Wie bitte?

Last week I turned 29, and thanks to the modern wonder that is Facebook’s Birthdays app, a few people wanted to know if I had any grand designs for marking my losing battle against entropy. I didn’t. There’s a worrying lack of grand designs in my life that I compensate for with last minute planning, and if this fails, with generous amounts of alcohol. I have also been known to combine these two into last minute drinking sessions. So true to tradition, that’s what I decided to do last Saturday. It was after all my first birthday in Berlin.

Normally I’m quite reluctant to host parties, not because I’m averse to celebrations, but because I worry whether bringing all my acquaintances under one roof will turn me schizophrenic. Allow me to explain. What all these people have in common is me, different mes. Some people know the work me, others are more familiar with the German course me, some interact with Spanish me whilst others prefer the Danish version, and many have only met the English me. Bring them all together and I’m no longer sure who the real me is anymore. I’m like an onion suffering an identity crisis. Each layer only brings another layer and me closer to tears  but with no sign of a kernel, because it is an onion.  And turning into a giant onion tends, in my experience, to put a damper on parties.

The party, though, turned out to be a success and I was overwhelmed with the number of people who turned up on such short notice. Although now that the onion story and  my penchant for tortured analogies are public knowledge, I might expect a drastic drop in attendance next year. But no really, thanks to all of you who made my first birthday in Berlin such a special day. You get a special AWESOME award. Thanks for the many thoughtful gifts that addressed all the different mes and for the generous amounts of alcohol that hit all of them equally hard. Did I mention you’re awesome?

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

Doris Lessing

Sometime ago I came across an article that bemoaned the death of Feminism and the reluctance of many women to label themselves as feminists. Aren’t these women interested in equal pay, asked the author? Do they not want to be given the same opportunities as men? Well, yes they do, but perhaps they don’t want to be associated with the increasingly shrill and vituperative voice of 60s feminists, whose antics left such a profound imprint, it seems, so as to essentially trademark feminism in popular culture. They weren’t even the first wave of Feminism - that honour is normally given to the suffragettes - and are by no means the most recent one, yet they are seemingly the ones that stayed in the public’s imagination. I blame Germaine Greer, grand doyenne of angry women everywhere. She nearly made me rescind of my own feminist tag, and for that I’m very angry. 

Greer is of course best known as the author of The Female Eunuch. Its publication in 1970 created a sensation, as it urged women everywhere to embrace their sexuality, become self-reliant and cast aside the passive roles they had traditionally been allotted. Delivered with great humour and wit, it gave patriarchy a deserved kick in the teeth whilst still treating men as potential partners, not antagonists. These two qualities, humour and  a more forgiving view on men were, sadly, rather scarce amongst other feminist theorists of the time. A product of the 60s, some of the book’s suggestions might be too mother-earthy in the cold light of the present. I, for one, fail to see the liberating properties of tasting one’s menstrual flux and I am quite happy to remain repressed on that front. But over time, many of her suggestions worked themselves into the mainstream, watered down perhaps, but still there nonetheless. This is how ideas become socially acceptable over time, you shout loud enough until your echoes start reaching enough people. A viewpoint is rarely accepted into the hall of dominant ideologies retaining its original strength. 

I should be forever grateful to Greer and company for paving the way for me and other women, as we no longer need to stay at home reading The Good Housekeeper, popping Valium and hoping our husband might accidentally stumble across our g-spot while looking for the cocktail shaker. I should be grateful, and I am, but I’m also disappointed, because somewhere along the line these women got stuck, and started sounding like broken records, parping on ad-infinitum about the whore/madonna dichotomy, without seemingly contributing to the debate, passing off tired observations as radical aperçus, breaking taboos that were no longer there to be broken.

Desperate to discard anything that had even the slightest whiff of sexism they soon ran into a wall, the one every feminist runs into eventually, as they realised they didn’t have enough pieces not tainted by that all pervasive patriarchy to build an alternative world. Language became the main battlefield, with never ending debates over Ms/Miss, humankind/mankind… (they’re still raging now). Reappropriation became one strategy, although I still don’t think “bitch” should be taken a compliment, no matter how many times Meredith Brooks insists on singing it. Others, like Julia Kristeva, suggested the invention of a “feminine” language marked by soft sounds, humming and other earthly noises, which I suspect would make women sound like Teletubbies. Then Greer lost it (although it could also be argued that Kristeva beat her to it).

