Wie bitte?

Hashtag Dystopia

Few things can make me as misanthropic as the recurrent popularity of doomsday druids. These days, it seems, slapping “dystopia” on anything automatically furnishes every old rant with deep social commentary and perennial fears towards ongoing technological progress masquerades as shocking incisive reflections. And the more apocalyptic their visions, the shallower they become. I call it “nihilistic porn”. No character development, no plot, just the money shot.

Which brings me to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a veritable hashtag stew of tweetable nihilism, wherein the viewer is spoon-fed Brooker’s trademark hyperbolic grumbling like an unsuspecting French goose. There’s no food for thought, only despairing dyspepsia, because everything is broken in Black Mirror. Every episode is a bleak yet hollow void with an almost complete lack of sympathetic characters taking part in this pantomime dystopia. It is the Daily Mail’s much ridiculed Broken Society but repackaged for Guardian readers by covering it with a shiny new coat of New Media buzzwords. In the first episode, in which the Prime Minister is forced to copulate with a sow live on TV to save the nation’s royal sweetheart, characters are unable to articulate any thought without wedging Youtube, Twitter or Facebook into every remark. Brooker’s version of Newspeak has replaced full stops and commas with hashtags as punctuation marks. What is initially amusing soon reaches saturation point, illustrated by an armed soldier who mistakenly aims at a journalist believing her to be the princess’s abductor. Instead of apologizing or ensuring she is not wounded, he shoots at her mobile and quips “There’s your RTS award!”. At this point I was expecting a ham-fisted  Abu Ghraib reference to round it off.

The second episode set its sights on reality TV, so all us viewers who have Ocado on speed dial can sit and quaff about the plebe who watches The X Factor sans the required ironic hat. Then we can all make disparaging and completely original remarks about wheat products and circuses. The story is set in a nightmarish panopticon where the 99% are forced to pedal bikes all day - the reason is never given - and sedated through forced exposure to pornography. That’s right, by now we have come to understand that ‘subtle’ is not part of Hashtag Dystopia’s vocabulary.

The third and final part of the arc has been concocted by Jesse Armstrong, best known for the Peep Show and for being one of the writers for the brilliant political satire The Thick of It. It reworks the Perfect Recall trope familiar to science fiction and comic readers, and famously addressed in the Jorge Luis Borges short story Funes the Memorious (1942). In the Black Mirror version, a new technology allows people to carry a chip that records everything and can be played back on demand, with the possibility of sharing it on those -you guessed it! - omniscient menacing screens that rule our lives. Nobody else seems to have a particular good memory because the story very quickly descends into the classic alarmist ‘New Technology Ruins People’s Lives. And This Time We Mean It!’ Yes, there is the atomic bomb and countless other horrific examples. But take the internet - What would people have imagined 10 years ago if they knew we would all have portable devices that let us access and broadcast repository of information. I’m sure no forecast would have included lolcats. I will leave the Arab Spring to more respectable bloggers.  

For somebody so seemingly intimate with new technology and who still - rightly so - extolls the creative possibilities of video games, Charlie Brooker sure takes an unnecessarily paranoid attitude towards progress more characteristic of somebody eligible for a Freedom Pass. Particularly when he occupies a privileged position from where he should be showing a more nuanced picture. This tirade is borne out of a sense of disappointment from somebody who loved TVGoHome and Screenwipe, but the misanthropic coat Brooke is fond of wearing has barely been changed and it is starting to exude a faint whiff of the reactionary.

Post-Rant

This uninformed rant was inspired by a recent visit to ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990’ at the V&A Museum. What follows is an attempt to articulate my misgivings about Postmodernism, understood by few and used by many, with a brief description of its predecessor Modernism, in the hope that a comparison between the two might sharpen the edges of blurry Postmodernism.

The more I think about it, the more I realise how much I dislike the term Postmodernism. What exactly does it stand for? The manipulative nature of its essentially empty rhetoric irks me, as when the Daily Mail resorts to ‘common sense’ or some luminaire in the Literary Review ponderously declaims that we inhabit a post-ideological world, then relentlessly pushes their own agenda, wrapped in an oratorical blanket of increasingly fatigued and meaningless prefixes. Postmodernism is the most recent movement and so exerts a great influence on our world-view, and yet there have been previous movements, and there will be something post-postmodernism, whatever we decide to name it. If I knew this future buzzword, I would probably not be a rich woman, but I would certainly get misquoted a lot, and you know that the more you are misquoted the more people you have reached. And the fewer have read you.

