Germany: Berlin

Author: Samuel Peterson

Date Published
2018-12-16 (ISO 8601)
73-12-16 (Post Bomb)

Berlin is Germany's largest single municipality by a wide margin. At 3.7 million (official) inhabitants it is more than twice the size of the second largest city, Hamburg, which has about 1.8 million people. You might notice that this is much smaller than London or Paris. Also, there is much less of a notion of Berlin's greater metropolitan area. Outside Berlin, you have Potsdam, Spandau, and that's about it. In fact, Germany's greatest concentration of people is to be found in the state of Nord Rhein-Wesphalia, which is where the cold war-era capital, Bonn, sits. Although there are no large individual municipalities there, the state is home to about 18 million Germans, or about 20% of the whole German population. Berlin is comparatively isolated; the state which encompasses it, Brandenburg (it's technically a different federated state), is mostly farmland.

Berlin also has a bit of a well-earned reputation in Germany for being dirty and incompetently governed. The dirtiness is pretty manifest in most of the smaller parks, where litter is a common sight. As for the incompetence, that's mostly manifested at the moment in an ongoing fiasco over a new airport which is now way over-budget and over-schedule. This airport is a favorite point of comment by the local Berlin newspapers. Sans airport, frustrations about the overtaxed and outdated transit system and the understaffed city offices would easily take its place.

But all that sounds a bit negative. I loved it in Berlin. There are dirty places, sure, but a dump it is not. Many areas can be quite pretty. I think that Berlin is at its best on the banks of the river Spree which runs through it, and the various canals which shoot off from it.

A canal in Kreuzberg. When we were living in this area, it was a favorite area of mine to walk and run.

Berlin's public works are also best by the spree. Here is the Bodemuseum on the museuminsel (museum island).

For those using mass-transit to move around, the metro map gives a faithful rendering of the feel of Berlin's layout, despite the transformations it performs on scale and shape of the actual dispositions. Here is such a map. You might wand to click on it to bring it to its proper size. I've annotated places that were places of residence, and work. Summaries are below.

Berlin's metro-transit map.

1. The vicinity of our first residence, in a neighborhood called Kreuzberg.
2. The vicinity of our second and last residence, in Freidrichshain.
3. Where Amanda worked. Aldershof is home to a rather large collection of scientific/industrial facilities. The area has a moto: "Science at Work" in large letters on a field near the metro-station.
4. First location of Caterwings, where I worked. This was also a short walk away from the Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor, and the US, Russian, and French embassies.
5. Second location of Caterwings. Not much of note here.

As you can see, we gravitated toward the eastern part of the inner city, which is circumscribed by the S-Bahn ring line called the ring. Outside of the ring, there is little of any renown, but some fine places, nonetheless, like the Tierpark, which is a Zoo that is a bit smaller than the central Zoologischer Garten. There's also a modest drop in the density of settlement, and more industrial areas which are not very pleasant to the eye.

There are some really neat monuments in Berlin. My two favourite are the Soviet War memorial in Treptower park, and the Siegessäule by the Tiergarten. The Soviet memorial is impressive due to its size, the strange angular look of russian art of the time, and because of the sheer scale of the sacrifices it commemorates. I like the Siegessäule, which commemorates the Franco-Prussian war and the unification of Germany in general, because of it's Victorian style, and the view it provides of the heart of the city.

I find it interesting that these two monuments come to mind. The two together can be thought of as marking the beginning and end of a rather large political tectonic event: the formation of Germany. Much of the European political instability between 75 BB (1870 AD) and 0 PB (1945 AD) focussed around the emergence of Germany, and the failures of the European powers to integrate them into a stable international order. Two world wars and tens of millions of lives later, Germany's role in international affairs took much less prominence. The two monuments are a great reminder of the perils involved in the hubris and paranoia that can accompany the emergence of a new great political power.

I get asked a fair amount about how noticeable the influx of migrants was, which became a big issue right about when we arrived. The answer I give is that it was not directly noticeable. I think this is in large part because there are already a lot of Turks, and Syrians, many of whom that I met had already been in Germany for some time (or were born there).

The influx of migrants probably would have been manifest had I lived near an asylum shelter, or by Tempelhofer Feld, which is the site that used to be the airport for the famous airlift during the Berlin Blockade, and now is a park-turned-refugee shelter.

