Long Overdue, Berlin’s New Airport Is Still Worth Celebrating

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Too bad I didn’t keep our plane tickets from 2012 as souvenirs. They showed us departing from Los Angeles (LAX) and arriving at Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER), which was just about to open. But the launch, already delayed the previous year, was again called off at the last minute. So we landed instead at the charming but small Tegel airport (TXL) that dates back to the early Cold War.

Over the years, other opening dates came and passed for BER, owing to construction flaws, from failing fire-safety vents to elevators too short for their shafts. Now, though, in a triumph of hope over experience, Berliners are daring to get excited once again about what’s been called their “phantom airport.” Tegel, largely cobwebbed since the Covid-19 outbreak, will start shutting down in June, and BER is actually ready to open in October. It’s ironic, of course, that Berlin is finally bringing its new airport online just as a pandemic is keeping most people from checking in.

And yet BER is still worth celebrating, if only as a symbol. That’s because the tale of Germany’s runways and terminals also reflects the country’s dramatic history. Each former and current airport has a chapter in the story of a nation that used to be aggressive, tragic and divided, before becoming successful, rich and reunified. In a sense, the opening of BER confers closure on a traumatic past and marks the beginning of something resembling normality.

There was a time, in the roaring 1920s, when Berlin’s oldest airport, located in Tempelhof near the city center, was actually Europe’s busiest. Then Adolf Hitler took over and rebuilt Tempelhof in the 1930s to fit his Nazi visions. A few years later, the city, country and continent lay in ruins, and the Americans took Tempelhof as theirs.

Soon Tempelhof got itself a new and more heroic image. It was where American, British and French “raisin bombers” landed — every 30 seconds at one point — during the Berlin blockade of 1948-1949, to feed a population that was entirely surrounded by the Soviets.

Even after the airlift prevailed, however, it was clear that German aviation during the Cold War would take new routes. Until 1990, only the airlines of the three Western allies — such as Pan Am, British Airways and Air France — were allowed to fly to West Berlin. Although the Americans kept some of the glamor of Tempelhof and the French expanded Tegel, Berlin had changed from a capital to a sideshow.

So the action moved to West Germany. The region of Hesse grasped that, being in the middle of the country’s new geography, it could turn Frankfurt, often called Germany’s “secret capital,” into a continental traffic node. This had a certain economic and historical resonance. In the Middle Ages, emperors had been crowned here; later, it was where Rothschilds built financial dynasties. By the 1960s Frankfurt was becoming “Bankfurt,” a sort of German Wall Street. It was a promising place for an airport, and Lufthansa, the German flag carrier, gradually made FRA its hub.

As West Germany’s postwar economy boomed, other metropolises and their airports also thrived. Stuttgart (STR) benefited from serving the Swabian heartland of Germany’s vaunted Mittelstand of family-owned firms. The main airport in the populous Rhineland is Duesseldorf (DUS), which by the late 1970s took second place behind FRA for a while.

But the real success story was Munich. In the immediate postwar era, Bavaria was an economic backwater. This changed, as successive state leaders, most notably Franz Josef Strauss between 1978 and 1988, hewed to traditional culture while also wooing cutting-edge companies and entrepreneurs, a strategy later dubbed “laptops and lederhosen.”

A centerpiece of this effort was a new airport, named after Strauss. The old one, Riem, was cramped and gloomy. The new one, MUC, which opened in 1992, was light-swept and transparent but still easily navigable and cosy — a perfect architectural expression of what the newly reunified Germany strove to be. MUC became a second hub for Lufthansa.

At the same time, the decision was made to move the federal government from Bonn back to Berlin. So, during the 1990s, planning began for an airport appropriate to Berlin’s new role, while Tegel and Schoenefeld (SXF), formerly used by the East Germans, kept handling the booming traffic. Tempelhof, used mainly by smaller planes in its final years, was eventually closed in 2008. Today its runways are a Mecca for kite-landboarders.

But even as these old names fade into history and the long-awaited BER takes over, Berlin won’t ever recapture its prewar dominance. Like the U.S. but unlike France, say, Germany is decentralized in its politics, economy and transportation infrastructure. The country has many competing hubs.

To pessimists, BER symbolizes Germany’s bad developments. Its highly publicized bureaucratic and engineering fiascoes have dented the country’s former reputation — not always entirely flattering — of being relentlessly meticulous and punctual. The subtext is that Germany, whether it’s building airports or algorithms, is increasingly leaving economic dynamism to others, especially China.

To optimists, this too is part of Germany’s long historical arc to “normality.” Germans today are more relaxed about their national identity and place in the world than they’ve ever been. That explains why they’ve also been nonchalant about BER’s travails. The truth is, many Germans have secretly been savoring the airport headlines as a font of gossip. Many an awkward dinner party has been saved by boozy debates about whether humans would set foot on Mars before disembarking at BER, or whether it would be more cost-effective to rebuild the capital near a working airport.

Even the coincidence that BER is now opening in 2020, the annus horribilis of Covid-19, may turn out to be unexpectedly appropriate. Experts have been worrying all along that the airport would already be too small when opened. The pandemic has taken care of that. As Lufthansa enters a government rescue program and people shy away from flying, Berlin’s airport could turn out to have just the right proportions. That, too, is worth raising a glass to.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. He's the author of "Hannibal and Me."

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