But I am ignorant as to what the future holds. Frankly, I am not even sure about the state of the present. That there is a retrospective on Postmodernism at the V&A would indicate that it is firmly in the past, further confirmed by the subheading ‘Style and Subversion: 1970-1990’. And yet the term ‘postmodern’ still gets its fair share of airplay in 2011. What I have noticed is that its temporal proximity - whether it has happened or is still unfolding - has led many to lose perspective. There is nothing revolutionary about Postmodernism, no more than there was about the Enlightenment or Romanticism. What makes it special is precisely the same immediacy that has rendered us so short-sighted; We are living it. Nothing has changed in the grand scheme of things, yet everything is different, as it always is and always will be.

Thus we are uncertain if we inhabit Postmodern times, or what this entails, apart from this penchant for sticking arbitrary prefixes on words to increase their emotional resonance and impact.  ‘Neo’ has become the preferred, catch-all, semantically slurred yet emotionally charged prefix for right-wing resurgences - neoliberalism, neocon, neonazism, neoprene. ‘Post’, on the other hand, is the default indicator for the discourse deconstruction and ‘decentredness’ that ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststructuralism’ celebrate. Whatever that means. We are constantly reminded that there is no ‘truth’ to be found, that everything is subjective and the idea of an objective independent reality is a mere mirage. The era of grand all-encompassing narratives like Christianity or Marxism is over. Yet people keep telling each other stories, only this time with more prefixes. These days, one has to muse about ‘subversion’ and ‘dystopia’, suspiciously close sometimes to the old ‘progress’ and ‘utopia’ but masquerading under less politically charged names, and without the whiff of fascism that ‘progress’ now gives off.

  So what is ‘Postmodernism’? It peppers our academic speech and generously seasons our (my) half-baked remarks about art, music, and society. Even ‘conditions’. What exactly is the postmodern condition?  Postmodernism was always one of those words that was semantically unstable, because it defined itself against the equally porous ‘modern’. The latter is normally applied to the first half of the 20th century - the era of Modernism. It is the term given to different artistic movements that rejected objectivity in favour of subjectivity — no longer was it about what we saw, but how we saw it. This was partly spurred — as are all new cultural expressions — by new technological developments. With (for instance) the increased popularity and availability of the camera, painters no longer needed to strive to perfectly reproduce reality. Instead they started to ponder the exact nature of this reality. They revisited that age old ontological conundrum that had taken Plato to his imaginary caves — what, if anything, is the essence of something? Picasso famously painted a violin from all angles simultaneously, which created a distorted image, but one still recognisable as a violin. In literature, the omniscient narrator and linear narrative were abandoned in favour of stream-of-consciousness and fragmented narrative, traditionally interpreted a reactions to the the totalitarian discourses and blind belief in progress that had led to both world wars.

Unsurprisingly, many people became wary of panoptic narratives with such an unwavering faith in their authority, and which caused so much pain and destruction in Europe. Modernism, then, is about the rejection of this authority. Modernists do not share the teleological views of history popularly associated with their predecessors, the Victorians. The two world wars put a dent in the the idea that humanity is progressing, that it has a final destiny towards which it has been advancing (‘telos’ being ‘end’ or ‘purpose’). Postmodernism is not particularly fond of grandiose statements either and, like Modernism, it is also characterised by fragmentation. The difference lies in how they approach this SHATTERED EXISTENTIAL MIRROR. Modernism traditionally laments the loss of this age of innocence in esoteric elegies about waste lands whilst Postmodernism famously celebrates this fragmentation through ironic pastiches and meta-patchworks of intertextuality set to groovy soundtracks. Basically, Postmodernists like Tarantino films and Tumblr, with its assorted quotations, random fonts, existential Instagrams and amusing gifs. What this definition tells us is that Postmodernism has really good PR. Any undergraduate who has trudged through the compulsory Critical Theory module will tell you that Baudrillard & co are not precisely happy chappies when they postulate the loss of objectivity, fixed meaning, and even reality in magnificently obscure sentences that sometimes undermine the most basic premises of grammar. They fill their intentionally playful and ambiguous prose with an irresistible intertextual insouciance. Apparently. (???)

Modernism, on the other hand, lacks such professional PR, partly because everybody involved is kicking up the daisies in Elliot’s wasteland, and can no longer defend themselves. Also, partly because everybody of my generation had to read Mrs Dalloway at school, a book that contains a disappointingly low number of ninjas and a complete lack of 70s blaxploitation musical references. The classic stereotype of the Modernist woman is of course Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide, and is hailed as part of the literary canon. But Modernists, particularly female, were not all as despondent as this portrayal. Many women were rather excited about the emancipatory possibilities that industrialisation brought. And as devastating as the two armed conflicts were, the absence of men meant that women had to replace them in factories, hospital wards, offices, even in the streets as bus drivers, as well as other public spaces normally reserved to men (they were sent packing back to their domestic spheres after the war, but the seed had been planted).

