KEY POINTS:
Sunday afternoon in central Berlin and watery sunlight falls lazily on the passing hipsters, rugged up against the coming European winter in vintage coats and scuffed retro boots. And outside a cafe in the trendy district of Prenzlauer Berg there's been a surprise meeting.
Several New Zealanders, who know each other vaguely from back home and who have all recently moved to Berlin, laugh when they catch sight of one another. They're all queuing for coffee outside a small store near a weekly flea market - it's one of the only places you can get a half-decent flat white in the German capital, a city that generally prefers its coffee very milky, overly frothy or both.
The assembled New Zealanders swap tales of their Berlin weekends - finding some strange nightclub in a hidden cellar, going to a party inside a white-walled gallery and dancing amid the art installations, catching the night bus home and watching a band jam onboard while one half of the bus yells at the musicians to shut up and the other half sing and dance.
The conversation turns to more everyday matters: how cheap the rent is, how many artists and creative types there are in this town, which interesting openings they've been to, how it's far more relaxed than other European cities and how good (and cheap) the kebabs are because of the large number of Turkish immigrants here.
All of the above, and more, are the reasons why Berlin is attracting more and more young New Zealanders setting off on what is most commonly known as the good old O.E, or overseas experience. And there are more due to arrive, say the New Zealanders meeting at this cafe. Once, London was the obvious choice for New Zealanders wanting a European experience. After all, we could speak the language, we often had some sort of right of residency and the culture was shared. So you'd move there, work as a well-paid nurse, lawyer or accountant if you were qualified or get a job in a pub if you weren't.
You'd set up house with other New Zealanders and spend your weekends drinking in New Zealander-dominated pubs and clubs. But over the past few years things have changed. For one thing, it's become more difficult for Kiwis to stay in Britain for a longer period. For another, we are looking beyond our colonial roots. So could it be that the German capital is becoming the equivalent of London for a new generation of travellers? "We get the sense that the numbers [of young New Zealanders coming to live in Berlin] are increasing," says Zoe Coulson-Sinclair, first secretary at the New Zealand Embassy in Berlin.
There are around 2000 New Zealanders registered as living in Germany with German government agencies and just under 200 New Zealanders aged under 30 registered as part of the working holiday scheme (whereby they get a visa to work in the country for a year). Since 2001, when German working holiday visas were introduced, the number taking up this offer has increased by over 30 per cent. But both Coulson-Sinclair and her colleague, Frances Warneck, a consular officer at the Embassy feel that over the past few months even more Kiwis have arrived in the capital.
"I get a lot of those kinds of calls - you know, can you help us with how to find a job and a flat and so on. And over the last six to nine months those calls have certainly increased," says Warneck, who fields a lot of general inquiries about all sorts of issues, including visas. When she first arrived in Germany 17 years ago, Warneck says, "I only knew of one other New Zealander living here. Now we're getting a lot more contact from young New Zealanders who are coming here for the arts scene and the music scene."
As Coulson-Sinclair says, "The New Zealand music scene has definitely got onto it in Berlin. They have realised it's cheaper for them to use Berlin as a launch-pad for Europe. You can do a season here, play around various countries and you don't need to be out of pocket." Bands like Fat Freddys Drop, immensely popular on the European continent, and the Black Seeds are already well aware of this.
"For us it really is an alternative to London," says Brodie White, guitarist with Wanganui rock band The Have. Most of the members of the group have relocated to Berlin and went on tour, supporting another New Zealand rock band, The Datsuns, around Europe late last month. "It's far too expensive there [in London] and even before we left they were tightening up the immigration laws. And even though this is the birthplace of minimal techno, there's still a really healthy live music scene and I think it's just going to get better. It's far cheaper to base ourselves here and it's such an unpredictable place with a generally creative vibe, which really suits us. Anything can happen," White laughs.
"Berlin is definitely becoming more popular [with New Zealanders]," agrees Veronica Manchego, an Auckland artist and one of the founders of the city's Cross Street artist collective. She's been in Berlin for several months now and was drawn there by the possibility of starting another artist collective elsewhere.
"There are definitely more people coming here, or at least, talking about it. I have had so many people say to me, 'I'll be there next year."' "I'm not quite sure whether it's the 'new London' right now but it's slowly becoming more like that," says Lucy McMillan, an artist and art teacher who moved to the city with her partner, film director Adam Luxton, in August.
"I've got more friends saying that they want to come here. And I think there will be even more when people who are here now get home and spread the word." Over the past five or six years, Berlin's reputation as a hip and happening centre for the arts, design and music has been more widely publicised.
