I’m irresistibly drawn to sleeper trains even though the reality of services like the Caledonian Sleeper and the California Zephyr is more functional than romantic. The same is true of the new European Sleeper from Brussels to Berlin via Holland which, with the right Eurostar connection, enables you to leave St Pancras on Friday afternoon and wake up in the German capital the next morning.
The age of the train’s rattly carriages — 1955 sleepers and 1967 couchettes — not only keeps the price down but carries a powerful nostalgic charge for me. In 1985, aged 18, I lived with the cultured, welcoming Khalcke family and worked in an old people’s home right by the Berlin Wall, tending to people who’d lived through the Second World War, for four hugely formative months. The Wall is now long gone and the city reunified and reconfigured, but it still feels like the place I know and love best after London. The sleeper reminded me of the trains I travelled on to Berlin and across Europe in the 1980s.
These are early days for the company created by rail nerds Elmer van Buuren and Chris Engelsman. Service on this, the first of several planned routes, has a retro feel too. They hadn’t got round to issuing tickets and sometimes didn’t show the train on departure boards when I travelled. Food and drink are rudimentary, albeit delivered with a smile. I was in a six-bunk couchette compartment, thankfully alone: two-bed compartments with their own basin are more expensive, seats cheaper. Ventilation is from the juddering pull-down windows but thanks to noise-cancelling earphones I had an excellent night’s sleep.
Arriving before the shops opened I dumped my bag at the stylish new Hoxton Charlottenburg and strolled around some old haunts: the Metropol theatre in Nollendorfplatz where I saw a punk production of Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a gig by the pungently named Jim Foetus; the bombed Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church, modern blocks of concrete and beautiful stained glass surrounding the ruined spire; the 1960s architecture of Zoologischer Garten station, immortalised in the grimy 1981 film Christiane F, featuring David Bowie. The Museum of Photography, round the corner from Zoologischer Garten Berlin (or Zoo, as everyone calls it) and housed in a former casino for army officers, only opened in 2004. It’s home too to the Helmut Newton Foundation and I took in a stylish retrospective of the work of Newton’s wife and fellow photographer Alice Springs, as well as an exhibition detailing the role photography played in the Holocaust. The city is still in active dialogue with the horrors of the Nazi past. Everywhere are “stolpersteine”, literally “stumble stones”, small raised pavement plaques commemorating Jews and others who lived at nearby addresses and were murdered in the concentration camps.
Although almost all traces of the Wall have gone, apart from a few blocks preserved at Potsdamer Platz and elsewhere, the years of division are powerfully felt too. I walked through Tiergarten, the massive central park, and still felt a shiver as I passed under the Brandenburger Tor and into Unter den Linden, the city’s historic main thoroughfare that used to be walled off in the East.
In 1985 you could visit East Berlin for a day but you had to change a certain amount of money and spend it all there, even though there was nothing to buy. You could also get off trains at Friedrichstrasse and buy cheap DDR booze at a kiosk, then get back on again. Armed guards stopped you leaving the station, and others policed platforms where western trains passed through eastern territory. The wall ran through lakes and in places down the middle of the River Spree. It seems all mad and inconceivable now.
The main library, university buildings, cathedral and opera house are on Unter den Linden, and the great museums are on the nearby Museum Island in the Spree. So the West German government built new versions of most of them, with the result that, after reunification, a city with half London’s population has two of most major cultural institutions. British architect David Chipperfield master planned the restoration of the neglected and war-damaged Museum Island and his blend of cool modernism and preserved decay in the Neues (New) Museum is as beautiful as its famous bust of Nefertiti. The neighbouring Pergamon is a match for the British Museum.
Slightly footsore now, I was glad to stop for a refreshing beer and a dip in the rooftop pool at Soho House Berlin, just past the concrete communist-era Alexanderplatz, with its ball-on-a-spike television tower. Supper was a Reuben sandwich at Mogg, in a beautiful former Jewish girls’ school on Auguststrasse. Then, because I am this paper’s theatre critic and a nerd, I paid my first ever visit to Bertolt Brecht’s theatre, The Berliner Ensemble, for a shouty, futuristic adaptation of Strindberg’s Dance of Death. (Other forms of diversion, including Berlin’s legendary nightclub scene, are available.)
The Hoxton’s bar and its stylish Indian restaurant were buzzing but my bedroom was delightfully quiet. After a restful night and a hipster breakfast of avocado on sourdough I headed east to Treptow, which I last visited in 1985 on a day trip to see the huge Soviet war memorial (told you I was a nerd). It’s now home to the enormous indoor Arena flea market, the Badeschiff swimming pool moored in the Spree and surrounded by an artificial beach, and lots of cool bars and food stalls along the river and the adjacent canal.
A bus took me to the vast Tempelhof field, the former city-centre airport that’s now a public park (an act of civic generosity that would be unthinkable in London: a similar site would be dense with luxury apartments here). Then underground and overland trains delivered me to Potsdamer Platz and the nearby Kulturforum, where West Berlin built its own Philharmonic concert hall (where I saw Oscar Peterson play in 1985), state library and so on. In the ravishingly clean-lined New National Gallery, designed by Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1968, I took in a peerless exhibition of modernist early 20th century art, plus 100 works by Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter.
There was just time for a shower back at the hotel, and a beer and a bratwurst before my sleeper train left from Lichtenberg station in the distant east at 9.40pm (in future, they’ll come into the central Hauptbahnhof). As on the inward journey, the trip was noisy, basic but brilliant fun. You can keep Paris, Amsterdam, even New York: Berlin remains the only city to match the culture, cuisine, architecture, parks and sheer excitement of London. It may even have the edge in terms of transport and infrastructure, though it’s not as cheap as it was. Still, you can get there overnight for just £51 now. What are you waiting for?