So things are not as simple as they seem. I want to finish this post with the classic ‘it’s complicated’, which is a rather fittingly postmodern end to this unfocused rant. I will, of course, describe my argument as ‘fluid’. Postmodernism - whatever it is - has claimed a monopoly on ambiguity. And yes, the irony is not lost on me. Ambiguity, together with subversion, seems to be one of its most frequent escorts whenever Postmodernism puts its ironic hat on and goes for a spin round the cultural landscape. Perhaps that is the reason why I have developed a dislike for Postmodernism — because it is so omniscient and at same time nobody can explain exactly what it is. A bit like gravity really. When it comes to gravity, few people gripe about the impossibility of escaping the laws of physics. But can we escape the Postmodern condition? Are we all Postmodern now? This was the question posed at the recent V&A retrospective, as we left the exhibition to the sound of New Order. What a fatuous thing to ask. Is this meant to be food for thought, something to ponder on the way back home? Of course we are all Postmodern now. And post-Renaissance, and post-Enlightenment, and post-Industrial Revolution, and post-Victorian and post-Capitalist and first-past-the-post and any other post you care to think about. It is all part of our cultural DNA.

Postmodernism has just made us hyperaware of the hybrid nature of our culture, that we are all assembled from the different discourses and ideologies that we have inherited and picked up along our trajectory. Just as it is difficult in this post-Freudian era to analyse our actions without resorting to the language of psychoanalysis, Postmodernism has simply given us a new vocabulary with which to articulate our experiences and preoccupations. Some are specific to our time and the moral dilemmas and problematic developments that advancement brings, such as cloning, or the internet. Other are age-old longings revisited, like the yearn for authenticity and distinction, now threatened by new technologies that can easily and cheaply reproduce anything, from an image to an expensive leather bag. All movements and cultural expressions have attempted to conceptualise and give voice to cultural neurosis and anxieties (in a post-Freudian era _everything_ is an anxiety). This is not new to Postmodernism. I’m still not sure if  Postmodernism isn’t just Modernism in drag.

It’s complicated.

It’s Grim Up North

I finally got round to watching The Killing (or Fobrydelsen, to use the original title), which most English viewers will by now know actually translates to “the crime”. And for somebody so fond of Scandinavian crime as me, it was positively - cliché alert - criminal that I had yet to be acquainted with Sarah Lund’s splendid collection of knitwear. When it was originally screened back in Denmark I was living in London, blissfully ignorant of the jumper fever that had gripped the nation. It certainly didn’t grip my family. When the BBC decided to finally broadcast it, I was based in Berlin. True, the Germans acquired the rights too and then dubbed it. But I didn’t want to see Das Verbrechen, I wanted to see Forbrydelsen. It was already quite amusing watching the subtitled version with my English boyfriend and noticing that many of the colourful expressions with which Copenhageners regularly pepper their speech had not made it into English. “Tager du pis?” became the prim “are you being serious?”. Even taking into account differing cultural expectations, it was always my impression that a great number of Brits swear like perpetually pissed sailors. Which is one of the reasons why I feel so at home here.

Anyway, my Berlin bubble kept being burst by news of this paradigm shifting Danish export that held BBC4 viewers - my people - enthralled every week. The Guardian was crushing so hard on Sarah Lund’s Faroese wool - henceforth referred as THE JUMPER - that it even made the smooth grey Mad Men suits turn green with jealousy. The Killing was even threatening to usurp The Wire’s crown and to steal its status as THE MOST NUANCED PORTRAYAL OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY EVER. People would ask me if it was always this dark in Denmark (it’s called winter) and how you pronounced “Theis Birk Larsen” or “Vagn Skærbæk” without dislocating your vocal chords (you can’t). And did Danes really wear THE JUMPER? It soon became clear that I was contractually obliged to see it, lest I risk expulsion from the Guardian guild, particularly before the broadcast of the second series this autumn when I would be back on the island. So I dutifully bought the entire series on iTunes and prepared to go on a Scandinavian noir bender, because if it was anything like The Wire the default mode is always “boxed set binge”.

I liked it. I really did. It was a bittersweet treat to have so much screen time dedicated to the family of the murdered girl. It was a reminder that every crime has its victim, a rather obvious point but rarely one developed in the standard formula followed by crime fiction, where the focus is on the investigator. And the acting was solidly lead by the very talented Sophie Grabøl and the eminently watchable and charismatic Lars Mikkelsen (he and his brother Mads Mikkelsen take up far too much prime estate in my head. The scene where Lars takes off his shirt - to show his vulnerability of course - made my ovaries stand up and give a loud standing ovation). Perennially rainy Copenhagen was bathed in lush non-light that made perpetual winter look positively attractive. Hell, it even made me homesick, a feeling I normally only experience in summer. 