In 2005, Berlin - home to more than 420 galleries as well as an estimated (by Berlin city government economists) 300 new music and 300 new film businesses - was listed as a City of Design by Unesco. It has also become the third-most-visited tourist destination in Europe, after Paris and London, as well as making it to second place on an annual survey of which cities best reflect the spirit of the times, or zeitgeist.
As the Hub Culture website, founded by Hong Kong-based futurist and marketer Stan Stalnaker, put it when compiling its annual zeitgeist survey: "Culturally, the city gathers strength, and over the past year has only done more to solidify its position as leader of the global underground. As the cutting edge vibe in London wanes, Berlin continues to draw the young and the restless." Perhaps as a result of the influx of all of this creative and cultural capital, Berlin, a city of around 3.5 million inhabitants, has seen an influx of the young and creative from all around the world, particularly from within the United States and the European Union; in June 2008 close to half a million residents were of foreign nationality.
At the end of 2005, the New York Observer reported that Berlin had more resident Americans than French. And within that same article, one American gallery owner who had relocated to Berlin said: "It's a fascinating, inclusive, tolerant environment with a very low cost of entry. And that spells magic for the arts, frankly. Berlin is going to be the New York City of Europe inside 10 years." And now young New Zealanders are joining the march. While "new Berliners" from Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) make up just 0.4 per cent of the city's total population, the Office for Statistics in Berlin-Brandenburg reports that this year there's already been a 13.6 per cent increase in visitors from Oceania.
Interestingly, it does seem to be a specific type of person who wants to move to Berlin. "I think there are still a lot of Kiwis going to London but basically artistic types are hearing it's quite cheap to live here [in Berlin]" says Tallulah Holly-Massey, a dancer who ended up in Berlin after several months travelling around Europe. She doesn't want to live in London despite the fact that she was born there. The cheap living in Berlin has led to a housing glut combined with an underpopulated city.
When the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago, a lot of those living in the former East Germany who could, moved to West Germany looking for better jobs and higher standards of living. At the same time there was something of a construction boom, fuelled by the reunification of East and West Germany. The result: too many apartments, high unemployment and cheap rentals. Which equalled, and still does even 20 years later, lots of room for under-employed artists to do their thing without necessarily needing to starve in an attic somewhere.
"In Berlin you can have your own [apartment] and not have to be a millionaire," says Kyle Callanan, a young designer who has launched his own line of leather fashion in Berlin and who also works in the film industry on various aspects of costume design. Originally from Wanaka, Callanan has been living in Berlin for almost two years now, working on his own projects as well as travelling to places such as Milan and Prague to work on film sets.
"There's money in the city but not in the way we usually think of it. Nobody asks you 'what do you do?' straight away, like they do in London. You don't have to be something or somebody to be accepted here, there's no pretentious hype. And everyone's an artist here," he laughs, "so you're no more or less special than anyone else." "In London you have to work really hard just to survive," says Lucy McMillan's partner, Luxton, who's writing a script while in Berlin.
"We wanted to experience living in another city, we also wanted not to have to work full-time. I wanted to do some scriptwriting and Lucy wanted free time for art and music. And this is a big metropolitan city but there's an easiness to the life here that's almost un-European.
In London or Paris it feels like you have to fight for your space on the sidewalk but here it's quite relaxed, it's quite New Zealand-ish in a way," he says. Luxton believes that such a preponderance of arty types with time on their hands makes the city a really inspiring place to be. "There's so much creative output. I may not like all of it but just being in the presence of all that, it can't help but rub off on you and get your creative juices flowing," he says. "And you can do a lot with a little here," McMillan agrees. Coulson-Sinclair, from Berlin's New Zealand Embassy says: "It used to be that you would go to New York and you could live in a grungy flat and have a pretty arty experience. But there's a been a lot more in the media recently about the cultural side of Berlin and how it's cheap compared to London, Paris or Rome. "In fact," she recalls, "Lloyd Jones [the Booker Prize nominated author who spent a year in Berlin on a Creative New Zealand writer's residency] said to me that never before had he experienced such willingness to experiment [as in Berlin]. Any crazy half-baked idea that anyone comes up with here, there's always going to be someone going 'wow, that's really inspiring'.
There's creativity on every corner and that must translate into other fields," she says. Coulson-Sinclair also has another theory as to why Berlin may be becoming an option for adventurous New Zealanders on their O.E. "The historical and political background is part of the appeal and I don't think we can forget that Germany continues to become a much more important middle European power. Plus, it also has to do with national identity. New Zealand is much more independent than it used to be."
