? "I think that because there are so many artists here it forces the quality to be better," he counters. "The galleries are very critical, and turn a lot of artists down. Paris used to be the home of art, but now a lot of people say - and I agree - that it's Berlin."
It's a statement that crops up a number of times whilst talking to foreign artists about their decision to be in Berlin; it's certainly the opinion of Aya Onoderra, a painter from Japan. She has been living in Berlin for around eight months, and like Vincent inhabits a beautifully-lit studio - in her case, in the leafy suburb of Schoenberg.
"I don't ever really paint things I see - just the things inside my head," she reflects. "Yet since I've been in Berlin, those things have changed so much. It's so important to have the right environment. I lived in Tokyo where it's so stressful, there are so many people. In Berlin you're in an amazing city, with all this life, and yet there is space: so many parks and green."
Since arriving in Berlin, Aya has used her location to source galleries all over Germany and Austria. She's currently exhibiting in Vienna. "I've always wanted to have my work displayed there. Every month or so I go to another city - Bonn, Hamburg, Vienna - with my portfolio, and trawl the galleries. People always ask where I've exhibited: it really helps to have had a gallery in Berlin."
Berlin's central European location offers a great deal to artists that need to move around. Florian Meindl is fresh off the plane when we meet at his label's studio in Friedrichshain: he's just DJ'd at the Urban Artforms Festival in Austria. "It was one of my biggest gigs in front of 8,000. I was playing with some great DJs: Jeff Mills, Ricardo Villalobos, Trentemoeller."
Florian has just turned 21, and moved to Berlin four months ago. "I knew that I couldn't do what I wanted to do from Austria, and for electronic music Berlin is the only place to be. If I wanted to meet a world class DJ in Austria I would have to pay, go backstage and hope: here I get invited to barbeques with Anja Schneider."
Florian is moving quickly. He realised at 16 that he needed to produce music as well as DJ: there are somewhere between five and six thousand DJs playing electronic and minimal techno music in Berlin, which certainly provides healthy competition.
"I was very lucky: I was 20 years old. It sold 1,000 times, which is quite good for a guy that nobody knows," refers Florian to his track Liquid Source, released by the German label Balcon Records. Larry Heard aka Mr Fingers, the Detroit house legend, picked up the record and ran with it, boosting the track's success. "Two months ago I released Sputnik on my new label. It sold about 1,200. It was heavily played in Berlin because it's classic minimal techno."
For a DJ, breaking into the Berlin electronic scene appears to require a great deal of skill, coupled with determination and a great deal of patience. Everyone I speak to on the subject mentions 'cliques'. "Unfortunately I haven't played a lot of gigs in Berlin. In Berlin everyone knows each other," Florian can reveal. "It would take at least a year for me to get involved. When you have ten releases here you're still nothing - hundreds of DJs have ten good releases in Berlin."
Oliver Koletzki owns Florian's label, 'Styl Vor Talent' (Style Before Talent) - and does play regularly. "I play every three months or so at the Panorama Bar - arguably the biggest electronic club in the world," he declares.
Oliver applied the hard work, skill, patience rule: his last record, Der Mueckenschwarm, sold over 20,000 copies. "My first three years in Berlin, I was playing in a cocktail lounge every Saturday - five hours for €50. But I was happy." He acknowledges Berlin's clique problem, but asserts: "It does take time and skill, but it is a bit like a family once you're in."
There's a huge 'illegal club' scene in Berlin. They spring up in flats, parks, warehouses, abandoned schools - anywhere that isn't occupied. Police here don't seem interested unless they receive a certain number of complaints. They have a good relationship with the scene, and appreciate that it has no history of violence. When people get in trouble, they simply move on and set up somewhere else.
"I try to keep touch with the underground," states Oliver: "I sometimes play for no money, but it's really important. I love to party when I'm not working. And sometimes the illegal parties with 50 or 100 people are the best."
"A few years ago, it was all about the new illegal club," offers Rowan Geddis, an English exhibition space owner in Mitte, central Berlin. "Now there have been clubs that have stayed around for a couple of years, which are the places to be. Before, if you advertised then it meant you were dead - it's not like that anymore."