Now I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, as if anybody at this point would notice, but groundbreaking it wasn’t. Maybe BBC 4 viewers haven’t read and watched as much crime fiction as I (probably a good thing), but to me it was blindingly obvious who it was from around episode 3. The meta-narrative was just too predictable. It was meant to be dark and gritty, which normally translates into the expected shattering of domestic bliss and the crumble of institutions that are dear to us, like democracy. And it was it was 20 episodes long, so you could watch the first three episodes and the last two and not miss too much background, apart from more red herrings than a Christmas Day smorgasbord. You _know_ that the suspect in episode 4 was not going to be the killer. But then maybe he was, because I had repeatedly been told that The Killing challenged more conventions than an Iranian art house film at Sundance. In fact, since I’ve heard it had such a shocking ending, I spent considerable time building increasingly byzantine theories to dissuade myself from the textbook ending I had already sensed earlier in the series. I was desperately seeking subversion, I _wanted_ to see semiotic subversion everywhere, like a poststructuralist third-wave feminist analysing Almodóvar cinematography. This never came. As much as I enjoyed watching it, it would have been a less neurotic experience, and therefore slightly anticlimactic, if viewers had filled in my Scandinavian bingo card beforehand. I could thus have more accurately assessed its revolutionary credentials.

I would like people to complete it _before_ the start of season 2 due this autumn:

1) Does it assume GRITTY means REALISTIC?

2) Does everybody end up depressed and miserable? And by everybody I mean everybody. Scandinavians are very literal people. We’re not only talking about the victim/s family/partner/friends but also the police, and neighbours, and distant relatives and acquaintances. And their Facebook friends. The police’s Facebook friends. The Facebook friends of Facebook friends. That random guy in episode 2 who was asking for directions. His Facebook friends. In fact everybody involved should just join Google+ and add each other to the all-engulfing circle of misery.

3) Does there seem to be a shortage of lightbulbs / sunlight in general?

4) If the investigator is male, is he an alcoholic? Does he have - at least one - a failed marriage? If she is female, does she get branded mentally unstable at some point? Does her long-suffering partner leave her at some point? (I presume that Sarah Lund is also familiar with this convention and has already prepared for this inevitability by dating a psychologist.)

5) Does anybody have time to finish eating their already harried kebab, pizza or burger grabbed from the local take away run by the token friendly “totally integrated” immigrant to remind the viewer that Scandinavian capitals are like SO MULTIETHNIC (read “gritty”, see point 1)

6) Corruption: is something rotten in the state of Denmark (read: EVERYTHING, see point 2)

7) Is the happy Scandinavian welfare model just a mirage? Are you being shown the dark underbelly of this seemingly perfect society where everybody is actually miserable, or will be soon (see point 2) and from which not even their stylish knitwear or flair for interior decoration can protect them?

8) Do bad things happen in woods? Do people go into woods despite knowing that bad things happen in woods? Are they familiar with Hansel and Gretel?

9) The weather heightens the misery:

Choose between these options:

a) It’s raining, ideally a constant drizzle that makes everybody soggy and miserable. A corpse appears. Everybody’s day, especially the corpse’s, just got more soggy and miserable.

b) It has been heavily snowing, and a frozen corpse of woman appears the day after. It’s always a woman and she is always described as a macabre ice figure or a morbidly beautiful snow queen. I think there’s some metaphor or deep cultural commentary here. So far I’ve only managed “don’t be a woman when it snows in Scandinavia”.

c) There’s a heat wave, i.e. More than 20 degrees celsius and a less than fragrant corpse appears in the woods (see point 8). The investigator/s spend the entire book sweating like an overripe stilton. Apparently nobody has heard of air conditioning in Scandinavia. This mystery is never resolved.

10) It stars one of the Mikkelsen brothers, preferably shirtless. If it contains both, just drop everything and alert me immediately.This point might not be necessarily related with any of the ones above. Or the article at all.

I will add more points as they occur to me but that should do for the moment.

Beards, Brows and Procrastination

Today was one of those muggy languid days that compels you to dramatically lower your standards to reap a sense of achievement, any achievement, at the end of it. Or dispose of standards altogether. In this way such mundane pedestrian activities such as cheese eating, wall staring or even hand-eye coordination will seem like a veritable tour de force.

Speaking of which, I was browsing GQ today.

Reason 540 why I hate GQ: Spinning some vacuous bile about the fear of appearing middlebrow as if you were the freaking Bourdieu of coolness, while failing to mention that the high/low culture divide is a deeply ingrained arbitrary divide borne out of the Industrial Revolution, developed specifically to preserve a condition conceived of as “high” from dilution and corruption by new forces seen as “lower” - for instance mass-production and increased purchasing power. See how easy it is? I don’t even know what I wrote there - I just turned on my cultural theory babble mode. Obviously this writer’s switch has been stuck since 1960. Which would explain GQ’s attitude towards women.

