Germans are famous for inventing just the right compound word to describe something ineffable. They should make one up for the sensation of being simultaneously exhausted by the past and ecstatic about the future. In English, let’s call it Berlinism.

We steeped ourselves in Berlinism at its epicentre: the funky downtown neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg. Another overly modest Craigslist ad had secured us another ideal apartment, though in this case the preschooler heaven of a local park was a full half-block away, in the shadow of a historic water tower that had served for a time as a makeshift concentration camp. There’s Berlinism for you in a single incongruous line: the old concentration camp is really a wonderful place to bring your kids.

There might be no other urban district in the industrialized West as ravaged by the twentieth century’s excesses as poor Prenzlauer Berg. Its capsule history reads like a litany of the sins of the industrial age — from prewar tenement slums to concentration camp deprivations to forty years under the boot of the East German police state. By 1989, it was so exhausted, so bereft of sustainable life, that many of its elegant old flats were abandoned, fully furnished, by East Germans fleeing west when the Wall came down. Yet today, just twenty years removed from its wholesale desertion, Prenzlauer Berg is as livable a neighbourhood as you’ll find anywhere. Among many other blessings, it is now home to the best farmers’ market I’ve ever overindulged at.

I could go on for some time about the Markt am Kollwitzplatz — the bread, the chanterelles, the olive oil pressed on site, the currywurst lunch with beer poured from a tap and served in a real glass, despite the takeout counter. To do so would really be to make a larger point about the New Grand Tour in general, thereby restating a well-known fact about Europe: that the food is, you know, weak-at-the-knees good. But moreover, that the culture of growing and eating food in Europe has largely skipped the most severe deprivations of modern agribusiness, meaning that even the most workaday greengrocers and mini-markets and takeouts deal mostly in what the huddled North American masses have come to think of as gourmet food. The Grand Tourists had their Venetian galas, but I found my own private decadence — even a hint of transcendence — in a sausage mit Pommes and a big glass of Hefeweizen.

The fruits of Scheer’s labour crop up everywhere on the German landscape. Keen to give my kids their first real taste of quick, comfortable long-distance rail travel, we traversed the country from Berlin in the northeast to Freiburg in the far southwest. Wind farms and vast fields carpeted in solar panels were as much a part of the scenery as castle ruins and red-roofed villages. We skirted the rim of Solar Valley, the newly christened hub of the solar industry, just south of Berlin, where thousands of new jobs in the manufacture of solar panels have finally brought the former gdr’s chronic unemployment problems under control. We passed through whole cities where passive solar design has become a part of the building code.

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2010.05-environment-the-new-grand-tour/4/

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