Thirty years after her first book, and to much fanfare, Greer published The Whole Woman, a sequel of some sorts to The Female Eunuch. Greer was still angry of course, although this time she was incensed over things that were cunningly disguised as progress - well they fooled me - like the contraceptive pill and today’s more lenient abortion laws. At this point, it seems, Greer had pretty much decided that women were and always will be regarded as disposable holes by men, and that any development only benefits some vague yet omnipresent phallocentric conspiracy.

The pill, she insisted, did not give women greater autonomy over their bodies, but made them a “manmade nonmother”, it was a “male interference with conception and birth”. “Women are driven through the health system like sheep through a dip […] The disease they are being treated for is womanhood” she hectors from her soapbox. Then she goes on to blame Roe v. Wade for giving women the dubious privilege to “undergo invasive procedures in order to terminate unwanted pregnancies, unwanted not just by them but by their parents, their sexual partners, the governments who would not support mothers, the employers who would not employ mothers, the landlords who would not accept tenants with children, the schools that would not accept students with children.” 

No wonder she is so miffed, being endowed with a pair of fallopian tubes apparently make her an object of universal hatred. I bet even the postman secretly hates her uterus. And Ms Greer has no time for actual mothers either, who have, of course, been deluded into popping babies into patriarchy’s lap. Being a woman in Western society is clearly a no-win situation, but at least they can take solace in knowing that they’re not having their genitals mutilated, like in some African countries. I mean,  that must be some sort of consolation, now that you’ve discovered everybody hates you. Right?…  You’d be wrong! You’ve obviously been blinded by your Eurocentric arrogance! Your penchant for make-up clearly exposes your secret ambition to become a Stepford Wife. Your reservations on female genital mutilation, on the other hand, are obviously “an attack on cultural identity”. 

That’s right, mutilating often unwilling 13-year-old girls must be “a procedure with considerable cultural value because it has survived 50 years of criminalization and concerted propaganda campaigns”. Oh, you mean like backstreet abortions…? Sex trafficking? No? Is it because we’re seeing this barbarous.. um tradition.. out of context, through our myopic Western eyes? I can only conclude that Meaning is Contextual, and in Greer’s case, this translates as ‘anything goes as long as it’s done by people who are sufficiently unlike you’. Oh, and as far as I’m aware, she still refuses to accept men who have undergone gender-reassignment surgery as women, her argument being more or less the bob-marleyesque sounding “no ovaries, no woman”. No wonder she is still regularly trotted out by lazy producers whenever gender is on the agenda: the woman is clearly a visionary, her enlightened and progressive views on transsexuality on par with Leviticus and other cutting edge gender theorists.

Every time I see Greer’s angry mug on TV, I get this unexplainable urge to become a Vegas showgirl. Strategically placed ostrich feathers are after all a tradition that have survived not only brief periods of criminalization but also years of concerted propaganda campaigns. Then it slowly dawns upon me, very slowly of course, as the epiphany has to tunnel its way through multiple layers of denial and lack of self-awareness deposited over the years by patriarchy. But lo and behold! Eventually I see the light! Greer’s constant presence on these panels is an evil machination of that all-seeing all-knowing Top Gear-loving cabal! By exposing me to her increasingly outmoded and tired arguments I will be lulled into the illusion that there are no nuanced or insightful minds left in Feminism! 

No wonder then that so many women shy away from the feminist label. Women are not stupid, despite Greer’s churlish insistence to the contrary. They still want equality - if anything it boils down to self-interest - and neither are they oblivious to the plight of the, still depressingly large, number of women who are routinely trafficked, raped, beaten, aborted for being the wrong sex and generally treated as second class citizens. And yet women grew tired of the ideology of oppression so beloved of 60s feminists and other professional martyrs, simply because most people don’t want to view themselves as losers. Is that shallow? No secret society pulling the strings behind the scenes. Most people, and I believe Greer would count herself amongst them, like to think of themselves as individuals in possession of at least an ounce of independent thought. 

Yet whenever a woman diverts from the narrow party line set by Greer and company she is instantly labeled as patriarchal automaton, with zero self-awareness and independent thought. The perennially popular Foucaltian model is promptly peddled out and the dissenting voice is accused of internalising the oppressor. You want to be a stay at home mum? Patriarchal lobotomy! You like pink? Ideological brainwash! And yet they have so far failed to provide an alternative model. So pink is patriarchal? Okay, what precisely is your alternative? Blue? I think we are ALL aware that society gives feminine connotations to the colour ‘pink’ now. In fact, so familiar have we become with the language of gender semiotics that when a girl plumps for a frilly little pink number she is not a mindless follower of old patriarchal models who should be sent to reeducation camp. She’s perfectly aware of the symbolic ramifications of her sartorial choice and also bound to be familiar with reappropriation.