(Yes I did just lambast GQ’s lack of incisive cultural critique. I must obviously be insanely highbrow. In fact my brows are so divorced from my eyes that a look of permanent incredulity frames my face. Like finding out that Zach Galifianakis’ beard is apparently lowbrow. And that I should care.)

My Imaginary Berlin

Berlin is now part of my imaginary landscape, joining Copenhagen, but not London, which once more becomes my home. And as much as I like Berlin, I must admit, that I occasionally prefer its imaginary, more malleable counterpart. An imaginary city is a thing of beauty, built on fragmented, diffused, sunny memories filtered through the prism of nostalgia. Like an old faded overexposed photograph. Yes, all my memories of Berlin are in Instagram, a visual condition that seems to affect an alarming number of Berlin residents, perhaps caused by their beloved skinny jeans that lead to poor circulation and, presumably, impaired colour vision. My imaginary Berlin contains a significantly smaller number of these self-appointed urban bohemians. They have either been brushed out or made more tolerable by nostalgia, the photoshop of memory. Bills, bureaucracy and other blemishes that could tarnish these recollections have been omitted. This is a Berlin without long cryptic dispatches from the health insurance, without icy slippery pavements that conceal frozen dog excrement and discarded cigarette butts. In my Berlin, it is always summer. In my Berlin I am never bored, never afflicted by existential ennui. I never mope or procrastinate. Youtube doesn’t exist. There are no videos of dancing budgies balancing precariously atop tennis balls. 

This is my Berlin, the idealised version of a metropolis I once called my home. A whimsical version perhaps, but no less quixotic than the Berlin celebrated in the countless blogs, articles, travel guides, and assorted Instagram eulogies that populate Tumblr. Like one of those polaroids sold at Mauerpark, forever static, frozen in time, before it was tainted by Capitalism and dismantled by gentrification. The Berlin of counterculture, the postmodern capital par excellence, the forever changing yet permanently static cosmopolitan hub, where everywhere permutation paradoxically needs to be previously approved by the committee of urban desolation fetishists. This explains, perhaps, most members’s fascination with photography, as if constantly portraying the city with a Leica keeps the city safe in a pre-digital age. The only difference between their Berlin and mine is that theirs is mostly imagined whereas mine is hundred percent imaginary.

Imaginary cities have many benefits. They are blissfully free from those pesky people that have stridently different opinions and life goals, and insist in living in your beloved metropolis, despite you making it adamantly and constantly clear in your livestream that these philistines are diluting the city’s essence and making it less genuine. Yes, multiculturalism is an essential part of the urban experience, but bad taste is not a culture, and should be derided and despaired through the medium of Helvetica Neue! In imaginary (and imagined) cities everybody thinks like you.

Imaginary cities are also very cheap destinations, a major benefit in the current economic climate, particularly since I have become once more a student. They are also easily accessible from anywhere. This morning, for example, I spent a couple of hours in a sunny Berlin park downing beer when I should have been engaged in archival work in rainy London. In fact, there are days where I seem to invest more time bumbling round my mythological atlas than at my current location, a universe that contains unanswered emails, unfilled paperwork and unhelpful bureaucrats. You are welcome to join. In fact, to all those people in Berlin that made my stay so memorable, please do so. Our shared memories is what makes this Berlin, my imaginary Berlin, so special. Did I mention it is always summer?

And another book quote…

Once you decide to leave, you view a city through an entirely different lens. The simplest of actions, actions you have repeated one hundred, maybe a thousand, times swell in significance since each time may now be the last: the last time you buy bread at the bakery, the last time you ride on the U-Bahn Line 2, the last time you get your boots fixed at the cobbler, the last time you go to the newsagent’s for a travel pass or a pack of gum. There were so many things I would miss, I realised, even things I hadn’t seen in a while, like the stone-face museum guards from the days when I still went to museums and the scenester kids plowing through the flea markets in search of the holy vintage grail and the stern women from the bank and the post office with their eighties hairdos and the ice-cream place on Stargarder Straße, where there was always a line, even in winter, and that German punctuality, which made you miss your bus by seven seconds but also ensured you arrived at your appointments on time, and of course the voice of the S-Bahn announcer as he rolled off the stations and Alexanderplatz with its ever-changing face and the yellow streetcars, napping or in motion.

Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

How to Speak and Write Postmodern

First, you need to remember that plainly expressed language is out of the question. It is too realist, modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires that one uses play, parody and indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a difficult requirement, so obscurity is a well-acknowledged substitute. For example, let’s imagine you want to say something like, “We should listen to the views of people outside of Western society in order to learn about the cultural biases that affect us.” This is honest but dull. Take the word “views.” Postmodernspeak would change that to “voices,” or better, “vocalities,” or even better, “multivocalities.” Add an adjective like “intertextual,” and you’re covered. “People outside” is also too plain. How about “postcolonial others”? To speak postmodern properly one must master a bevy of biases besides the familiar racism, sexism, ageism, etc. For example, phallogocentrism (male-centredness combined with rationalistic forms of binary logic).

