Having a ball in a less than glamorous city is too much

Berlin's high society gathered on Saturday night for the social event of their year, the annual Berliner press ball and, as usual, it was a painfully embarrassing occasion.

Held in the International Congress Centre, a building of such architectural charm that many tourists believe it served as a model for the spaceship in the film Battlestar: Galactica, the ball attracted 3,400 of the city's luminaries.

It began decorously enough with Claudio Abbado conducting members of the Berlin Philharmonic in a Rossini overture. But the musicians soon made way for a troupe of minimally-clad Samba dancers, decked in red and yellow feathers as they stomped around in precariously high heels.

Among the many unkind games one can play at these Berlin occasions is to choose the most inappropriately dressed guest, a distinction for which the competition is often fierce. Was it the museum curator in his peacock-blue dinner jacket, striped bow-tie and spotted cummerbund? Or the substantial lady who chose a see-through fabric for the upper half of her ball gown?

Saturday's press ball may be the last because, when Germany's rulers move eastwards from Bonn later this year, they will bring their own ball with them. Berlin's elite is hoping that the government's arrival will bring new glamour to the capital, but the job of making the city stylish may be beyond the powers of the governing class.

Berlin can be complex, thrilling and liberating, but it has not been glamorous for at least 70 years. Even during its heyday in the 1920s, the city's appeal to entertainers like Josephine Baker and writers such as Christopher Isherwood owed more to its challenging, "modern" atmosphere than to any elegance it might have had.

After the war, when East Berlin fell under the influence of the Soviet Bloc, the western half of the city attempted to reinvent itself as a gaudy beacon of Western values. Subsidies poured in to encourage Berliners to stay in their city and Berlin's cultural scene was among the most generously funded in the world.

Herbert von Karajan maintained the position of the Berlin Philharmonic among the world's leading orchestras, and the Schiller Theatre and the Schaubuhne were in the vanguard of European theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. But West Berlin never developed a social scene to match its cultural life, and the public fell hungrily on the stars that arrived each February for the Berlin Film Festival.

The allied forces from France, Britain and the US added a dash of colour to West Berlin's social life. Invitations to military balls were highly prized by the local population, and the British events were often staged with great elegance and attention to detail.

Since unification, Berlin's politicians, business people and journalists have been trying to persuade one another that a new, cosmopolitan future is at hand. But most efforts to create a network of smart places for fashionable people have failed, perhaps because Berliners like their social life to have a democratic flavour.

This is one reason why few restaurants object to guests arriving in T-shirts and jeans and it explains why waiters in the most expensive venues will flutter around a regular guest who spends little but may ignore a celebrity at the next table.

The truth that Bonn's pampered elite must learn before they move to their new home is that Berlin is quite simply immune to glamour and style. Instead of trying to spruce up the capital's act, they should get used to the combination of Abbado and Samba dancers, to say nothing of a striped bow-tie with a polka-dot cummerbund.