An Irish firm’s plans to redevelop a run-down shopping centre in Berlin face fierce opposition

WHEN THE MAYOR of Berlin infamously described his city as “poor but sexy” he wasn’t referring to the desolate shopping centre a few doors from his home. There’s nothing sexy about the Ku’damm Karree, Berlin’s answer to the Irish Life mall: a disastrous 1970s pile that would flummox even hardened feng-shui practitioners.

The Karree is a rambling mess of a shopping centre that begins with a narrow entrance on the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin's most famous boulevard. Visitors are funnelled down a long tiled corridor beyond two kiosks and rows of empty shops to a bank of lifts at the entrance to a bizarre 20-storey tower block in the middle of the complex. Walking through the glaring emptiness of it all is like being an extra in the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead.

Then, about 200m down the tunnel, the scene changes to a 1980s Majorca-style shopping-disco-entertainment complex. Amid half a dozen shuttered bars two dim, low-ceilinged establishments remain: Bistro 2000 has seven beers on tap, starting at €1.50; the Karree Treff is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Two of the dozen customers play electronic darts while others read the paper and discuss tomorrow’s referendum. “I’m not sure how to vote,” says Karin, who is 43, over a glass of German white wine. “It’s clear the centre has to go – it’s never worked – but I’ll miss this pub.” One of the staff members offers a resigned shrug: “After 12 years of uncertainty we just want clarity. We’re annoyed at the city for this planning mess, but nobody’s mad at the Irish.”

The Ku’damm Karree had been failing for years when the Irish property group Ballymore bought it, in September 2007. Yet locals have greeted its plan to gut the centre and revitalise a dead stretch of the Ku’damm with reactions ranging from caution to hostility.

Ballymore says the viability of the 21,000sq m shopping complex depends on widening its facade to attract anchor shops and more customers. But standing in the way are the Komödie and Theater am Kurfürstendamm, two 1920s jewel-box houses once run by the famed theatre director Max Reinhardt. After surviving the war, damaged but largely intact, and the cold-war divisions, the two theatres were incorporated into the Karree in the 1970s.

The demolition plan has triggered a beige revolution among locals, mostly well-off pensioners, who are determined to hold on to what they see as one of the last outposts of West Berlin, their vanished former home. They have forced a borough referendum tomorrow, and are asking their neighbours to reject the demolition plans.

The two privately run houses are home to what Germans call boulevard theatre, an unashamedly popular form offering a mix of farce and comedy. It’s a world away from the city’s high-brow subsidised theatres. But West Berliners have never forgotten how these two small theatres kept them laughing in difficult times.

“These theatres are architectural jewels, and we’re afraid the audience will vanish during five years of redevelopment and, with it, this form of theatre,” says Otfried Laur, head of the campaign to save the theatres, and initiator of tomorrow’s vote. “Some 220,000 people come here annually, and, while the theatres may have no legal protection, they stand under public protection.”

Martin Woelffer, too, has seen the writing on the wall. He was a vehement opponent of the plan to demolish the theatres which were first operated by his grandfather in 1933, and later his father. Then it was revealed that the city had secretly sold his family down the river. In the mid-1990s, Berlin’s city government quietly accepted eight million marks (about €4 million) from the then owner of the complex in exchange for lifting the rights protecting the two theatres.

With no legal protection – the theatres are not listed – Woelffer has realised, albeit reluctantly, that working with his landlord is the only way to preserve theatre on the site. “Initially I found it a tremendous shame because my heart is really in these two old theatres,” he says. “As a private operator we are very dependent on the building owner. They’ve helped us quite a bit, for which we’re grateful, and we’re happy with the deal to keep theatre on-site. We’re just sad at how the politicians let us down.”

The one thing that both sides in this dispute can agree on is that Berlin’s politicians, from the city councillors up to the mayor’s office, have made a mess of this. Ballymore, for its part, feels it has wandered into an investor twilight zone.

After paying about €200 million for the site – far too much, say local analysts – group director Paul Keogh admits now that, even after levelling the theatres, he would be “lucky to get €50 million now”. The clock is ticking for Ballymore, with a significant proportion of its debt now with Nama. Keogh says the Berlin property is owned by Ballymore International, a company based in Luxembourg with no connections to Nama. But he admits that the privately held property group as a whole cannot afford another year of delays in Berlin.

“The mayor is anxious to have an image for Berlin as a progressive and welcoming place for international business,” he says. “But I said to him that if we fail in this referendum we will tell people not to do business in Berlin. It’s an impossible, illogical place. And it’s not just bureaucracy – many cities have that – it’s just how a very small group of people can cost a development so much.”

In the wood-panelled bar of the Kempinski hotel opposite the Karree, a small group of people gathered last Tuesday night for one last debate. A long-winded evening reached its rhetorical climax when an excitable older man warned the politicians present, with a nod to upcoming state elections in Berlin, to take heed of the “societal realities” in the city and not cave into Ballymore’s “fetish of economic efficiency”. A foreign investor would be forgiven for thinking they had landed by mistake in Cold War East Berlin and not the 21st century united German capital.

In a clever move, Ballymore has blunted some of the protest by commissioning the British architect David Chipperfield, who can do no wrong in Berlin since his extraordinary refurbishment of the Neues Museum. His plans involve opening up the site, attracting high-end restaurants and cafes as part of a €500 million investment and, on the roof, a €35 million theatre with a Kurfürstendamm entrance.

“We trust Chipperfield because we trust his ability to transform this site and, with it, the western end of the city,” said Jochen Brückmann of the local chamber of commerce. Most local politicians have dropped their initial opposition and now, too, support the Ballymore plan.

But the traditionalists are not convinced, and tomorrow’s vote marks their last stand against the Irish investor.