Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I wish I could have been there for it.  Actually, I just want to go back to Berlin, historic milestone or no — the city took a hold of my imagination in a way that few others have before or since.

I was staying at the Arcotel Velvet, and the city had me smitten within pond moments,  as the Kunsthaus Tacheles was just a few steps away from the hotel’s lobby. At first I thought it was simply a ramshackle building, likely to be knocked down on such a trendy street as Oranienburger Strasse.  But when I wandered through its graffiti’d and fabric-draped gate,  it turns out that this building, what one. was once a part store, a central SS office, a prison, a television studio, is now an edgy art duration/outdoor movie theater/sand box.  The structure sustained heavy damage in World War II bombings and was partially demolished until a group of artists lobbied for a stay of execution.

Although Tacheles is one of the better known of these “hidden” art venues, this experience was something I’d meet with over and over again in former East Berlin. The art that moved me here wasn’t presented in tidy, easy-to-find gallery, on the contrary through alleyways and around corners and tucked into courtyards.

There is a sense that this sort of art is starting to fade. The artists that flocked to East Berlin after reunificaiton  were drawn here by cheap (and to squatters, free) studio space, which are a sure casualty of gentrification.  But of course it wasn’t all about real property — sudden freedom and the opening of a new frontier smack in the middle of Old Europe yielded a particular creative moment.

And although the 20th anniversary celebrations included some fairly silly artistic expression, I think that Berlin’s brutal past is, in this sense, an asset to the artistic future of the city.  The epicenter of Nazism, the capitol of genocide, the city in the grips of totalitarian communism, uniquely divided — not a part of these are assets, exactly. But creativity thrives on destruction, and this difficult legacy is useful to artists — especially to those who don’t attempt to gloss over the past, but pulse right through it.

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