Old places and new myths in Berlin

By Melanie Sevcenko

Twenty-one years after the reunification of Germany, gentrification is taking its toll on much of the eastern part of the culturally vital but economically troubled capital.

But as property prices creep upwards, parts of the city remain derelict and abandoned. The spaces that once functioned as factories, embassies and government offices under the German Democratic Republic (GDR) remain redundant.

Haunted amusements

Kulturpark Planterwald was the only amusement park in the GDR and remains as a relic of communist childhood in the centre of Berlin's Treptower Park. With an assortment of patched fencing around its parameter and the sort of back-story that would make for a movie script, the park is an essential break-in zone for those who brave the patrolling security.

Since 1989, the former amusement park has been under the ownership of the Spreepark Berlin GmbH Company, headed by Norbert Witte. Shortly after he went bankrupt in 2001, Witte, who was more than $14mn in debt, escaped to Lima, Peru. But in 2004, he was charged with smuggling cocaine from Peru to Germany in the park's flying carpet ride.

Emge Sicherheitsdienste, a security company contracted by the city, now presides over the grounds. But exactly who owns the park remains disputed, which is one reason why potential investors have consistently shied away while moss and grass has consumed the Ferris wheel and rollercoaster, an English village and pirate boat, swan rides, a rusty circus tent and even a love canal that was never put into operation.

The former Iraqi embassy to the GDR stands ominously in a cul-de-sac in Berlin's northeast region of Pankow. Abandoned during the final stages of the first Gulf War in 1991, it inhabitants appear to have left in a hurry. Typewriters and telephones, fax machines and filing cabinets remain with Arabic documents strewn about the desks and floor. The wind blows a delicate lace curtain through smashed doors that lead onto a veranda.

To the southwest of Berlin, in the former East's Potsdam-Mittelmark district, is Beelitz-Heilstatten - a vast hospital complex designed by architect Heino Schmieden. Beelitz-Heilstatten became a military hospital during World War I, when a young Adolf Hitler was treated there for a leg wound.

In 2008, architect Torsten Schmitz took ownership of the buildings and has since been looking for investors to help restore them. But, the resurrection of the old sanatorium is not a lucrative prospect. Irene Krause, a Beelitz historian and tour guide, says it is more economically sound to build a new hospital than to renovate an old one.

Suggestions for the future of the buildings come and go, from school campuses to retirement homes, but nothing has been seen through to fruition. "German investors no longer invest in Germany, they go abroad," says Krause.

After a fatal accident in one of the buildings, the mayor of Beelitz asked Schmitz to lock the facility down - the boarded up windows and doors now add to its ghost town façade. But the boards have not stopped nature from creeping inside and overrunning the barren interiors. A young forest has devoured the entire top floor of one building in the west wing.

Most of the rooms are stripped of their equipment and furniture, but Krause says what remains is evidence of ingenuity in engineering and design. "I hope people will see that this is a place that was made for the next generation, but I don't know if anybody will spend the money on it."

Fading legacy

During the Cold War, the National Security Agency (NSA) built a listening station on top of the Teufelsberg Hill in the former West to eavesdrop on Soviet and East German military traffic. The Allies had originally constructed the hill from the rubble of buildings destroyed during World War II.

But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the station was neglected and now exists in a state of purgatory between the city investors who toy with the idea of building a spy museum and the Field Station Berlin Veterans Group which campaigns vigorously to erect a memorial there.

"One more theatre of the Cold War goes down," says Barbel Simon of the Cold War Museum in Berlin, "a [sign] that the Cold War and its legacy is starting to fade, unfortunately."

In 1998, the Berlin Senate forcibly reclaimed ownership of Teufelsberg for $43mn. But with no viable investors in the opinion of the city - even filmmaker David Lynch's proposal to construct a transcendental meditation centre on the site was denied - Teufelsberg remains a playground for urban explorers. On any given day, the pulverised interiors and defaced exteriors are strewn with photographers, sunbathers, artists, bloggers, and even campers who pitch tents and bring portable grills.

'Pure urbanity'

In a city that is no stranger to financial instability and shifting political fortunes, money seems to be at the root of the hesitation to rejuvenate these historically and culturally significant spaces.

Mediaspree, a multi-tiered investment project that plans to commercialise real estate on both sides of Berlin's Spree riverfront by converting unused property into lofts, hotels, telecommunication and media companies, has been trying to entice wealthy investors since the early 1990s. But development is a slow trickle, leaving ambitious plans only partially realised.

