Hurray we’re still alive! And: We can continue to experience something – because this is Berlin, the wildest village in the world. Not a place to love or feel good, but still quite usable. If it weren’t for the conditions in Berlin. The change is little, because the people of Berlin want the continuity of the Left-Kladderadatsches with familiar means and people, according to the 2021 election result. But what does the shaman commissioned by this newspaper with the future view see in the northern fog of the future about her whereabouts for four decades?

She sees – yes, for sure – a glass building with broken panes. A squad of righteous people from Robin Hood’s forest cheers because they succeeded in driving out two gentrifiers who had turned from have-nots to billionaires in a short time. Your project was called “Lightspeed”, the speed of light. This is a phenomenon that the Kruschtel Berlin keepers of all sexes cannot cope with.

“From headscarf girl to lab coat millionaire”

The clever human couple (man and woman) had invented, produced and sold a world rescue product. Got rich from my own efforts – unbearable. A wonderful scene rises out of the fog in which the address of the glass house, with its deeply exploitative and capitalist connotations, is renamed from “gold mine” to “money sink” in an urgent procedure after deliberations by a secret jury.

The disturbed money bags disappear with their laptop backpack in the gray on the run to Mainz. They take their address and a billion euros in municipal taxes with them. Ha, moans the voice of a senator from the East: “We don’t take capitalist dough anyway!” A ghost who looks like Berlin’s ex-finance senator Thilo Sarrazin whispers about a book entitled “From the headscarf girl to the lab coat millionaire”.

A new whey market

Schools appear in the haze, which all those who were supposed to take over the education department in the new Senate horrified. The legacy of 25 years of SPD work in the Children & Future Department – a lotterland in which those who need a good school most remain lagging behind. The old, white shaman is naturally worried: This year her favorite girl (who lives in Pankow) is to start school. The unsuspecting child is very much looking forward to it! Die poor.

The whey market appears. The Senate oracle promises to be able to “experience it again as the place where Berlin was founded”. But now the cultured voice of a senator is blowing over, it sounds like “bolt, bolt”. Does that mean a long street front that looks something like the Grünerstrasse multi-storey car park, only in the mirror on the other side of the street? Soft, Wotan!

“We make architecture with trees”

Better quickly around the corner from the Old Market to the New Market, known as the town hall forum at a loss. This was once Berlin’s belly and heart with a lively craftsman quarter facing the castle. In 2022 everything will remain gray as it is until 2024. In the 1980s he wanted to say: People, stop complaining about boring architecture when a few green crowns grow into the sky.

In the ghost train of urban development, the specter of the general socialization of apartments haunts and rumbles: “Backwards into the future!” In times of decaying GDR public property, people once mocked the grandiose work “Creating ruins without weapons”. This time the socially minded inner-city people voted for a new attempt of their own free will. Who, oh great oracle, will finally help the failed utopia to greatness? Ah – a magician who believed that they could build airports, without competence, only with the magic wand called “Political Will”.

Destroy what destroys you!

Now the coffee grounds are mumbling too! 2022 When & more streets will be renamed, there is nothing important to do than hack shadows with swords. The alternative – persistent history clarification – would really be an imposition, like brushing your teeth three times a day. Also what’s up? If there were a street of unity in Berlin, it would have to be renamed at the Diversity Dam. But there are none. But the Brüderstraße! They have been around since 1297, when the Dominican Brothers’ convent settled on the street. Long enough, right? Sexist anyway. Passenger street would be contemporary.

The great attack rides the district assembly of Kreuzberg, which decided in September to wipe out the entire “general procession” with twelve streets bearing the names of generals of the Prussian wars of liberation. Yes, cut off the heads of your forefathers! Destroy what destroys you! General Yorck von Wartenburg was among those attacked, who called for a popular uprising against Napoleon and thus initiated the wars of liberation. When Chancellor Angela Merkel was adopted with a big tattoo at the beginning of December, the soldiers marched according to tradition to the sound of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Yorckschem March. Away with that too?

The shaman said nothing about climate change

Now the crystal ball shimmers with great happiness: there is cannabis for everyone! The dealers from Görli lower the prices, but then the business with cheap grass is going on here. You have to be able to afford clean stuff from the state dealer. The princes used to put liquor barrels on the street when the people were supposed to be happy. That then lay blissfully in the gutter and did not interfere with unpopular measures. Now an experienced stoner writes in the magazine “Fluter” about a phenomenon “that every stoner knows”: “The evening was discussed at the highest level. The world was treated in its principles. Every sentence, every word, was filled with wisdom. The next morning everything is forgotten. ”Brilliant. This is what Berlin needs in order to slide into the post-pandemic phase.

If the uprisings of the anti-vaccination troops then slow down, the sun comes out again, the Berlin Samurai Museum has opened in March (what do you learn there?), The citizen swing at the castle can go into operation in autumn, just 15 years after the building decision was made. Those are prospects!

In any case, the “new twenties” promised two years ago, just like those a hundred years ago, began with the end of a political era. With an epidemic, with excited to militant people on the street, with social fragmentation. The shaman said nothing about climate change. She’d rather keep her mouth shut and grab the bubbly to see more clearly.

This text appeared in the weekend edition of the Berliner Zeitung – every Saturday at the kiosk or here as a subscription.