The air smells of dust and the ground is riddled with construction pits. Here a house is being torn down, there the skeleton of a new one stands nearly twice as high as the old building rows. Nearby, workers are leveling the sand for a new street.
The city is so full of construction sites and such a vast array of new buildings are coming into being, that anyone returning to the city after an absence of a couple months, or visiting after having consulted an outdated guidebook, is bound to feel out of place.
"I feel lost in Berlin. It has no resemblance to the city I had supposed it was. There was once a Berlin which I would have known, from descriptions in books … a dingy city in a marsh, with rough streets, muddy and lantern-lighted, dividing straight rows of ugly houses all alike, compacted into blocks as square and plain and uniform and monotonous and serious as so many dry-goods boxes. But that Berlin has disappeared … It is a new city; the newest I have ever seen … The main mass of the city looks as if it had been built last week," American author Mark Twain wrote in the Chicago Daily Tribune after spending half a year in Berlin, starting in October 1891.
If a city can be seen as a living organism, then the years between 1870 and 1914 were Berlin's adolescence, a time when the sleepy capital of the Kingdom of Prussia became a booming metropolis, a place both contradictory and disorderly, always shifting between extremes, sometimes sparkling and sometimes abject, sometimes ruled by military discipline and sometimes by bohemian excesses, but always willing to experiment, forging ahead impatiently toward the future.
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