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.
I Am Now Integrated
If I’m sounding a tad more Teutonic today it’s because I recently - and rather unsuspectingly - took part in an integration ceremony. I have now an urge to barbecue nine months of the year and buy jars of Nutella large enough to hold all my written correspondence with German bureaucracy. Other side effects include worsening of pre-existing syntactic complications, also commonly known as the inability to write sentences containing less than three subclauses or syntactic non-linearity, together with an increased belief in the all-healing powers of homeopathy.
It all started with yet another letter from the unending sea of paper that life in Germany entails (I have yet to reconcile this epistolary enthusiasm with the equally Teutonic fondness for forests). This latest missive congratulated me on passing the so-called German language test for immigrants and invited me to a ceremony where two very official sounding officials would hand over my certificate. The letter also encouraged me to bring along my children, who would be freed from school upon the presentation of said letter. Since my progeny currently amounts to zero I wondered if it would absolve my fiance from attending his pre-planning planning meeting instead. Though, like most children, he would probably sit at the back and play during the whole ceremony. And I don’t want to take his iPhone away.
I had no choice but to attend the event sans better half and non existent quarter halves. Thursday afternoon thus found me in a chalk-smelling mossy green locale in Antonstrasse’s Volkshochschule, together with the 20-odd other recipients and their children, partners and other assorted family members. I was one of the few people, it seemed, that had arrived without an entourage, a camera, or a recent visit to the hairdresser. I had already gathered that I wasn’t part of the usual demographic, not only was I the only female there dangerously close to her 30s without descendants, I was also in the rather lucky situation that I did not need the certificate for visa reasons, nor would it have any effect on my professional prospects. My posts might often give the wrong the impression, but I was there just for the love of German. I’m a professional linguist, I can’t live in Berlin and not learn the language. Yet there are many people that don’t - hence the integration courses. All the people gathered that Thursday in room 305 had successfully completed such a course. The only non-compliant element to be found, much to the chagrin of the representative of the integration ministry, was the sound system. Microphones rarely want to integrate.
We all waited patiently in our seats while I tried to discreetly eyeball the cake table. A couple of babies started loudly protesting, perhaps also piqued by the lack of Hanuta bars (Danish butter biscuits at a German induction ceremony? I thought I was there to be integrated, not the other way around) While I pondered the symbolic ramifications of baked goods, the integration ministry delegate successfully integrated the microphone. What followed was a predictable speech on the importance of language to German society. Partly catering to the linguistic level of the attendants, partly to hammer the message home, her rhetoric was littered with keywords such as “society”, “community”, “common language”, and “increased opportunities”. She reminded me of a nationalist Buddhist monk repeating a particularly cherished mantra. We were then serenaded by a capella version of the national anthem. I really wanted a Hanuta bar. We were called individually to receive our certificates. One by one we went up and were handed a red rose and our certificate by the two official looking officials. I also found out why so many of the recipients had been to the hairdresser. We were meant to greet the suits and then have our picture taken sandwiched between them as a memento. I had not been coiffed nor did I have a photogenic baby to accessorise my certificate and rose. Merely my awkward smile. If I had known in advance that the pampers count was going to be this high I could have borrowed one - I live in Prenzlauer Berg after all. For an integration ceremony I was feeling rather out of place.
The capella group reappeared and gave us a Spring hymn, for which they received some integration singing roses. Then the teachers were honoured with some more red buds too. Maybe Interflora was sponsoring the event. I would have preferred Hanuta. We all politely clapped. Then people broke off to get some tea, Turkish tea, coffee and decidedly non-German biscuits. Alas, I had another appointment, and left with my rose and certificate, soon to be accompanied by an integration Ritter Sport.
Always the Exophone, Never the Ex-phoney
I’m writing you this letter to tell you I’m on my way
I’m coming home
And nothing, nothing, nothing can’t get in my way
Babe, I’ve changed…
– Goldhawk Road, Tina Dico
Some time ago I was labelled fat-skinny by Grazia, a rigorous publication with impeccable scientific credentials, and a respected authority on nutrition and €4,000 must-have ostrich bags. Now, I would never normally harbour doubts against such an assertion, but I have occasionally pondered whether fat-skinny is yet another hare-brained collective delusion courtesy the thick-thin Grazia writers. It is, after all, the year of the rabbit.