Where the migrant influx was visible was in news stories, the increased popularity of the Euro-sceptic political party AfD, and the growing frustration with the two largest parties: the CDU and the SPD(although those last two involve a range of issues, immigration just being one of them). Some of the larger news stories about migrants focused on some outrageous incidents of mass sexual assault, most notably the large set of assaults during the 2016 new year. There were other smaller stories: some cases of migrants failing to register themselves and being deported, cases of migrants not being allowed in public swimming pools on account of their inappropriate conduct towards women, and increases in the number of "people of interest" for the security services.

Related to this question of migrants is the more general impression of the crime in Berlin. Almost everywhere I went seemed safe. Which is very odd since our apartment in Friedrichshain was one street removed from a notorious den of anarchist squatters who frequently had issues with the police, and who set set fire to cars on multiple occasions during protests. Nonetheless, the neighborhood felt safe. Probably because there were also a bunch of new families in the neighborhood and no incidents of assault or robbery were known to us.

However, there is something unsatisfying with this answer: subjective impressions don't inspire the greatest confidence in accuracy. So I thought I'd look for some criminal statistics in Berlin. I found an excellent report released by the Berlin Police department in German here. An abbreviated version is here. I am assuming the reader does not speak German, and as such, I'd just direct him or her to some graphs I thought were interesting, also note that the Germans denote a decimal place with "," and the separator for the thousandth, millionth (etc) place is ".".

I also wanted to get some statistics for Phoenix (where I currently live) for comparison. I found these data released by the phoenix police department.¹

For the interested reader who wants to dive through these figures, but who does not speak german, I'll just put some translations here some of the categories of graphs shown (erfasste Fälle means recognized/reported cases, aufgekl. Fälle means opened cases):

• Straftaten insgesampt: Total Crime
• Häufigkeitszahl zu Straftaten insgesamt im Langzeitvergleich: long term view of total crime rate (this figure gives total incidence of crime per 100,000 people)
• Mord und Totschlag: homicide and manslaughter
• traftaten gegen die sexuelle Selbstbestimmung: offences against sexual self-determination (not sure exactly what that constitutes, my guess is something not quite as bad as rape.)
• Vergewaltigung und sexuelle Nötigung: Rape and sexual assault (You may notice a significant spike here in 2017. The longer police report states that changes in the law regarding what constitutes rape played a part, as well as processing a large backlog from 2016.)
• Raub insgesamt: Total robberies
• Raubüberfälle auf sonstige Zahlstellen und Geschäfte: robberies of shops and misc. cashier sites
• Handtaschenraub: Bag snatching
• Körperverletzung insgesamt: Total assaults
• Gefährliche und schwere Körperverletzung: Serious assault (aggravated assault)

Comparisons of these categories between cities in different countries are in some ways problematic due to different definitions of various crimes, but I'll present here ratios of crime rates of some of the larger categories between Berlin and Phoenix for 2017, with the note that we take Berlin's population (as reported in the police report) to be 3,574,830 and Phoenix's to be 1,601,282. Also, I take the reported cases in Berlin's case, and the figures from the Uniform Crime Reporting (link above) in Phoenix's case. The figures are in rate of incidence per 100,000 people:

• Murder rate per 100,000: Berlin: 2.5, Phoenix: 10, PHX/BER: 4
• Robbery: Berlin: 119, Phoenix: 206, PHX/BER: 1.7
• Aggrevated Assault: Berlin: 300, PHX: 494, PHX/BER: 1.6
• Rape: Berlin: 28, PHX: 71, PHX/BER: 2.6
• Burglary: Berlin: 59, PHX 799, PHX/BER: 13

So you get the idea, Berlin is markedly safer than Phoenix. I'm inclined to distrust the comparative burglary figure for phoenix, as the phoenix police don't fully explain what their definition is, and the difference is so large.

I'd like to close by mentioning the Berlin flag which delighted my parents when they visited. It follows the same color scheme of the German Empire: red, white and black, with the black being featured as a bear, which is the cities' patron animal.


As a tribute to our time there and the fact that this blog was started while living in Berlin, the red white and black banner for this blog was intended as an abstraction of this flag.

Footnotes

1. When I first looked around, I found this , summary of crime rates. I was shocked when I saw it, since I read the figures as a rate per 100,000 residents (I failed to see that these were in fact the numbers in parentheses). Before I realized this error I was calling folks I know saying: "you wouldn't believe these statistics I'm seeing". And in fact they shouldn't have. Incredulous myself, I found the phoenix PD statistics that I used in the blog, and only after that did I see that it was I that was in error in the reading of the original source. I will probably need close supervision when I fall victim to dementia.