Berlin Germany

President Clinton strode through Brandenburg Gate into the former East Berlin on Tuesday, declaring a "monument to conquest" and "tyranny" had now become a gateway to a united Europe. "Nothing will stop us--all things are possible," he told tens of thousands of Berliners massed at the structure that long obstructed Berlin's central boulevard. " Berlin ist frei " -- Berlin is free, the President exclaimed in German.

Irish rockers U2 returned to Berlin for a free mini-concert Thursday in front of the Brandenburg Gate, playing its classic singles and a duet with Jay-Z even as the show was obscured from public view by a nearly 6 1/2 -foot- high metal barrier. Bono greeted the crowd with the German words "Berlin, Du bist wunderbar!" (Berlin, you are wonderful!) and the band played a 30-minute, six-song set that featured "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," "One" and "Beautiful Day." The show, free to 10,000 ticket holders who snapped up the tickets online last week in just three hours, drew controversy because of the barrier surrounding the gig. Both Berliners and tourists alike saw the irony in building a wall around a concert dedicated to the wall that already has come down.

The cream of Germany's political elite will gather Tuesday in Bonn to agree on the ground rules for a debate likely to shape much of the nation's long-term future. The debate will determine whether the recently reunited Germany is ruled from Berlin, an eastward-looking Prussian metropolis on the cusp of Europe's old East-West divide; or from Bonn, a sleepy, westward-looking university town on the edge of the Rhine that has hosted four decades of German democracy.

So much for Barack Obama's Kennedyesque moment in Berlin. Obama campaign officials say that the Democratic candidate has decided not to speak at the city's historic Brandenburg Gate, where President John F. Kennedy visited before famously declaring in June 1963, "Ich bin ein Berliner!" ("I am a Berliner!"

A Viking in a G-string ran past a nearly naked woman adorned with angel wings as a man shimmying in black boots and a sequined miniskirt was sprayed with champagne Saturday in a thunderous din of techno music and rainbow-haired humanity known as the Love Parade. More than 500,000 revelers -- stepping over broken beer bottles and drunken comrades -- danced, gyrated and skipped through this German city in a summer fling that has become one of the world's most raucous and hedonistic parties.

Evolving plans for a 9/11 memorial at ground zero in Manhattan have generated much hand-wringing lately, and with good reason. Even in the best of circumstances an effective memorial to the victims of a cataclysmic event is extremely difficult to design; once built, a failed memorial isn't likely to be altered or removed. A cautionary example recently opened here in the German capital, and it offers a textbook case of what not to do.

There's a Starbucks near where the orgies used to be, and although the aura of Bohemia is distinct, things aren't as unhinged as they were 17 years ago when punkers, pornographers, anarchists, squatters and artists of all persuasions landed amid the rust and drizzle of this liberated city. It seems an era from a scrapbook, a time of cheap rents when everyone with a brush and a bit of brio claimed a garret. Some were talented; many were not.

The tea comes, the waitress smiles and Jason Forrest, an unquiet and happily offbeat American, tells you (oh yes, he tells you) how his life leapt off the tracks and found rebirth in this winter dark city he calls "hipster ground zero." His artistic spirit "rudely" treated in New York, Forrest said, he sought sanctuary in Berlin. He rented an apartment, bought a bed and two tables, found a bohemian cafe (how hard could it be?

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder heralded the "culmination of German unity" Monday as he ushered parliament back to Berlin's radically altered Reichstag, ending the capital's 50 years of exile in a Rhine River village and, perhaps, the stigma of Germany as a threat to world peace.

Forty-six years after it lay smoldering in the ruins of the Third Reich, Berlin reclaimed its glory as the capital of Germany when Parliament voted 337 to 320 Thursday to abandon Bonn and "complete the unification" process. After 11 marathon hours of debate, weary lawmakers decided to gradually move the Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament, and the seat of government to the country's historic capital over the next 10 to 12 years.

Former President Bush inaugurated the new U.S. Embassy at its pre-World War II site, a return that he said symbolized the fulfillment of "a great and noble dream" of European freedom and unity. Bush, who was president when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and supported German reunification less than a year later, spoke alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel at the site in front of the Brandenburg Gate -- the symbol of Germany's postwar division and then of its unification. The embassy completes the post-reunification rebuilding of the Pariser Platz, in front of the gate, which once stood in the fortified no man's land behind the Berlin Wall.

Former Mexican presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo made headlines in Germany, eight days after winning the Berlin Marathon in his age group. "The Fastest Man of Mexico," said Monday's Berliner Zeitung newspaper, referring to the 55-year-old Madrazo's race time of 2 hours, 40 minutes and 57 seconds. Unfortunately for Madrazo, it was a sarcastic jab.

Former Mexican presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo disappeared midway through the Berlin Marathon on Sunday before reappearing nine miles later, winning first in his age group and shaving an hour off his personal record. Race organizers brag the course is fast; a world record was set Sunday.

Berlin has named a street in honor of the late American rocker Frank Zappa. Frank-Zappa-Strasse, or Frank Zappa Street -- formerly Street 13 -- lies on the eastern outskirts of Berlin amid empty industrial buildings in what was communist East Germany. The street is home to Orwo Haus, a former Communist-era film factory that now provides practice studios for more than 160 bands. Musicians at Orwo Haus campaigned for two years to have the street's name changed.

There's a Starbucks near where the orgies used to be, and although the aura of Bohemia is distinct, things aren't as unhinged as they were 17 years ago when punkers, pornographers, anarchists, squatters and artists of all persuasions landed amid the rust and drizzle of this liberated city. It seems an era from a scrapbook, a time of cheap rents when everyone with a brush and a bit of brio claimed a garret. Some were talented; many were not.

A glimpse of this city's real estate pages suggests that just about anything's for sale: A Brit is turning a former Hitler Youth headquarters into a luxury club, Americans have bought up swaths of former communist-era apartment buildings, a German firm has transformed a red-brick prison into condos, and owners of rooftop flats have never been more coy.

Open to anything and closed to no one, Richard Stein's cafe made the skittish wince. Sexually eclectic and politically charged, it was in the vanguard of a queer power movement in the 1990s, a place where homosexuals, cross-dressers, AIDS activists, lesbians, immigrants and some who preferred to just remain mysterious pushed for wider civil rights in a newly unified city wholly free after four decades of communism.

In a country that is no more, there were cars missing parts, cranky washing machines, endless slabs of look-alike apartment buildings, billows of barbed wire, a cartoon character called the junkman and guys playing chess in the nude. The former East Germany vanished in the dust and shattered graffiti of a falling Berlin Wall.

Pacific Symphony Music Director Carl St.Clair has been appointed music director of the Komische Oper Berlin beginning in 2008, the orchestra announced Thursday. The six-year appointment at one of the most adventurous theaters in Germany, founded in 1947 by producer Walter Felsenstein, will not change his relationship with the Orange County-based orchestra, which he has led since 1990, St.Clair said. His Pacific contract runs through 2009.

Berlin's annual film festival opened Thursday with a portrait of the turbulent story of Edith Piaf -- part of a strong French contingent at this year's event. Olivier Dahan's "La Vie en Rose" is the first of 22 movies competing for the top Golden Bear award at the first major European film festival of the year.