Websites and mailing lists give you the places to be in Berlin, rather than expensive advertising campaigns required to draw a crowd in the UK. "Mouth-to-mouth advertising is amazing here," adds Oliver. "If you organise a party, within a day you can get 100 people easily. If you are here to party for a few days, the advice is to head to the music shops, pick up flyers, ask the record sellers."
"But if you're visiting and want to party - or you're a DJ and want to play the best places - the best legal club is absolutely the Panorama Bar, Ostgut. It's so tolerant, so open-minded. You have bank clerks, punks and hippies all partying together. Watergate is another amazing club, on the fifteenth floor, with a panoramic view of the city to watch the sun come up. Maria and Bar 25 are also very important."
Every artist I spoke to mentioned 'the history' and its influence on their work, from the architecture to post-Cold War 'Berliner' mentality. Particularly to the East, the city has maintained its ties to the past, indeed 'now' and 'then' are so intertwined here.
In May 1945 - three weeks after Germany and Berlin were split into the four respective occupied zones - the authorities in the Soviet Zone ordered the re-opening of all the cinemas. Wherever you wander in the East, you're never too far from an independent cinema, tucked onto the curve of a street corner.
The diversity and range of film and documentary that comes from Berlin and is shown here would certainly be difficult to equal: there are readily-available opportunities for first-time and rising directors of both feature and short film to have worked screened. Multiplex's are relatively difficult to find; you need to look a little further to find the latest Hollywood release.
Funding for films works in a similar way to the British system, split into regional film bodies. There are 16 'Bundeslander' - areas of the size somewhere between a county and a region - each hosting its own film body, with a specified amount of money to offer. As in the UK, this amount varies; Berlin, like London, has a larger pot than any other region.
It's difficult to quote concrete figures for the investment in German film and television, simply because of the huge amount of independent funding. The FFA (German Federal Film Board) has an annual budget of around €70 million at its disposal to invest in feature and short film, but there are also eleven well-known independent funding bodies in Berlin alone. What is startling is the amount of public money available for film and tv; just under €200 million a year. This pot allows filmmakers a here a greater license to experiment than in the UK.
Berlin falls under the umbrella of the Berlin-Brandenburg Film and Television Industry, said to have an annual turnover of around €800 million. An invaluable resource for filmmakers, the region's 'Medienboard' acts as a one-stop-shop for all film and TV inquiries in the capital - from funding to locations, marketing to local business and politics.
Everyone is entitled to funding from all the regions, but you need to provide a link to a specific region if possible. "I'm now entitled to money from the film funding body in Schleswig-Holstein," offers Martin Raabe, a filmmaker who has just made the move from Northern Germany to Berlin. "I can quite easily get the money from my State, but I need the team and there are so much more talented, skilled and trained people in Berlin."
There is a great deal of talk about the 'new, new wave' of German cinema, and the crest is without a doubt breaking in or around Berlin. The move is spearheaded by directors like Fatih Akin (Head-On, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul) and Hans Weingartner (Die Fetten Jahre Sind Vorbei).
And it's no wonder. Berlin in the past ten years has a prolific record of producing quality film with relatively low budgets. Films with international success like Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) cost just $1,750,000, and Goodbye Lenin! cost a reported €4,800,000.
Understanding of film in Berlin runs beyond economics, embracing the considerable cultural and social gains. It was recently published that for every Euro invested in film, the economy receives three Euros back. But in this burgeoning cultural metropolis, investment is pouring into art for art's sake across the board: "Here the funders never expect to get any money back," concludes Martin.
Berlin in the last 17 years has developed into a cultural Mecca. The government's backing and understanding of the societal importance of the arts - even in the face of unprecedented unemployment - suggest that Berlin will continue to be one of the world's dominant creative forces for the foreseeable future.
LINKS
www.german-cinema.de
www.ffa.de
www.medienboard.de
www.vincentsatelier.nl
www.stilvortalent.ce
www.german-cinema.de
www.florianmeindl.de
Text: Paul Morris
Illustration: The Boy Fitz Hammond
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