With some places it’s just a feel­ing. The Bahnhof Zoo has always been an icon for Ber­lin, the former cen­ter of the West. Nowadays I hardly ever get as far as Char­lot­ten­burg, and I try to avoid crowded places and shop­ping des­tin­a­tions (I tend to like my life stress-free. Plenty of tour­ists and the typ­ical pre–Christ­mas craze are def­in­itely on the bot­tom of the oblig­at­ory to-do list).

And yet, although I’ve been liv­ing in Ber­lin for more than four years, the areas around the Zoo and Ku’Damm remain sac­red and unknown to me. Vis­it­ing the “other side” tricks the soul into believ­ing we’re now in an entirely dif­fer­ent world, although the Zoo is merely a twenty minute bus ride away from my doorstep.

But oh, whatever I remembered from my last visit, the Zoo and sur­round­ing areas are sub­jec­ted to change. What’s this Bikini Ber­lin super-mall type con­struc­tion site? Why have they torn down the mag­ni­fi­cent Zoopalast Kino? Where the hell did the Waldorf-Astoria come from? What’s with all the new sites on Ku’Damm, those stores? The beauty of Char­lot­ten­burg, com­bined with the cul­tural her­it­age of the typ­ical “West­ern archi­tec­ture” of the 70s and the reforms that are tak­ing place now are worth a visit just for the visual input.

Where Ber­lin feels small in size it’s the City-West that can bring back the feel­ing of a global met­ro­polis. Although still rather tiny in com­par­ison to other large cit­ies, here is where the com­mer­cial heart beats. Shops, people, large streets, hor­rible traffic, neon-lights and ads every­where. The stark con­trast between this Ber­lin and the East is inter­est­ing as it is, but I’m quite sad to see so many land­marks van­ish with the times.

Hence I prom­ised myself I’ll take my cam­era out on a little City-West explor­a­tion adven­ture over the next couple of weeks. Every week I’ll try to cap­ture cer­tain areas and find new things that I’ve com­pletely missed out so far. I’ll start out with the Bahnhof itself, with the major­ity of the pic­tures com­ing from Andreas. He happened to be strolling around the Zoo on Sat­urday, too. His motives really cap­ture the essence of the train sta­tion itself, and justly so: what a his­tory this train sta­tion had to endure.

Every­one prob­ably remem­bers the now clas­sic novel and movie “Chris­ti­ane F. — Die Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo”. I would guess that there’s a gloomy atti­tude to the place that still derives from the pop­cul­tural influ­ences this story of a young heroin addict had. What was once an excit­ing myth, stick­ing to Ber­lin with an immensely strong glue, is now just another rail­way sta­tion. What is the Bahnhof Zoo today? Just a land­mark for nostalgia?

The Bahnhof Zoolo­gis­cher Garten was once the only long-distance rail­way line between Berlin-West and the rest of Ger­many. Need­less to say, this is how it became so cul­tur­ally rel­ev­ant. It was the arteria of the Ber­lins body, pump­ing people — and with those people came influ­ences and sub­stan­tial changes — through the rest of the city. The wall fell and the city cen­ter was to be logic­ally re-instated in the actual cen­ter of the city, which led to the estab­lish­ment of todays Haupt­bahnhof in 2006. I remem­ber the first time arriv­ing in Ber­lin being picked up at Zoo. I remem­ber by the time I moved to Ber­lin in 2008, there was abso­lutely no reason to ever go back again.

I won­der if all the res­taur­a­tion pro­jects around the Zoo will man­age to change the fad­ing repu­ta­tion of the sta­tion. For now, the Bahnhof Zoo is prob­ably noth­ing more than a func­tional space, sur­roun­ded by retail, res­taur­ants and large streets, with an old and soon for­got­ten story.