People have been expecting Berlin to have huge growth economically, in population, real estate value, etc since the fall of the wall. This has not happened yet (at least, not at the rate that was expected). I doubt it will happen with startups.
Berlin as a city is doing just fine and compared to just after the wall came down the difference is nothing short of amazing. The amount of money pumped in to the city shows up everywhere, infrastructure and public transport, the quality of the houses and apartments, the number of businesses and so on. This is not correlated at all with start-ups, which simply relates the the size of the home market (to a first approximation, Germany, Switzerland and Austria) and the ability to subsequently expand internationally (which is actually quite hard). I was in Kreuzberg (Berlin neighbourhood) this week and I could barely recognize it compared to what I remembered.
Compared to other former east block cities Berlin had of course a head start (half of it was already western), even so the progress is strong. By comparison, London today and London 2 decades ago are not that far apart, whereas Berlin today and Berlin 2 decades ago are worlds apart.
As the spoils from Berlin percolate out through the surrounding countryside Berlin will achieve yet another growth phase, what took 50 years to destroy will not be fixed overnight but you can surely rely on Germany to be able to fix such things as fast and thoroughly as possible.
Berlin has a debt of over 60 billion euros, with an annual budget of 20 billion, 5.5 of which comes from the other laenders. This is huge, the other laenders have complained multiple times that they need to cut costs. Its GDP is 80 billion, compared to frankfurt (70 billion) or munich (60 billion) it's nothing as its a much bigger city. Berlin doesn't have a financial sector or any major industry really. Population has stayed (more or less) the same for the last 60 years.
Yes Berlin looks amazing considering ww2 & cold war, but is nowhere near the major european capital it should be.
Also, London today from London 2 decades ago is very different, a simple example is canary wharf that didn't have a single sky scraper 23 years ago.
Sure, but neither Frankfurt nor Munich had as much backlog as Berlin. Not even close. I remember counting 50 construction cranes in Berlin at some point in the early 90's. The rate at which stuff was being fixed was nothing short of incredible. And that's work-in-progress, it will take 100's of billions before you could even begin to call it complete.
Ah, the new Airport. The butt of many a joke for decades to come. I'll see your airport and raise you a lock, the dutch envisioned another channel in the North of the country (the 'dollardkanaal') and pre-emptively made a gigantic lock complex. Which they then had to demolish again because the channel was never dug. At least they managed to re-cycle the lock doors (these are now in the Nieuwenstatenzijl locks a few km to the East).
Fortunately Berlin already has three airports (but Tempelhof is closed) so for now the crisis is not imminent (and I think that is one of the reasons the new one is delayed, delaying it is not going to cause any disasters other than waste money, which is of course bad enough).
Just looking at the architecture of the airport compared with Charles de Gaulle, Oslo Airport and Shanghai Airport you can see that they all try to get a large surface for their terminals to make space for a lot of aircraft. The BER airport terminal buildings are built in a square, with little obvious room for expansion. I guess they could build in that square which looks like it has nothing in it, but a new and separate terminal building cluster is not optimal either. No, in combination with the fire gas thing it seems like this is the PHP of airports - bad design all around.