Christopher David, the creative director of Kooper David Creative Property Development, a company that specialises in transforming utility spaces for arts and creative industries, feels that "Germans are very detailed and bureaucratic, hence progress is more gradual and less about boom and bust cycles".

But not all locals support the ambitions of the development firms. The independent street art blog, Urban Artcore, reported that 30,000 Berliners voted in a referendum against Mediaspree and its gentrification plans in 2008, claiming the investment project contradicts Berlin's affordable urban persona.

Urban Artcore founder, Brenna, feels that abandoned spaces "are an example of pure urbanity, places without ads, places without CCTVs, places without angry citizens".

But Berlin is home to some sites that have succeeded in changing their function after a period of uncertainty. Tempelhof, one of Europe's iconic pre-World War II airports, was closed in 2008 but reopened its gates this year as a vibrant people's park. In 2009, Kooper David Creative Property Development turned a defunct city swimming pool in the Wedding region into a gallery and performance space for local and international artists.

David thinks Berlin offers unique opportunities for such transformations because "two world wars and a dividing wall have left massive amounts of unused industrial space. Combine that space with the very cheap cost of living and you get the ideal location for artists to begin their work".

But Brenna says that the number of abandoned factories in the former GDR is dwindling. "It becomes harder from year to year to find buildings without security guards. I guess the time for the majority of the now-abandoned places to be put back into use is very near."

Rebuilding history

As the epicenter of World War II and the one time dividing line between opposing economic ideologies, Berlin has one of the most turbulently rich histories in Europe.

But most Germans do not believe that these buildings have been abandoned as part of some bid to forget or erase that history. Christine Wolf of the Berlin Monument Authority sees a correlation between abandoned buildings and "major changes like the development of Berlin from an industrial city to a service-orientated city".

Still, one cannot help but wonder why the GDR's central parliament, the Palast der Republik, was dismantled in 2006 on the order of the German Bundestag. The Berliner Stadtschloss (City Castle), the building that has been proposed for the site, is essentially a replica of the historical Palace Square of the old Berlin, which was demolished in 1950.

Martin Sabrow, a political scientist and historian at Berlin's Humboldt University, says that although there has been no overriding move to ignore East Berlin's recent history, there was in the early 1990s "a strong wish to destroy all reminders of the GDR regime, including the whole Berlin Wall. There was also a long discussion about the future of the Palast der Republik. Not only its symbolic value, but also its presence in the middle of Berlin were the reasons why especially the former GDR citizens wanted to destroy it".

But architecture, like the collective memory of citizens, is more than just empty disused buildings - it encloses a history and can speak volumes about a city's antiquity. But Sabrow steers clear from the idea of Berlin as a vast museum or memorial to the past. "There are many old buildings, but for example, Potsdamer Platz is a view into the future. Berlin has its places of memory and many other memorials, but it also has places to live everyday life."

Daily Update

Iraq's troubled young hearts

In the August heat, the waiting room of the Sulaimany Centre for Heart Disease was packed with worried parents. Some had been waiting for this day for months. Others just showed up. They had heard on TV that for 11 days an international team would be fixing children's hearts for free. They dressed their sick children in suits and taffeta dresses and came, prepared to beg.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, an estimated 4,000 children are waiting for heart surgeries. Decades of malnutrition, intra-family marriage and, many believe, the remnants of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons deformed their hearts at birth. The deformities are exquisitely complex - a challenge for even the best pediatric surgeons. But Kurdistan has none.

Though Iraqi Kurdistan's economy has blossomed since the fall of Saddam in 2003, healthcare has not seen the rapid changes and improvements of other sectors. Instead, parents are forced to rely on a loose network of NGOs to heal their children of their heart problems.

Waiting list

On the other side of the double doors into the cardiac ward, the team was assembling. The group of surgeons and medical staff were from the International Children's Heart Foundation. They were ebullient because the first child they operated on was already walking around the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), less than 24 hours after surgery. It seemed to bode well for their trip.

At the head of the group was Dr. William M. Novick, the organisation's founder. Novick is a giant. At well over 6 feet tall and known for his cigars and searing intellect, he could convince you of just about anything. The Memphis, Tennessee native has spent the last 20 years jumping from one underserved community to the next, building sustainable cardiac programmes where governments and communities have few options.

