Creative Destruction of an Artists" Center in Berlin THE marshal came in the early morning hours, accompanied by a locksmith and a police officer. After playing a funeral march on a piano, the last tenants left peacefully. Their eviction earlier this month marks the end of the 22-year history of Tacheles, a world-famous artists" center in Berlin's Mitte district. Tacheles long ago lost its edgy cachet within Berlin's creative scene. But as a symbol, it stood for the city's commitment to culture over or at least alongside capital. Its demise should be a call to arms for those who want to make sure Berlin stays that way. Located in the heart of Berlin, just a short walk from Parliament and the chancellery, Tacheles was housed in the romantically dilapidated wreck of a former East German department store. After the Berlin Wall came down, the site quickly emerged as a locus of the burgeoning Berlin underground, providing a meeting point for musicians, artists, gallery owners and theater people. Tacheles's fate was always in question - its occupants were squatters, with no firm legal claim to the property. For Berlin's inhabitants and visitors alike, then, its very existence stood for the idea that the newly unified city could and would provide space for creative experiments. The art center also stood for the harmonious relationship between the anarchic underground and the official culture of the capital, which is why its eviction resounded prominently in the international news media. Berliners, on the other hand, could hardly be bothered. It has been at least a decade since the house and its tenants have produced any kind of relevant creative impulse. The cluster of underground galleries and clubs that appeared around Tacheles in the 1990s has long since moved on, driven out by rising rents to neighborhoods in the former east and, later, to less expensive parts of former West Berlin. Bars and clubs sprang up in unused industrial buildings and along the fallow banks of the Spree River. But this era is now ending as well. The rapid sale of the city's profitable land to real estate developers, often by the notoriously broke city itself, has led to the expulsion of the creative scene from the shores of the Spree, while hypertrophic gentrification is driving up prices in neighborhoods that, only a few years ago, were just beginning to be settled by artists and musicians. Within this context, the shuttering of Tacheles is symbolic. The toppling of a living monument to subculture comes at a time when similar spaces in every Berlin district near the center of the city are disappearing as well. Not that the procedure itself is unusual: In New York, creative types have fled from Manhattan to Brooklyn and will move on from there when prices rise. Gentrification is part of the normal development of every city in the world. But development in Berlin over the last 20 years hasn't followed the normal path. The creative scene was formed during the anything-goes years after the fall of the wall. Part of its identity has been the certainty that new spaces will open up when older ones close down. Somewhere, somehow, there was always an abandoned building or lot - the next Tacheles - to be appropriated, if for only a limited amount of time. During the last two decades, "Zwischennutzung," or "temporary use," was the magic word for Berlin cultural policies. This era is now coming to an end. Call it the "closing of the frontier." What next? Berlin basks in the international attraction that all those spaces for subculture provided. In no small part, this attraction comes from the fact that life in Berlin, compared with other cities, is still quite cheap. In the words of the city's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, "Berlin is poor, but sexy." Should official policy aim at keeping Berlin poor enough to encourage the further influx of sexy hipsters? The majority of Berliners say no. Most would prefer more prosperity for the city and for themselves. They would rather see fewer tourists and more business development. On the other hand, what happens if the tourists stay away and the international public turns its back on Berlin? The prosperity of the famous night life depends on the young tourists of the so-called Easy Jet set, and the still blossoming gallery scene wouldn't survive without solvent collectors from abroad. Jens Balzer is the pop culture editor at the newspaper Berliner Zeitung and a columnist for the German edition of Rolling Stone.