#old berlin

Old Berlin - Vintage aesthetic (9 icons)

As a child, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. My mum worked shifts as a nurse, and my dad studied in Münster during the week. I grew up hearing stories about Berlin after the Second World War: the ruins, the women clearing the rubble, and my grandfather, still a little boy, sneaking out at night to steal potatoes from fields.

One story stuck with me. I can’t even remember now whether it was during the war or after it, but the cats in his neighbourhood disappeared one by one. Even as a child, I knew why.

The stories were told in short, unsentimental sentences. And every time, a cold shiver ran through me—more fascination than fear.

Only later did I begin to understand the trauma underneath it all. My grandmother grew up in an orphanage. My great-grandmother died after she became pregnant. I’m no longer sure whether the child was her husband’s, but I do know she didn’t want it. My grandfather only ever said she would have “ended up in a concentration camp anyway”. Because abortion was illegal back then.

As a teenager, I started to see it all differently: my grandparents’ mealtimes kept like clockwork, the sheer amount of food, the two fridges packed to the brim. It would never occur to me to blame them for the stomach aches on my way back to my mother’s—or for the time I even threw up on the S-Bahn. My relationship with food wasn’t healthy. Neither was theirs. But I understand why.

And Still, Things Aren’t What They Used to Be

My grandparents, by most measures, were doing well in the 1990s. My grandfather was a postman, my grandmother a cleaner. And yet, then and now—my grandfather is 91—they’ve had a pension that stretches to everything: good food, a four-room flat in an old Berlin building in Charlottenburg, and monthly pocket money for the grandchildren, however old we are now, however grown-up we’ve become.

And despite all that, I heard this one sentence from them again and again: Things aren’t what they used to be. Whenever the local news gave them an opening, it turned into: Berlin’s gone to the dogs.

For most of my life, I filed it away as background noise. Something older people said. A sentence that floated in the air like a habit, and one that even now doesn’t really hold up. At least not in all the small, everyday ways people use it.

One day I was in the kitchen doing the washing-up. For a moment, I felt not entirely unlike my grandmother. The news played in the background through Alexa (because of course it did). And suddenly the thought arrived, loud and undeniable: Things aren’t what they used to be.

At first I didn’t take it seriously. I nearly laughed. I thought of my grandparents and shrugged it off as one of those sentences you pick up somewhere along the way, without ever choosing it.

Except it didn’t go away. Over the next few weeks it kept coming back, quietly irritating, like a song you don’t even like but can’t stop hearing.

And then January 2026 arrived. Trump talking about annexing Greenland. 2025 landing, once again, among the three warmest years since records began. More and more copywriters telling me they’re being replaced by AI. And suddenly that old sentence wasn’t background noise any more. It was right there, in the middle of my day.

Everything feels less solid than it used to. Alliances feel thinner. The things you assumed would hold, don’t. You start to notice how quickly the world can change its mind.

And suddenly that old sentence wasn’t background noise any more. Not nostalgia. Not sentimentality. Just a blunt reaction to the sense that something is breaking.

When the world shifts

The world and the systems I’ve known all my life are changing. They always have, of course. But much of it happens so quietly, so slowly, that you barely notice it while it’s happening. Often, it’s only from one generation to the next that the difference becomes clear.

So I wonder if this is what my grandparents felt too. What every generation feels, sooner or later. You make your peace with the world you know, even with the parts of it that hurt. Because at least it’s familiar. The new version isn’t.

We don’t know what’s coming next. And as you get older, you start to see how different the future will be from the one you were raised to expect.

Maybe that’s where Things aren’t what they used to be really comes from. Not as a longing for the past, but as a response to the unexpected—the moment you realise that the world isn’t unfolding the way you were told it would.

The world you learn to live in

Up until our mid-twenties, most of us are just trying to work out how to exist. We learn the rules. We learn the roles. We learn what to say, what not to say, and how to behave in a way that makes us likeable. We learn what counts as “normal”.

And then, later on, you realise something slightly uncomfortable: none of it is necessarily wrong. It’s just that it doesn’t always take you any closer to yourself.

For a lot of people, it takes years to build enough confidence to start unlearning the parts they only picked up to fit in.

Maybe that’s why midlife reinvention is so common. People go back to university. They switch careers. They move. They leave. They begin again. Not because they’ve lost their way, but because they’re finally willing to take themselves seriously.

What remains

So I wonder if Things aren’t what they used to be can mean something else when it shows up.

Not a judgement on the past, but a moment of realisation: I can’t rely on the things I thought would hold.

Every generation probably ends up saying it. Not because the past was perfect, but because you get used to a certain world. And then you realise how easily it can vanish.

And if that’s true, then maybe ageing really is this strange double thing. The outside world gets messier. Less predictable. Harder to read. And inside, you become a little clearer. Not happier. Not safer. Just more familiar with yourself.

Maybe that’s the comfort. Not that the world stays stable, but that you learn to be a little more stable within yourself.

Rankestraße, Viktoria Augustaplatz - Charlottenburg-Berlin