Coming from him, the future of Iraq's young hearts seems particularly desperate. "This is a hideous problem," he explained. "I've covered every possible place for heart surgery in this country. All six of them put together are not operating on 400 kids a year. This country has a population of 30 million. With a birth rate of 35 per thousand, they are generating in excess, by conservative estimates, 6,000 new children a year that need surgery."

On this trip, his 16-person team planned to help up to 28 children, with the hope that continued training of local surgeons will eventually lead to the treatment of more.

They wrote each child's name on a whiteboard in the corner of a conference-cum-examination room, trying to sort out which families had arrived and which cases are were urgent.

Most children on the list were patients of Dr. Aso Faeq, northern Iraq's only pediatric cardiologist. Faeq visits two cities and 150 children each week, trying to keep up with his growing list of patients. He can only diagnose these children's hearts - hearts with holes, or no hole where there should be one; hearts that grow upside down or twice as large as they should; hearts that need immediate care, or they will stop beating all together.

Then there is the backlog. "For the last decades, there was no treatment for congenital heart disease in this region," Faeq explained. "The patients here are either previously undiagnosed cases or the families who couldn't pay for the travel and treatment in Baghdad. So many patients are collected over years here."

In all of Iraq, the waiting list for pediatric heart surgery is well above 20,000.

Death sentence

Next to Faeq, Jeremy Courtney, the executive director of the Preemptive Love Coalition, flipped through a stack of papers with dozens of children's names. He was the only one in the group wearing a suit. Of anyone in the room, he had the most to gain from these surgeries. He and his wife moved to Kurdistan three years ago from the US with a few friends. They had a vague notion of trying to help people in the region.

Not long after, they stumbled across Kurdistan's pediatric heart surgery problem and formed a small nonprofit organisation to send these children to neighbouring countries for surgery at reduced costs. His organisation contacted Novick almost two years ago for help. By arranging surgeries inside Iraq, Courtney could help fix more hearts in a matter of days than his organisation facilitated in its first year - and for one-fifth of the cost.

In the hospital, he was trying to stay on top of every detail and looked up from his list with surprise. "Where is Samal?"

Samal Sirwan Hussein was one of the first children scheduled for surgery. Five months after she was born, her parents took her to the doctor with a simple case of flu. They were told she had a congenital heart defect and would die without surgery within the next year.

The diagnosis kept her father, Sirwan Hussein, up at night. Other people in his family had heart problems. He knew this kind of diagnosis could be a death sentence for his daughter.

"My cousin had a heart problem, she wasn't well. They didn't find anyone to do surgery for her and after six or seven years she had a heart attack and died," he said. "I don't know what I do. All day, all time, all hours, I see her, she has a problem and I can't do anything for her."

Jeremy found Hussein and his wife Parween cradling their daughter in a corner of the waiting room. They had driven for five-and-a-half hours from the mountain town of Rwandz to the hospital, just three days after Samal's first birthday. But there were so many mothers jostling to meet the American doctors that they could not get past the door.

As Hussein's wife carried the baby into the examination room, she began to quietly cry. Her daughter reclined on the examination table, unfazed. Her huge brown eyes focused on an episode of Winnie the Pooh that Courtney held up on his laptop as a cardiologist performed her pre-surgery examination. With her stubby pigtails and near-constant smile, it was hard to imagine this child was sick. But when she waved her hands toward the screen, her fingertips were blue.

Decimated healthcare system

The visiting cardiologist was getting frustrated. The local doctors tapped to assist and learn from his team kept disappearing into their offices as patients came through.

Cardiology and other high-impact medical professions are not popular in Iraq, explained Dr. Rekawt H. Rashid Karim, the general director of health in Sulaymaniyah.

"Our people are not interested. They all go to the simple branches, like dermatology, like ultrasound; they go to branches that don't have much responsibility," Karim said. "These branches are more comfortable and have more money, because we have a bad system."

Healthcare is officially free in Iraq. In reality, there are both public and private sectors and all the country's doctors work in both branches. Doctors are paid the same flat salary in the public system no matter what their area of expertise.

Doctors who deal in complicated or urgent medical problems, like pediatric cardiac surgeons, are often required to stay longer or work harder at public hospitals. Meanwhile, doctors like dermatologists maintain dependably set hours and have more time to serve paying patients in private sector clinics.

Because of this, there are not enough trained doctors to fill the new hospitals being built to address Kurdistan's heart problems and other urgent needs, Karim explained.

To make the situation even more pressing, Kurdistan's hospitals do not only service northern Iraq. The rest of the country's healthcare system has been decimated since the US invasion, leaving thousands to seek help in functional hospitals in the north.

