To hang our minds on loftier matters – as they say in parts of the world where in the end you need it much less than in Berlin. But even from here, in the shadow of the super election chaos and all the other debacles, there is an exceptional success to report: Almost a little unnoticed due to pandemic lockdowns and other worries, the internal renovation of the Kaufhaus des Westens has been completed. “Ah, KaDeWe!” – there is cheering and exulting again as soon as the subway doors open on Wittenbergplatz. But unlike in the musical “Linie 1” back then, these are no longer the notorious Wilmersdorf widows, but more so the children of Mitte (plus Milan and Moscow) – many very young or decidedly ageless, ethereal beings with sometimes unclear gender, but almost always great blaze of color. The mayor from Berlin looks at the dog tour, of course. But he is also happy: It must have been something like that when the first flowers bloomed on the rubble in the spring after the war. So life goes on.
The architecture office OMA has set off an escalator fireworks in the KaDeWe
Specifically: The new architecture is to be inaugurated and celebrated this Thursday evening. She comes from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, OMA, in Rotterdam. The project was led by partner Ellen van Loon, but the analytical spirit of OMA founder Rem Koolhaas now also rules the building. Because the insight that is conveyed is essentially that everything here is essentially about the grand entrance, and of course the stairs are more important than the sales areas – just like the quality of the rooms in a grand hotel but even more about the grandiosity of the hotel lobby and there again the stairs for the epiphanies of evening wear. But since it opened in 1907, the KaDeWe has been the grand hotel among department stores. The league has always been more like Harrods than Hertie or Horten. In terms of architectural history, the core of the idea of the modern department store consisted of connecting stacked sales areas with escalators. OMA has literally set off an escalator fireworks display at KaDeWe: If you look up, they shoot like flower petals in all directions. The sheer sight of it is pretty tipsy. And then they sucked on the champagne on Thursday evening: There were mini bottles with glass straws. Then there was a fashion show and models drove up and down the new escalators, standing and looking so wonderfully convex and bored, as only models can – or young people who are currently, by whatever means, successful from 032c to Yves Saint Laurent.
And as always and everywhere at such events, everyone who was there looked again as if they had agreed to play the Robert Altman film “Prêt-à-Porter”. In the role of Marcello Mastroianni here logically: Michael Müller, if only because of the same initials. The current head of the KaDeWe, a Swiss named André Maeder, demanded from the governing mayor that in the future you can also shop on Sundays – or, even better, at night! MM said: nothing. He watched the beautiful show and – he shares this joy with many Berliners – will have been pleased that he will soon no longer be a governing mayor, but a member of the Bundestag with a constituency that ends where you can already see the KaDeWe, but is not responsible for it.