Finally “affect us” sounds like plaid pajamas. Use more obscure verbs and phrases, like “mediate our identities.” So, the final statement should say, “We should listen to the intertextual multivocalities of postcolonial others outside of Western culture in order to learn about the phallogocentric biases that mediate our identities.” Now you’re talking postmodern!

Stephen Katz, How to Speak and Write Postmodern

Desperately Seeking Berlin

Spring has finally arrived in Berlin and the city’s veritable army of urban bohemians and perpetually-broke Mac owners have colonised terraces and parks, all airing their totally unique and identically cropped leather jackets. Individualism never looked so uniform. These very public displays of mainstream disaffection occasionally make me wonder whether I am the only Mitte resident under 30 that wasn’t drawn to Berlin by the capital’s irresistible counterculture magnet. I was not sitting in London one day feverishly trying to tell Helvetica apart from Helvetica Neue when my zeitgeist antenna registered the sweet siren calls of bohemia from across the continent. I ended up in Berlin by accident. The start-up my boyfriend toiled for got acquired by Nokia. Nokia, in Berlin. So we had one week to decide whether we wanted to up sticks and cross the Channel. Neither of us had been to Berlin before. Both of us liked the idea, and in particular the property prices. A month later I was ploughing my way through the inch thick snow that had accumulated overnight on Goltzstrasse completely oblivious to the counterculture cornucopia unfolding further up east. The only culture of cool I was aware of during our first fortnight in the German capital was the one located at the bottom of my thermometer. Ignorant as I was of the city’s ungentifried hotspots I picked Schöneberg for our hastily found temporary base partly because I vaguely remembered Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin taking place in the neighbourhood. So I guess I was following the hype, only my hype was 60 years old. And although we no longer live there, the area between Nollendorfplatz and Hauptraße occupies a cherished place in my personal atlas. I have many happy memories of exploring the shops occupying the Goltzstrasse/Akazienstrasse stretch as the permanently bewildered Ausländerin I still am; of Saturday mornings at Winterfeldplatz market inflicting my phrase book German on the potato seller, of trying to locate the final resting place of the Brothers Grimm at the Matthäus Kirchhof. I even ventured down to the Schöneberg Rathaus, backdrop for J.F. Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. It was a cold November night and I was standing in front of the illuminated building trying to feel the spirit of history but in the end I couldn’t feel my toes.

That was the time when I was still ingenue and my experience of the city was mainly shaped by Schöneberg, before I was alerted to the undiluted Berlin essence that was to be found in neighbouring multikulti Kreuzberg, in ungentrified Neukölln and in ostalgic Friedrichshain. Schöneberg it seemed, was less Berlin than other parts of Berlin. For all its eventful history and cultural heritage, the current dominant definition of Berlin, the one that has been rammed down my throat ever since, was surprisingly simple. I also think that it does the city a disfavour. Berlin is more than graffiti, techno, smokey bars and second-hand shops. It contains parts oblivious to Berlin’s status as the new New York. Whatever that means. Maybe they want higher rents after all. Berlin is not even allowed to be Berlin, and at the same time there seems to be a neurotic pursuit in tracking down the city’s essence. After all Berlin is a place in flux, an ever changing urban landscape, a metropolis condemned to forever become and never be. I wonder if Berlin has been engaged in this  Sisyphean task of ‘never being’ for its entire 800 year history, before the advent of Lonely Planet travellers and urban fetishists. And for how long it remained static before it entered its current fluxy phase. As opposed to other European capitals, which are presumably entirely rigid and static. Which place worth visiting isn’t in flux? And what do they mean by flux? This is the postmodern dynamic urban fluidity that new Berliners will wax lyrical about to wide-eyed newcomers in a clandestine Neukölln bar. But is also the much maligned gentrification that new Berliners will fret about in a clandestine Neukölln bar while observing the incoming droves of wide-eyed newcomers. In these circles it is received wisdom that whilst urban flux was beneficial in the past, it must now stop. Just after their arrival. Any further newcomers dilute the essence of Berlin. A rather essentialist view for a city that celebrates its pluralism. Essence is what your travel guide promises. Lifestyle magazines might crown Berlin as the new art capital, and yet a large number of its inhabitants still think that Basquiat is what French people put baguettes in. Are these people not part of the real Berlin? The truth is that there is no essence, no existential anchor and in this way, at least, Berlin is fittingly postmodern. This search for the capital’s soul reveals more about the people seeking this holy grail than the city itself. It exposes them as newcomers and tourists. Nobody in their hometown frets so intensely about authenticity as when abroad. Then suddenly no restaurant is genuine enough unless it contains a toothless old matriarch busying herself over a stove with whom you communicate through the exclusive medium of hand gestures. 

