Now, twenty-two years after the wall came down, there’s a growing nostalgia for the old East Berlin.  Trinket vendors on Museumsinsel sell toy Trabants and Soviet flags.  The TimeOut city guide features a walking tour called “Socialism Safari."  And "Ossie,” or Ampelmann, the figure that indicates “walk” and “wait” on East Berlin crosswalk signals, is supplanting the bear as the unofficial mascot of the city.  Berliners were up in arms when, years ago, officials began upgrading signals in East Berlin with the more conventional West German icons.  Their protests were taken quite seriously, and now it’s policy to feature Ossie at crosswalks throughout the old East Berlin.  The closest thing New Yorkers have to this kind of civic icon are its sports team mascots.  But we don’t care about Mr. Met the way Berliners care about Ossie.  

The little green man is strangely out of fashion and proportion.  He’s like a South Park character, with a too-big head and squished limbs.  He wears an old-fashioned hat and walks so quickly that he might tip over forwards.  His image is everywhere, on t-shirts, Christmas ornaments, ice cube trays, and just about anything else that’s available for sale.  There’s an Ossie shop at KaDeWe.  And, in some misguided spirit of feminism, they’ve devised a female companion for him, Ampelwoman.  These are bright, lively icons.  But it’s a bit sad that everything meaningful about the old, divided city becomes so simply translated into something that’s for sale.

Walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin one afternoon, I spotted an ugly old modern East German building across from the Dom that I had never seen before, a huge spaceship-like thing with blue and white panels.  Except that it wasn’t an ugly old modern East German building.  It was the Humboldt Box, a new temporary structure that offers special exhibits and a view over the city.  The Box is located on one of the most visible and symbolically charged parcels of land in the city, right at the heart of the tourist district, on the site of the former Palast der Republik.  After the Palast (a truly great ugly old modern East German building) was demolished in 2009 preparations began for the reconstruction of the old castle that stood there before WWII.  Then, when that project was suspended for financial reasons, the city held a design competition and gave the media company Megaposter the chance to put up this six-million-Euro folly.

Berliners were upset by the cost of the structure, and also the manner in which the project slipped so easily through the public approvals process.  But the best reason to be upset is by the atrocious design by KSV, an architecture office whose principals were, amazingly, trained at the Bauhaus.  They haven’t built much yet and seem to specialize in winning competitions.  Berlin is a city rich in architecture and rich in architects, the kind that specialize in buildings.  A wave of young architects from around the world flocked to Berlin after the wall fell, forging a strong local design culture.  Why didn’t the city select a superior design for this structure?  And why aren’t Berliners rioting?

The Neues Museum, Berlin’s museum for classical and ancient art, is housed in a stately neoclassical building by Friedrich August Stuller.  It recently underwent an award-winning renovation by the English architect David Chipperfield, a project that began in 1997 and ended in October 2009. The museum is renown for its fine Egyptian collections and one particularly lovely bust of Nefertiti. I visited with high hopes for the architecture and no particular interest in the objects on display.

The renovation lives up to the hype; it’s a masterful blend of old and new constructions.  The original masonry walls and vaults have been scrubbed clean and mostly left as they are, exposing the layers of material the building is made of.  Frescoes and decorative tilework from the original galleries have been retained within new finishes.  Chipperfield’s design rubs up against the platitude that a museum should be a plain white shell.  It’s a rich, sensual home for the artworks.  The slender glass display cases are set out sparsely, pulling visitors through and offering generous space for gathering and repose.  And the soft lighting reveals the objects while maintaining a sense of mystery about them.  But the real surprise was the artwork.  Walking through the galleries, I felt as if I were seeing Egyptian sculpture for the first time.  Like the building itself, these old fragments of stone and plaster came to life.

I visited Berlin for the first time in 1996, seven years after the wall fell and the city was wondrously reunified.  The capitol was being planned, new developments were underway, and there were construction cranes hovering over every street corner.  I still recognize that city, one of broad, low streets lined with stately old trees and sensible apartment blocks.  It possessed a quietness and ease that, in most residential neighborhoods, is still there.  But something else is gone, a sense that Berlin was largely private, that it allowed for pockets of emptiness and eccentricity that just wouldn’t be possible in a busier, wealthier city.

Then at the Winterfeldplatz green market on Saturday morning, beyond the tables with gorgeous spreads of sausages, breads and vegetables, I saw an apartment tower that looked as if it had been airlifted in from a commune, or from Mars.  Tall and flower-like, it had puce-colored metal siding and balconies spinning off its spine in all directions.  A friend explained that it had been designed by Hinrich Baller, Berlin’s “hippie architect."  Baller, who still works in the city, builds in the visionary-fantastic tradition of German modernists like Bruno Taut and Hans Scharoun.  But his work seems more personal than theirs, a bit like that of American architect Bruce Goff.  Seeing Baller’s very original building perched at the edge of the old square reassured me that, in some places, the other Berlin was still here.