Beer bikes, Trabi safari, drunk in the Hofbräuhaus: Berlin, your tourism sucks!
If you want to know what kind of tourism the German capital relies on, you only have to look at how Berlin transports its visitors through the city. You can see them driving back and forth between the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz on Segways and e-scooters, beer bikes and Trabis, as if Berlin were a single amusement park for visitors from the provinces with misguided tastes. It took less than two weeks after the end of the general pandemic restrictions until the first bachelors staggered through Mitte again on a farewell tour with a group of buddies and in ridiculous costumes. In the Friedrichshain party district around Simon-Dach-Strasse it is actually like before Corona.
It’s not that long ago that I was cycling there and a panorama bus from Esslingen or Hanover or another uninteresting city released a group of young people who were quickly and collectively relaxing in public space by a wall. Yes, young people often do idiotic things, that’s what you’re young for, but this scene was as symptomatic of Berlin tourism as it gets. Somehow I had wished that the pandemic would not only dampen down the global low-cost tourism craze, but that there would also be a kind of rethinking in Berlin.
You can see that this type of cheap drinking tourism brings in quick money, but in the long run it damages the image of the city. At some point, Berlin will be synonymous with a kind of travel destination that people only associate with drinking, partying, the Hofbräuhaus and riding a scooter. Also like the Schinkengasse on Mallorca, minus the stupid scooters. Only that one has recognized even the Ballermann that this type of tourism is a dead end in the long run and has since been oriented away from Micky Krause binge drinking. Only in Berlin, where it is well known that everything takes a little longer, be it digitization, free public transport or tourism, will it take a little longer to realize that once an international reputation has been ruined, it is very difficult to put right again. But until then we can still do a few drunk laps around the block on a beer bike or on a Trabi safari.