I do not want to extract you from your Lonely Planet universe (a very crowded place), but you won’t find such a lady in Berlin, metaphorically speaking or not. They have very good dentists in Germany. But you will find many people looking for her, so you can join the search party. You will even come across people that claim to have seen her before she disappeared, swallowed by the mainstream wave that’s threatening to make Berlin less authentic that it has been for the last 800 years. No wonder they can’t find the city’s essence. It is in the past.

The Romantics: Wagner, Techno and Additive-Free Tobacco

What do Wagner, techno and American Spirit tobacco have in common? Apart from the fact that they should all come with a health warning. Their continued popularity and appeal throughout the years flies in the face of logic, defies all explanation. It has been taunting my - admittedly scant - rational self for some time. Where is this famed Teutonic rationale? And why would it willingly subject itself to an 18-hour opera, which libretto reads like some turgid fan fiction concocted by a 17-year-old feverishly chaste Evangelical with a worrying Dungeons and Dragons habit? Why is techno, electro, minimal or whatever name this many headed yet monotone musical hydra now goes by, still so omnipresent in Berlin? Why is a 90s fad still styled as the the soundtrack of a brave new urban utopia? Every other country left the party a long time ago. They even left the after-party. And finally, why do health stores in Germany sell tobacco? Maybe they favour a holistic approach and offer all sorts of health states, including very poor ones. Maybe some people equate “additive-free” with “addictive-free”. Maybe the carbon monoxide produced by smoking tobacco, all tobacco, has finally affected their oxygen-deprived brains, and they are now under the illusion that nothing “natural” could possibly harm them. Arsenic is a natural ingredient. Maybe they pour arsenic into their daily latte of delusion. I add two heaped teaspoons of sarcasm.

But why should Germans be exempt from the whims and fancies of irrationality? Why do we insist on placing them into the technology-worshipping-automaton box, the one into which Germany has recently been shoving Japan? I think it is about time that we inducted Germans into the Hall of Irrationality where they can join every other nation on earth. I myself have been a proud member ever since I discovered that eating fair-trade chocolate increases my karma but not my waistline.

Not all German are engineers. In fact, the country is facing a shortage. Germany, a byword for engineering excellence throughout the world, had 70,000 unfilled engineering posts in 2008. To address this gap, the Chancellor has been in talks with other European countries, such as stereotypically passionate Spain, where engineers are plentiful. What the poet quota in Germany currently is, I cannot say, but once upon a time, when Berlin was capital of Prussia, the kingdom excelled in exalted bards and balladists. Few people would describe the Germans as romantics, but that’s precisely what they were famed as at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, where the Romantic movement with a capital “R” thrived in the country. A reaction to the Enlightenment and its systematic thinking, Romantics rebelled against this reverence for reason, which they saw as a straightjacket that stifled spontaneity and everything creative. German Romantic literature’s main ingredients include an exaltation of the individual, particularly of the Genius, an undefined longing or Sehnsucht for something sensed but not known, and that characteristic German Innerlichkeit or “sense of inwardness, or remoteness from reality, of intimate community between self and the mysterious forces of nature and God.”* Goethe, who was later to label Romanticism as positively unhealthy, spearheaded the Romantic revolt with his seminal novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship about a young man that abandons his comfortable life to travel the world, returning changed. Goethe’s book kickstarted the concept of Bildung (education), where people travel not to educate themselves about the world or learn new skills, but to ultimately discover themselves. That’s right, Goethe is indirectly responsible for Eat, Pray, Love and  plastered gap year students in full moon parties in Thailand. Which means that by the time he wrote Faust he already had experience in giving his soul to the devil.

Germans were the Romantics of Europe. The French were fascinated by their neighbours’ eccentricity and erratic behaviour, so different from the cold rationality that characterised Gallic literature at the time. To them it was refreshing and charming that Germans would abandon the strict symmetry of French landscaping, as epitomised by Versailles (originally Baroque), in favour of the undomesticated and mysterious German forests. So now you know, fellow Ausländer, forests have been the natural habitat of Germans for at least 200 years, but have only been their premium barbecue spot for half a century. Germans kept flocking to forests despite their reputation in German fairytales as the setting of sinister events. Just ask Hansel or Gretel. The fairytale with its fantastic tales and folksy roots captured the public imagination and were collected by people such as the Grimm Brothers (also famous for being the founding fathers of Germanic philology and German studies). Fairytales appealed for their “unspoiled nature” and “innocence”, traditionally the literary medium of the peasants, who were regarded as the true embodiment of German culture, free of artificiality, foreign intrusions and the trappings of modern city life.