Now my beloved Guardian (et tu, Brute?) informs me that my voice inhabits a grey zone, a metaphorical one, as opposed to the physical space occupied by my semantically indecisive body mass. You see, I have been put into the “exophone” box (provided that my fat skinny body fits, of course). Exophone, derived from the Greek prefix “exo”, meaning “outside” and the word “phone” denoting “voice” or “sound”, refers to the phenomenon of writing in a language other than the one you were born into. Like I’m doing right now. At this very instant. Have you found any syntactic incongruity yet? A suspiciously foreign word choice that grates on your native ears? A dubiously placed preposition perhaps? If you haven’t, you’re probably going to now.
I grew up speaking Danish and Spanish. Does my Spanish background betray me? Perhaps my vocabulary is characterised by a marked preference for Latin etymology rather than Anglo-Saxon. Anglo-Saxon, i.e. Old English, is a West Germanic language. So is Danish. Well, it is actually a North Germanic language. I’m sure all you Germanic connoisseurs detected a certain je Norse sais quoi in my writing*. What can I say, it’s in my blood. My Spanish plasma does not contain red blood cells, it contains rrrrred blaaad sills. I am an exophone, forever condemned to a self-imposed linguistic exile, forever shackled to this phoney feeling.
The addition of German to my linguistic repertoire is not going to help matters (and it will certainly upset the North versus West Germanic equation, as I assume that German is Omni-Germanic). Not that I speak Luther’s language fluently, not by any means, but I have established friendships in which German is the main medium of communication. The German I is not as fully-fledged as the English I, the Danish I, or for that matter the Spanish ¡ay, caramba!. Which one is the real I? Is it a combination thereof? I have spent roughly a third of my life in each of Denmark, England and Spain.
Most of my adult life has taken place in England, so it is only natural that I should formulate my adult thoughts in English. They’re few and far between to begin with. Most of my half-baked ideas and fully-fledged rants are product of over-dinner conversations with my English fiancé (I should’ve probably plumped for the Anglo-Saxon “betrothed”, but I have no dowry and Richard III is no longer king of England). It is only natural that I should want to record these exchanges and conclusions in English. Why would I want to translate them into Danish or Spanish, stripping them in the process of subtle yet vital nuances and removing them from the original context. Because I can’t feel in English?
Karen Blixen: Not included in the Guardian’s list.
The term “exo” in “exophone” implies an emotional disconnection, a semantic slap to the face. And I never liked metaphorical violence, or real insults for that matter. The linguistic essentialism latent in the term troubles me. Am I unable to express genuine emotions in English? Perhaps the 1985 Spanish me is somehow more real than the 2011 English me. Maybe I have an immutable mother tongue kernel to which I’m no longer loyal. That would be rather unfortunate, because for the past 10 years English has been the language in which I have loved. I was proposed to in English, I accepted in English. In fact my constant bad punning and penchant for wordplay could be read as an ongoing love letter to my future husband, a homage to the linguistic treasures I’ve stumbled across during our decade-long dialogue.
Or maybe I am destined to forever be the exophone, never the ex-phoney, because I will always be phoney, a linguistic transvestite masquerading as an English speaker. Pity, I actually prefer the newly coined “ex-phoney” , which is a misleading hybrid just like myself. The prefix “ex”, like “exo” denotes “out of, from out” but it normally precedes words borrowed from Latin. The “phoney” found in “ex-phoney” is also not a corruption of the Greek “phone”, as some might assume, but an alteration of “fawney”, a gilt brass ring used by swindlers, from the Irish Gaelic “fáinne”, meaning ring. You could say that “phoney” is a phoney “phone”, an etymological red herring. No wonder a phoneys like myself likes it. So to recap, “exophone” is made up of two Old Greek components. “ex-phoney” is composed of the Latin suffix “ex”, cognate of the Greek “exo” and customary chaperone of Latin nouns, plus an Irish Gaelic corruption disguised as a Greek word. A true linguistic mutt.
“Exophone” is, on the other hand, a pure Hellenic neologism coined presumably by exophonic people themselves, who wanted to put their Classics degrees to use and whose dabblings in the Greek language should, according to their own linguistic intolerance, be as genuine as the Sirtaki dance in Zorba the Greek. Confused yet? You should be.
All this fancy terminology cobbled together from two dead languages, Latin and Old Greek… who since the 6th century has been able to claim that Latin is their mother tongue? Apart from the Pope, of course, whose views are, incidentally, also stuck in the Dark Ages.
