When I moved here it was still completely rubble and ruins,” says Klaus Biesenbach as we enter a leafy courtyard, facing a mustard-colored apartment building in former East Berlin. It’s mid-September, at the end of Berlin Art Week, and we are touring the few square blocks where the post–Cold War art scene, and Biesenbach’s life in the city, first took root. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he moved into a former bicycle storage room here—without heat, hot water or a phone line. “I spent my first winter going to museums with my student card,” he says. “I could be there for hours, sipping tea to stay warm.”

---