STRIVE January 2018 | Page 8
Photo by RDTviews © 2018
Berlin: Dreaming the Future in the
Shadow of the Past
By Dr. Lauren van Vuuren
Berlin in 2017 is a city bristling with new technology
start-ups. Young people from all corners of the world take
advantage of cheap rent and an abundance of shared work-
spaces, often working strange hours in keeping with the
wild nightlife of the city. When they’re not working, they
race around on fixed gear bikes through the wide streets of
Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, and Mitte. In this irreverent,
youthful, and intense environment, the potential of tech-
nology to make the world a better place seems unlimited. It
is telling that one of the journalists who broke the Edward
Snowden story, Laura Poitras, chose Berlin as her base. It is
a deeply progressive city, where people treat freedom of the
Photo by RDTviews © 2018
8 January 2018
press, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement as
inviolate human rights. The drum of the right-wing party
Alternative For Deutschland (AFD), beloved in some small
towns across the old east Germany, beats very, very faintly in
the great metropolis on the Spree. It is precisely the freedom
and internationalism of the city that attracts people from
around the world. The tech start-up industry has massively
boosted Berlin’s always flagging economy. In a mere 10 years,
the city has gone from being a minor player on the tech scene
to the home of around 2,500 start-ups.
And yet as a writer based in Berlin, I often find myself
musing about the meaning of technological advancement in a
city with such an excoriating twentieth-cen-
tury history. In the years before World War
I, and especially through the turbulent but
wildly exuberant Weimar years of the 1920s,
Berlin was the technological center of Europe.
Advances in transportation and industry,
improvements in living conditions, and the
embracing of a progressive, permissive cul-
tural life contrasted with the fragmentation
and societal upheaval of the larger postwar
world. Glittering department stores and roads
heaving with new cars, new tram lines, so-
phisticated rail networks, and the large-scale
introduction of electricity led to Berlin being
called “the Chicago of Europe.” Yet the glitter
of Weimar was built on very shaky ground.
The Great Depression tore that ground from
under it and snuffed out its bright lights.
When they were turned on again, it was by a