Thanks to the enthusiastic coining of these exophones, Latin and Old Greek now boast a larger semantic pool than they did in the times of Socrates & co. Because nobody actually speaks these languages anymore, it is quite common to encounter accidental amalgamations of Latin and Greek roots. The word “television”, for an instance, is a well-known example, consisting of the Greek word “tele” (far) and the Latin word “visio”. These hybrids are known as heteroradicals (the Pope is a huge fan), “heteroradical” being, of course, also a heteroradical word (from the Greek “hetero” meaning “to differ” and the Latin “radix” i.e. root). You might be shocked to hear that some purists dislike these heteroradicals. I believe these are the same people who get their pedantic panties in a twist every time they suddenly encounter a split infinitive. I am more astounded by the fact that a purist should show opposition to a word containing “hetero” and “radical”.
I am also slightly perplexed by people who can so authoritatively argue about an obsolete language that has been relegated to scientific nomenclature and intellectual pomposity. And also used to label, in the best Foucaltian fashion, linguistic dissidents like me, who have spent most of their adult lives thinking, dreaming and being perplexed in an adopted language.
Some time ago I went to see Tina Dico in concert. Danish by birth - her surname is actually Dickow - this singer-songwriter spent a large part of the last decade living in London. I actually attended a gig at the Union Chapel during my own London years. And now she was in Berlin, touring after her recent return to Denmark. She was no longer based in the British capital and yet the city had left a visible imprint. Her Danish cadences had, like mine, been gradually eroded and I even detected the hint of an Estuarian accent. Dico has always composed in English and her songs often revolve around the themes of exile, belonging and travelling. Berlin’s Admiralspalast was thronged that evening with the Danish diaspora and as the opening chords to “Count to Ten” echoed throughout the hall, they rose to their feet, as if following an invisible command, and enthusiastically accompanied Dico in her tales of transience and topographical dislodgement. They were all singing in English, united by their Danishness. Singing in Berlin, many accompanied by their German partners. I could hear one of them waxing lyrical about Dico’s English lyrics in fluent German to her partner. I guess I had stumbled into an exophone convention.
*Anglo-Saxon purists, I have some bad news for you! (apart from the obvious fact that you’re Anglo-Saxon purists in the 21st century): The UK (particularly northern England) attracted some - presumably very lost - Vikings on the way to Mallorca in the ninth century. As a result, English contains large swathes of North Germanic words. In fact, “Words of Scandinavian origin rarely look or feel foreign to modern English-speakers. They have been completely assimilated, and most denote everyday objects” (From The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, Henry Hitchings.)
I Think, Therefore I Am (German)
In a day and age when professional alarmists fret about the dumbing down of humankind - because all medieval peasants were avid readers of the Literary Review - it is reassuring to know that thinking is positively thriving in at least one country. Germany is rather fond of pondering, dissecting, mulling, musing, ruminating and other mental gymnastics. Germany has been the main exporter of dry philosophy since time immemorial, before the French started smoking and hanging out in cafés. Often it is sublime and other times it is tad too dense. Martin Heidegger’s magnus opus Being and Time was according to Roger Scrutton “formidably difficult - unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it”. This incidentally is often how I feel when I peruse the politics section of Süddeutsche Zeitung.
George Bernard Shaw claimed that “an Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable” . A German, on the other hand, feels uncomfortable when he thinks he is being moral. Can he ascertain this morality? How do you define morality? And what social forces cause him to question his morals in the first place? Which role does the concept of moral play in today’s society? At this point, and to assuage his (or her!) guilt, a German feels compelled to write a 5,000 word editorial in the Tagesspiegel consisting of 10 line sentences containing 20 subclauses interspersed with 30 brackets and asides written exclusively in the passive mode, so they can bring out their entire collection of “geworden gewesen wurden haben” verbs they have been keeping for those special occasions. Whatever the conclusion (spoiler: it might be America’s fault), rest assured that readers will be reminded of their victimhood. In an Advanced Capitalist Society we are ALL victims. Blame it on the Advanced Capitalist Society. Whatever an Advanced Capitalist Society is (clue, a German philosopher* is its main analyst). But if it weren’t for an ACS (I’m not German, and got tired of typing) there wouldn’t be editorials, debates, opinion of the day. There wouldn’t be any Tatort!