Where once a visit to the land many pale-faced New Zealanders' great-great-grandparents came from was standard practice, now Coulson-Sinclair argues that, "we don't see the same ties to the motherland that we used to." Luxton believes it may have been this way for a while. "I don't think that London has been that 'old London' for a while now. People are looking around a bit more and they've been doing that for a while."
There is also another, more practical reason for Berlin's very recent popularity as a destination - and that is the ease with which it is possible to obtain a working holiday visa. While those New Zealanders who apply for British working holiday visas report long waits, expense, unhelpful attitudes and passports that arrive a panicky day before they board the plane, virtually all those with German working holiday visas have nothing but good things to say.
The application costs around $120 (compared to several hundred more for a British visa) and seems to take only a few days to process. In 2007 a new system was launched allowing New Zealanders to apply for a working holiday visa through any German consulate or embassy anywhere in the world, including Germany. "Until a year ago you had to return to New Zealand to apply. People don't realise they can now come to Germany, visa-free as a tourist, then if they want to stay longer they can apply from within the country," Coulson-Sinclair says. As more young New Zealanders learn about this new system, "we expect an even greater increase," she says.
"The irony is that it will be much harder to monitor [statistics about how many New Zealanders come here] as the issuing will no longer be in one place." By now you may be thinking Berlin sounds too good to be true, an urban paradise for new Bohemians, chockablock with cheap mansions, free beer and weekends of gallery opening parties in underground clubs. But of course, this isn't exactly true. There are plenty of challenges. The most obvious is probably the language barrier - even though most of the locals speak English it's still trickier to find work and an apartment without knowing at least a little German. And then there's the bureaucracy to deal with.
"Filling out the visa application was probably the easiest part of coming here," White says. "And the rigmarole you save on your visa back home, you'll definitely make up for with bureaucratic hassles when you get here, in order to get a job and somewhere to live - in fact, in order to do anything here in Berlin. So in that respect it's not as easy as it looks." Says Coulson-Sinclair, "[The bureaucracy] is a challenge here and I think it can impact on people's abilities to find a job." One of the big differences in Berlin is that informal networks for foreigners are not fully developed as they are in London. "Which, of course, makes coming here a more adventurous, groundbreaking thing to do - rather than just jumping into the shoes of the Kiwis who left the job and the flat before you," she says. "But as the destination gets more popular, the tips - about sublets, about jobs - will get better and they'll be spread around."
So things are changing as more Antipodeans arrive in Berlin. However, in general, Coulson-Sinclair and all the new, New Zealand-Berliners Canvas spoke to are not quite sure whether the city will have the same mass appeal as London. The mayor of Berlin himself is famous for describing his city as "poor but sexy". Which obviously won't interest everyone. And maybe it doesn't really matter. "For me it's all about New Zealanders understanding their place in the world," Coulson-Sinclair says.
"I think we only understand our own [national] identity by fully discovering another - it's important to have these points of comparison, to realise why we do things in a certain way. And you can do that by having an experience in a very different culture, by understanding how others think about history and politics. And that can only enrich your own, and other cultures."
So you want to go to Berlin?
For visa application forms and information visit the Germany embassy website www.wellington.diplo.de
Health or travel insurance coverage is a must as it gets difficult to get work in Germany without it - check the fine print of the policy to see where and what is covered.
There are plenty of apartments and rooms being sublet in Berlin all the time as people travel away a lot for work and study and, unlike in New Zealand, often keep their rooms on. If you're looking for temporary accommodation in Berlin: go to www.mitwohnzentrale.de or www.zwischenmiete.de to see what's available. You can even do this before you leave in order to check rental prices.
If you have problems with the language, use Google Translate to translate whole paragraphs. The results are not always grammatically correct but at least you'll get the general idea.
When you get to Berlin, you'll find that in order to do almost anything you will need to have registered with the nearest city council office or Buergeramt. This can take several hours while you wait for your number to be called, so put aside time.
Do research about what work options are available before you leave home. Check out www.arbeitsagentur.de or check out some German newspapers such as Morgenpost, Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.
With so many American and Canadian ex-pats already living in Berlin you may find some of your questions about living in the city - on such topics as banking, tax and so forth - have been answered online in one of several forums. The Toytown website (www.toytowngermany.com) and the English language magazine Ex-Berliner (www.exberliner.com) both offer useful information. Craigslist (www.craigslist.com) for Berlin can also be helpful for jobs and accommodation.