Yet anybody who has read the unfiltered stories, before Disney sugarcoated them, will be familiar with the violent imagery that pervades them. Hansel and Gretel evade their fate by shoving the old lady into the oven, the hunter saves Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother by chopping open the wolf and Cinderella’s stepsisters, in a desperate bid to fit into the dainty glass shoe, mutilate their feet. Foreigners might be amused by German Romantic sensibility and their camp Schwärmerei, but in typical Romantic fashion, something sinister lurked under the movement. Already Heinrich Heine was warning about Romanticism’s dangerous obsession with death and destruction. Many Romantics, preoccupied with a higher spiritual realm, were unconcerned with such earthly matters as politics. Often conservative, they mourned the passing of a golden - yet never discerned - utopia, and were rather vague about how to return to this prelapsarian state. Most disturbingly was the recurrence of total annihilation or obliteration as spiritual cleansing found in the writings of some of these Romantics. While there was no precise cure to be found for the social malaise and decadence in their often cryptic and esoteric prose, the idea of the phoenix rising from the ashes would have devastating consequences. Inevitably, Hitler was a Romantic. The connection was evident to the German novelist Thomas Mann who, shortly after the National Socialism Party rose to power, wrote:

It may seem daring to associate the nationalism of today with the ideas of a romanticizing philosophy, and yet the connection is there…[and serves] to support…the National Socialist movement from the spiritual side…We find here a certain ideology of philologists, a romanticism of professional Germanists, a superstitious faith in the Nordic - all emanating from the academic professional class, and the Germans of 1930 are harangued in an idiom of mystical philistinism and high-flown tastelessness with vocables like “racist”, “völkish, bündish”, “heroic”, which give the movement an ingredient of cultured barbarism more dangerous and more remote from reality, flooding and clotting the brain more grievously, than the Weltfremdheit and political romanticism that led us into [WW1]”

This is not to argue that a penchant for fairytales and forests led to Nazism. The rise of fascism in Europe in the 30s (Germany was not the only country so affected) was due to a toxic and complex combination of social, economical and political factors. But it did not help that many of these new Romantics had been heavily criticising the political efforts of the troubled and short-lived Weimar Republic. Not that they themselves offered any practical solutions to the young republic, disdainful as they were of the mundanity of politics, which they regarded as a pedestrian occupation. The Führer was also mocked despite them indirectly having helped created a political climate open to escapism and vague affirmations about a lost German golden age.

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The Romantic impulse knows no hues or political affiliation. It was later strongly to reemerge in the student revolt of the 60s, whose participants had a characteristically vague goal besides the dismantling of the old order and the creation of an intuitive new society. It took once again a more sinister turn in the 70s with the Baader-Meinhof Group, led by Andreas Baader, who was seemingly of the conviction that burning down department stores would somehow incite a sexual and anti-capitalist revolution in Germany.

Berlin’s actual anti-imperialist urban guerilla factions show less propensity towards violence and prefer to express their Weltschmerz through the medium of Photoshop and electro music. The turntable has, it seems, superseded Wagner as the primary source of musical escapism among the disenchanted German bourgeoisie. Romanticism was from its inception a middle-class pursuit. Factory workers during the Industrial Revolution rarely got the chance to experience longing or ennui. So it was up to the children of the bourgeoisie to campaign on behalf of the ungrateful proletariat. But I digress and it’s taking me longer to get to the point than Wagner’s Ring Cycle or a Ricardo Villalobos track. What do these two musical genres have in common and what so Romantic about them? Well both last an eternity and have a relentless insistence to them. You will be familiar with techno’s repetitive hypnotic beat but perhaps less with opera so I will give you an example. In his prelude to The Rhine Gold, Wagner (according to Gordon A. Craig) at some points extends the figurations on the chord of E flat for a whole 136 bars, so as to mimic the slumber of a river. Proto-trance music! Throw in a couple of dragons and vikings and you get the Love Parade. Both musical styles appeal to this German Innerlickheit or inwardness. Both disconnect you from your immediate surroundings and plug you into a higher but more diffuse reality. Next time you go to the opera or a club, notice how often German Romantics close their eyes. Particularly when they are dancing. They are not there. They are back in the woods! 

It is in these woods, their spiritual home, where they can commute with nature by smoking. Like that nice Indian American chap on the packet of American Spirit tobacco. Winnetou (created by the pathologically sentimental Karl May) and all the other tribe members live to an old ripe age despite communicating through smoke signals. Apart from all the ones that were directly or indirectly exterminated by white pioneers. Which is actually the majority. But German Romantics are already know that American Imperialists are bad for your health.

* Quote taken from Gordon A. Craig The Germans. In fact the chapter Romantics was the main inspiration for this entry. All brilliant insights are his, all bad jokes and accidental insults are mine.