This attitude can partly be seen as rebellion against the old guard. It was bound to happen. As the new generation grew tired of being declared the victim, and with no alternative model to build on, these women thought that they could reclaim territory by taking symbols tainted by sexism and subverting them through ironic-self-awareness . The return of red lipstick and burlesque are examples of this philosophy, but so is the popularity of “porn star” and “deep throat” t-shirts. As long as it’s a conscious choice, the argument goes, there is no exploitation.

Now this is being heavily debated by another wave of feminists who are concerned by the increasing trend of posing in the buff for lads’ magazines. Is it possible to feel empowered without having to go topless? The most disturbing example is of course the perma-tanned former glamour model and all around entrepeneur Jordan, who has made her fortune by selling her privacy. Addicted to fame, Katie Price, as she now prefers to be called, has more or less rented out her womb to Hello magazine. She has, as Charlie Brooker memorably put it, “[had] herself sliced open and injected and sewn back together until she resembles some kind of rubbery pirate ship figurehead, a weird booby caricatured looming at us out of the mist.” And yet many women regard her as a role model, assuming, perhaps, that as long as those millions sit in a bank account, then it can’t possibly hurt. As long as it is you who tells the surgeon where to make the incision, then it is okay.

Which is why feminists have returned to the drawing room. Many of them never left of course, but I assure you - assuming you made it this far - that Feminism still has a lot to offer.  The ‘ism’  deceives, like any other political movement, it conceals a plethora of views. If you haven’t found one you sympathise with, then you just haven’t looked hard enough. But Feminism is still relevant. Don’t let Germaine Greer put you off.

Last Tuesday we went to Teufelsberg, which means Devil’s Mountain, located in the district of Wilmersdorf, north of the Grunewald forest. Teufelsberg is not only a hill, but also a giant metaphor, although like many other Berlin landmarks, it’s not clear what it is meant to illustrate. The 80 metre high hill, found in the former British sector, towers over its flat Brandenburg surroundings. It’s the highest hill in Berlin, higher than the one found in Kreuzberg and other -berg ending Berlin districts. If anything it illustrates the lack of altitude in the capital. What’s remarkable about Teulfelsberg however, is not its height, but its composition. It’s made up entirely of the debris and rubble of Berlin, gradually gaining inches over the 20 years after the war as the Allies rebuilt the West.

The site was originally the home of the Wehrtechnishe Fakultät, a military technical college designed by Albert Spree, Hitler’s architect and all around fascist aesthetic consultant. Construction ground to a halt with the war’s eruption and only the shell of the compound was completed. After the end of the conflict, there were plans to knock it down, but it withstood any demolition attempts. In the end the Allies were forced to literally bury it under the weight of historical memory. 12 million cubic metres of it, the equivalent of 400,000 buildings. But this is not what attracts so many visitors to Teufelsberg - it’s sadly not the only debris mound in the world created by armed conflict. It is however the only one that also hosted a listening station owned by the US National Security Agency (NSA) during the Cold War. In other words, it was a spy lair perched on top of a million cubic metres of war wreckage underneath which a nazi military technology academy lurked. See what I mean by giant metaphor? It gets better though. With the fall of the Wall, the station was quickly dismantled and all the spy equipment swiftly removed. The building and the radar remained though and stood abandoned until they were acquired by a group of investors, presumably high on post-unification optimism who planned to turn the site into flats. This plan was later abandoned, probably after the investors discovered Berliners’ refusal to live in anything but an Altbau.

Once again deserted, the place fell prey to vandals, arsonists and urban desolation fetishists. New Berliners marked their territory, covering it in graffiti and leaving a trail of beer bottles and broken glass. The glass is of the anti-bullet variety, but apart from that, it looks uncannily like my local U-Bahn station. It even has a broken lift! I have no idea what to make of the Teufelsberg metaphor, it has way too many layers. Its current sorry state is however a source of anxiety for a group of individuals who seem to be under the illusion that the spy station is somehow single-handedly responsible for stopping Berlin turning into a smouldering atomic crater and ruining everybody’s barbecue plans. I for one rejoice over the fact that it is no longer in use and that Berlin is, at least in this respect, a pleasantly uneventful city. Disconcertingly phallic in appearance, a vandalised Teufelsberg is perhaps a fitting reminder of the sticky situations to which unchecked levels of testosterone can lead us. 