Karim estimates that 40 per cent of the regional hospitals' patients are from southern Iraq, but only 17 per cent of central and southern Iraq's budget goes to the north, stretching their resources thin.

For the children who do not receive help from Novick's team, their options are unclear, even to Karim. "There is no fixed programme. That is the problem," he said.

Some children might be helped by other visiting teams, shipped out of the country for care through the Preemptive Love Coalition or taken to Sudan or India through emergency aid groups. The government will sometimes give families a few thousand dollars for their care. But Karim admits that there is no long-term plan to address the new cases of deadly heart defects that crop up each year.

Political obstacles

For the NGOs who try to fill the gap in Iraqi Kurdistan, the political and cultural obstacles are intense.

"There are days when it comes to a head and there's a family that doesn't want to go to Turkey, to go to the 'enemy Turks'. To have the 'enemy Turks who are bombing northern Iraqi villages' help their child," Courtney explained.

"Occasionally there are funding disputes or there's a kid from this part of the country who is a constituent of that political party and if we're appealing for money from another political party, then we run into problems."

"If we get to, on any level, help overcome some of the petty politics inside northern Iraq to help save a child's life, that's meaningful for us," Courtney said.

For Novick, politics are more of a sticking point than an opportunity. "I'm not interested in becoming a political ping pong ball," he said.

But the nature of his work demands that Novick work on a high governmental level to ensure sustainable care once he leaves. He knows that in order for a long-term programme to work in Iraq, he must have both of Kurdistan's political parties behind him, as well as some level of agreement between northern and southern Iraq.

"One of my obstacles, if not the major obstacle, is figuring out the political landscape," he explained. "I don't want to step on toes and defeat the purpose of the programme before it ever starts."

As his daughter was prepped for her operation, Sirwan Hussein fidgeted in an empty bed in the cardiac ward. Samal's blood type, A negative, was hard to find, so he donated about a litre of blood in case his daughter needed it. He passed out after all of Samal's tests were finished and she was snugly awaiting her operation.

It took more than five hours before they received word from the doctors that Samal had made it through the surgery but the outlook was not good. Her heart had stopped even before the operation was underway and she was extremely weak. Less than 24 hours later, Samal died in the ICU.

For the Hussein family, Samal's death was bittersweet. An estimated 7 million children worldwide need heart surgery but have not received it. Samal had beat immense odds, but it had not been enough to save her.

In the basement of the Sulaimany Centre for Heart Disease, four more children's names were written on the surgery board for the following day. In the waiting room outside, families continued to gather, hoping to be one of the thousands put on the surgical team's waiting list.

Daily Update

Thousands flee south Pakistan city

More than 175,000 people have fled Pakistan's southern city of Thatta, leaving it virtually empty, as flood waters threatened to submerge the city's outskirts.

Troops and civilians were struggling on Sunday to protect the city after floodwaters broke through levees on the Indus.

"The water is still two kilometres away from Thatta where the armed forces and the local administrative workers are working on war footing to save the city," Hadi Bakhsh Kalhoro, a senior city official told the AFP news agency.

"The army brought a maximum of resources to try to fill up the breach. Almost all the people have left Thatta to safer places, all shops and schools are closed," he said.

Thousands of people sought shelter on the high ground of a historic cemetery outside Thatta and others headed to nearby towns and cities.

'Incapable government'

Many were angered by lack of help, and on Saturday, a number of villagers blocked the main road in protest against the government, saying they had not received any food or assistance.

Lakano Barani, a resident from Thatta, blamed officials for not taking the necessary steps to prevent the third levee from breaking.

"Nothing was done and now it is too late. If they [the government] had taken action, then the historic city of Thatta could have been saved," he told.

"The government has not told the people where to go or what to do. It is the most incapable government I have ever seen."

About 17 million people have been significantly affected by the floods and about 1.2 million homes have been destroyed or badly damaged, according to the United Nations.

More than 1,500 people have been killed.

The UN, the Pakistani army and a host of local and international relief groups have been rushing aid workers, medicine, food and water to the affected regions, but are unable to reach many people.

More than eight million people are in need of emergency assistance across the country.

Disease and hunger

The UN said that aid workers were becoming increasingly worried about disease and hunger, especially among children in areas where even before the disaster, acute malnutrition was high.

"We fear the deadly synergy of waterborne diseases, including diarrhoea, dehydration and malnutrition," Karen Allen, a senior Unicef official, said.

