Comment by rsynnott

It's a very common complaint in countries where one city is disproportionately dominant (London for the UK or Dublin for Ireland, say). It's arguably a bit more surprising for Berlin, because Berlin isn't so disproportionately huge (Berlin's metro area is 6 million out of 80 million, versus London's 15 million out of 70 million or Dublin's 2 million out of 5 million), and because Germany has other comparably sized cities (Hamburg's metro area population is about 5 million). You'd expect it to be a bit less of its own place just on that basis.