On a chilly April day, the queue of hopefuls snaked 150m around the block, all hoping for the same thing: a 74 m2 three-room apartment, with a separate kitchen and bathroom for €1,074 a month. After an hour online, the landlord had 600 queries and took the advertisement down. An hour after the original viewing time, the apartment was gone and the queue of hopeful tenants went home hopeless. What sounds like another day in the life of a flat hunter in Dublin is the new reality, too, in Berlin. For much of the post-wall period, the German capital was...