[…]It is Spain’s idiosyncrasies which make it such a fascinating place, both to study and visit. Much the same could be said of Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Each, thankfully, has its own identity. And what the Spanish, in their enthusiasm for ‘Europe’, perhaps overlook is that to be true to themselves they may need to be different from others. For me at least, the new Spain will have reached maturity, not on the day it ceases to be different from the rest of Europe, but on the day it acknowledges it is.

John Hooper, The New Spaniards

Churchill once said, “When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticise or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I get home”. This might apply to a brief jaunt abroad, but an expat should be exempt from this rule, particularly if you, like me, happen to share two nationalities. Should the Danish government not give me a reason to jump on my soapbox I rest easy, knowing its Spanish equivalent soon will. Furthermore, my move to Berlin from London has also provided me with ample opportunities to view the to-ings and fro-ings of UK politics from an outsider’s viewpoint. I’d like to think of it as a detached meta-perspective, although my boyfriend would argue otherwise. Yet today’s tuppence berates people who criticise their own country, obviously not including myself, since I got on the soapbox first. Specifically it’s about Spaniards’ harsh views on their own country and their glaring inferiority complex towards the rest of Europe. You don’t need to be in the Iberian peninsula to come across it, in fact this mindset is well and alive in Berlin where apparently 60% of Spain’s twenty- and thirty-somethings live. The other 40% are to be found in London’s Camden Market, so in retrospect it was probably wise for you not travel all the way down to Spain. You wouldn’t have found any. 

The target of today wrath are the so-called progres, which is short for progresista, i.e. “progressive”. Once upon a time being a progresista was a very progressive stance to take. Spain has a proud tradition of forward-thinking minds who, amongst other things, were responsible for drafting the first constitution in Europe in 1812*, hot on the heels of the American one (it was sadly never enacted, as the returning Ferdinand VII, known as “the wanted one”, turned out to be a completely autocratic bastard, a constitution being the last thing he wanted, swiftly arresting its authors). The country might have had a turbulent history, and has at times not been the most liberal place to live, but this has not deterred many Spaniards in the long run.

Spain also has a surprising number of radical laws, radical at least for a country that has historically been regarded as one of Catholicism’s strongholds. Here same-sex couples are allowed to marry, instead of settling for a civil partnership as in other seemingly enlightened countries such as Great Britain. And they have the right to adopt, unlike in Germany. But if you mention this to a progre, they will rebuke you by claiming that it might not be on paper, but northern European countries just have a more liberal mentality. Progres, it seems, have an almost unnatural ability to read public opinion on “liberal issues”, particularly in countries they have never set foot into, but gleamed knowledge of through the marihuana haze. Progres smoke a lot, perhaps believing that the smoke will not ward off only mosquitoes, but also cold facts and figures. Their natural habitat is the flea market, hence their high numbers in Berlin. To a progre a flea market is the zenith of civilisation, what Flemming was really looking for when he accidentally discovered penicillin. Here they can sit and smoke dope all day surrounded by Bob Marley records, tribal jewellery and other Spanish people. They might be dedicated smokers but they are not enthusiastic linguists. So blissful they look that you almost don’t have the heart to tell them that the Palestinian scarves they’re proudly sporting are most definitely Chinese in origin. Almost. 

Asked for the reasons behind their move to Berlin, they will all give you the same answer “Oh, in Berlin nobody judges you, you can dress however you like”. Apparently their brave sartorial choices are frowned upon back in their motherland, not only in the poky little city they grew up in, you understand, but IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY. I’m sure people from, say, Barcelona will agree. Don’t blame the poor progre, they are only able to spout sweeping generalisations picked up from other progres, forming a sort of incestuous bermuda triangle of vapid antiestablishment ideology, crumbs and leftovers from the 60s. 