Martin Mogwanja, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator, said the international response to the disaster must be more assertive.

"If nothing is done, an estimated 72,000 children, currently affected by severe malnutrition in the flood-affected areas, are at high risk of death," he said.

In Islamabad Phoebe Greenwood, from the international children's charity Save the Children, told "We have acute malnutrition here, which is when in a disaster children and families are not getting enough food at all. This has long-term implications for their health.

"There is an immediate need to get normalcy back into these children’s life."

Greenwood said that it would be important to set up temporary schools across the affected areas of Pakistan in order that children will be able to interact with each other although more funding was needed.

Meanwhile, the aid effort is gathering pace. Almost $700 million has now been donated to the flood appeal, both directly and through the UN.

The United States is taking the lead - contributing more than $100 million to the relief effort, while Saudi Arabia has handed over $34 million and the UK has donated more than $20 million.

Daily Update

Muslim nations donate nearly $1 billion to Pakistan

ISLAMABAD — Muslim countries, organizations and individuals have pledged nearly $1 billion in cash and relief supplies to help Pakistan respond to the worst floods in the nation’s history, the head of a group of Islamic states said Sunday.

The announcement came as floodwaters inundated a large town in Pakistan and authorities struggled to build new levees with clay and stone to prevent one of the area’s biggest cities from suffering the same fate.

Foreign countries have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to help Pakistan cope with the floods, which first hit the country about a month ago after extremely heavy monsoon rains. But some officials had criticized the Muslim world for not contributing enough.

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, head of the 57-member Organization of The Islamic Conference, likely sought to counter that criticism by announcing that Muslims have pledged nearly $1 billion. The pledges came from Muslim states, NGOs, OIC institutions and telethons held in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, he said.

“They have shown that they are one of the largest contributors of assistance both in kind and cash,” said Ihsanoglu of the various donors. He spoke during a joint press conference with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi in Islamabad.

Ihsanoglu did not provide a breakdown of the pledges or say how much of the money would flow through the Pakistani government versus independent organizations.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani criticized donations made to foreign NGOs rather than the Pakistani government Sunday, saying much of the money would be wasted

“Eighty percent of the aid will not come to you directly,” said Gilani, referring to Pakistani citizens.

“It will come through their NGOs, and they will eat half of it,” he said during a press conference in his hometown of Multan.

The floods began in the mountainous northwest about a month ago and have moved slowly down the country toward the coast in the south, inundating vast swaths of prime agricultural land and damaging or destroying more than 1 million homes.

Floodwaters surged into the southern town of Sujawal on Sunday after breaking through a levee on the Indus River two days earlier, said Hadi Baksh, a disaster management official in southern Sindh province. Most of the town’s 250,000 residents had already fled, but the damage to homes, clinics and schools added to the widespread devastation the floods have caused across Pakistan.

Authorities in Sujawal were trying to limit the flood damage, but the water level has already risen up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) in the center of town and 10 feet (3 meters) in the surrounding villages, said Anwarul Haq, the top official in Sujawal.

The floodwaters also threatened Thatta, a historic city of some 350,000 people who have mostly fled to higher ground. Thatta is the base of operations for local authorities trying to cope with a disaster that has overwhelmed the Pakistani government and international partners who have stepped in to help.

Authorities rushed to build makeshift levees across the road connecting Sujawal and Thatta, parts of which were already flooded, Baksh said.

“We are trying to plug the bridges at three different points to stop the water flow toward Thatta,” said Baksh. “We are trying all our best efforts.”

Thatta is located about 75 miles (125 kilometers) southeast of the major coastal city of Karachi and 15 miles northwest of Sujawal.

Many of the people who fled Sujawal and Thatta headed to Makli, a hill just south of Thatta that contains a vast Muslim graveyard.

About half a million flood victims are camped out on the hill, Baksh said. Most lack any form of shelter and are desperate for food and water.

“We don’t have water to drink, not to mention food, tents or any other facility,” said Mohammed Usman, a laborer who fled Sujawal several days ago and needed water to help cope with a painful kidney stone.

The United Nations, the Pakistani army and a host of local and international relief groups have rushed aid workers, medicine, food and water to the affected regions, but are unable to reach many of the 8 million people who are in need of emergency assistance.

The U.S. said Saturday it would deploy an additional 18 helicopters to help with the relief effort. The U.S. military is already operating 15 helicopters and three C-130 aircraft in the country, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.
by Asif Shahzad
Source: Associated Press

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