But the insouciance characteristic of youth becomes hollow if carried onto your 30s and 40s. You become one of those burnout hippies that got high on the counter-revolution and is still searching for that elusive time in which everything was black and white, as bland and simple as a John Lennon ballad. Perhaps Spain herself should be blamed for spawning such a generation. Living under the tight grip of Franco’s dictatorship for 40 years whilst Northern Europe experimented with different socialist models, it is no surprise that many Spaniards still embrace outmoded forms of counterculture. Perhaps they’re making up for lost time and still feel the clandestine thrill of indulging in now innocent activities that carried a price tag during the Generalísimo’s time. It has now been more than 30 years since Spain was able to embrace democracy once again, 30 years in which it has frantically tried to catch up with its other European neighbours. Recessions will come and go and so will housing bubbles, although politicians’ inability to keep their fingers from the cookie jar will sadly stay. And yet Spain should pat herself on the shoulder. Spain is different, but so is every other country. Most importantly, Spain can pride itself on being pleasantly bland.  This might come as a disappointment to those thrill seekers who, like Hemingway, flocked to Spain attracted by its fiery and indomitable spirit. On the other hand, Spain is unlikely to start another civli war, and most importantly, won’t have to put up with American authors that eschew wussy adjectives in favour of manly verbs. 

And this is why, dear progres, I get so angry with you. I’m simply disappointed because I’m convinced you could do so much better. You know the the term has been emptied of all meaning when it is used as an insult, and with progre that happened years ago. When my parents married, Spain wasn’t part of the European Union, and the Danish immigration authorities grilled my mother, demanding to know if her motives were genuine. Although Franco was already dead, there was still currency circulating with his loathsome effigy. Nowadays it is Spaniards that get to be rude to immigrants (how fleeting is historic memory!) and get to spend their Euros in the many countless countries they can visit. And this is something that should be celebrated, apart from the growing xenophobia of course. That really sucks, although it is also, perversely, a sign that Spain is now a country wealthy enough that racist morons have the money and leisure to spend it infecting the internet with their imbecilic venom.

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about progress, right? Well done Spain! Now if only the current government could pass some much needed labour reforms…

* Note to history sticklers: The people responsible for drafting the 1812 Constitution were actually knows as liberales, it would be their political descendants who became known as progresistas. Liberales were arguably pretty progressive too though.

And yes, the pictures are from Teufelsberg. No connection, I just need some visual breaks.

He’s a hungry hungry caterpillar!

Yesterday I was on my way to Teufelsberg, yet another of Berlin’s Cold War relics I hope I’ll have time to post on soon. Anyway, I was following the same route as the narrator from the Book of Clouds, except that she gets off at Savignyplatz, and I was reminded of the following passage:

“As for the S-Bahn, it too was a wondrous thing, especially its elevated routes, and during each ride I’d fall into that limbo between origin and destination where thoughts are churned out in time with the wheels of the train but with far less purpose and linearity. It wasn’t just the trancelike glide of the wheels, however, or the view out the window. It was announcer’s voice. I preferred this recorded voice to any other voice I had heard in my life, especially on days when I felt disconnected from the city, attached by the thinnest of stringest.

“Nächste Station: Friedrichstrasse”

All it took were a few words to retighten the bond.

“Ausstieg links,”, the announcer would add for those ignorant of which side to disembark.

There was a spring to his utterances, a buoyancy packed and delivered in ancipation of every stop, and I would put away my book or newspaper and sit back and listen to the stations, as they were rolled off, one by one, uninterrupted - that is, if other presences didn’t interfere, such as plainclothes ticket inspectors or junkie musicians, their pleas for attention like dark blood clots in the city’s circulation.”

I agree with the author, it is a very pleasant voice with the right amount of enthusiasm, but not as much as to sound like a life coach. S-Bahn man sounds like he’s having way more fun than Underground lady back in London, although I don’t know yet if that is something you should be looking for in a train announcement.

There are moments in Berlin night life when it would be nice be a native English speaker, just to be able to appreciate all the nuances. Like when a Swede and a Spaniard who have just met in Watergate and shared a taxi to Alexanderplatz talk about how great they think Berlin is: ‘I fucking love this city.’ Or shortly afterwards in the lift when a Dutch guy who lives in London gets talking to a Norwegian girl, and she’s there with a friend who just moved to London. While they’re attempting to explain all of this - they do have fifteen floors to travel - another Norwegian chips in, telling the Dutch guy that, should he ever travel to Norway, he mustn’t go to Bergen as it’s incredibly boring.. Then we reach the top. The door opens and the lift operator lests everyone out. On his way out of the lift, a guy in his late twenties who sounds as if he might come from Australia, and who has been listening to his companions’ conversation the whole way, says, ‘Norway, Norway - that’s the country with the fjords, right?’