With this in mind I recently came across a piece in The Economist on Muslim immigrants learning about Germany’s Nazi past. Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste), a peace organization founded to confront the legacy of Nazism, is running a series of seminars and tutorials about the third Reich targeted at immigrant women who want to know more about this episode in history. This has provoked controversy and much soul searching in Germany and its brooding inhabitants and led to yet another wave of editorials. I don’t know about you, but at this point I’m expecting editorials whenever Facebook changes its layout. Anyway, on the one hand there’s scepticism in certain quarters about the genuine interest of immigrants in the Holocaust. The course is partly funded by the interior ministry who is eager to prevent anti-Semitism and discourage Islamist extremism, as well as reach out to the country’s large Muslim community. There are, of course, many Germans who welcome interest in Hitler’s regime on the part of guest workers and encourage them to contribute with their thoughts on the subject. The whole kerfuffle is Germany in a nutshell:
The unspoken assumption is that there is a middle ground between German remorse and indifference. As enlightened Germans, the seminar-givers see the Holocaust as a unique crime committed mainly against the Jews. Yet they must make room for the views of women whose backgrounds have little to do with the persecution of Jews and who may have suffered horrors of their own. Taking their experiences seriously matters as much as instructing them. There is a risk of “relativising” the Holocaust, says Astrid Messerschmidt of the University of Education in Karlsruhe. Yet the German version of history “cannot be imposed from above”.
Most fraught, says Mrs Weduwen [who organises the seminars] , are discussions of the Middle East. The women learn that both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict have grievances. The message can receive a hostile reception when Israeli commandos storm ships trying to break the Gaza blockade. Mrs Boumekik is involved in educating Arab families who blame Jews for the conflict. That is like assuming Muslims are terrorists, she says. With hostility to Muslims mounting in Germany, some women draw parallels with Nazi racism.
To a German pundit, this news item is a dream come true. Sod Advanced Capitalist Societies! It contains National Socialism + Collective Guilt + Immigrants + Women in Headscarfs + Israeli-Palestinian Conflict = Editorial Gold! Throw in a healthy dose of nuclear energy, a sprinkle of homeopathy with a side of Hartz IV, and I guarantee you that Germans will be thinking for a very very long time. Anyway, I don’t know what these poor women have to do to integrate into German society. They’re already willingly taking part in a 60-hour tutorial about the Nazis (and knowing Germans I suspect this is one session). Maybe they could engage in a 7 hour debate on what it means to be German, and whoever refrains from rolling their eyes and beating other participants over the head repeatedly with an unabridged copy of Being and Time gets a German passport.
* I actually happen to like Habermas
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German Dentistry and the Rant-Free Live
Søren Kirkegaard, Danish philosopher and all-round cravat aficionado, once claimed that a bad conscience can make life more interesting. Which is why I avoid New Year’s Resolutions like I should have avoided that last Jägermeister shot. And yet I have recently been troubled by this - universally shared - tendency to furiously pound on my keyboard only when my sarcasm levels are reaching critical levels and venom is seeping from my fingertips. The final product is dumped on my blog, host to all my eye rolling, teeth grinding and hair pulling. And into the internet’s infinite cesspool it leaks. Yet most bloggers seem committed environmentalists given the amount of recycling that takes place in the blogosphere.
My wise father once urged me to pick up the pen not only when something bothered me, but also when something pleased me. Because it so rarely happens. People are more than happy to jump on the nearest soap box and loudly proclaim their disagreement/air their conspiracy theories/correct your grammar/invoke Goodwin’s law/ plead assistance on behalf of ailing Nigerian benefactors. Particularly, nay, only if they only made it as far as the fourth line of your argument. And this is the crux of the problem as the journalist Geoff Nicholson so lucidly put it: “people think you’re talking sense only when your prejudices coincide with theirs. Dissenters tend to raise the question “Who asked you anyway?” Nobody of course, apart from that little persistent voice in your head. The one that makes you go Eureka in the shower and comments on that woman’s pink UGGh boots at the bus stop. And this voice believes that I should rebalance the equation by writing something nice for a change.
I would therefore like to sing the praises of dentists, German dentists. My previous experiences in the UK had led me to believe that this profession was still filled by barbers, Medieval barbers. So awed was my deutsch dental practitioner the first time she set her eyes on the dental work performed by her colleagues across the Channel, that I feared she might cart me off to the DDR Museum near Unter der Linden. The filling material found in my molars had not been spotted in oral cavities since the fall of the Wall. My mouth was like a Hominina fossil, the missing link between historical orthodontics and modern dentistry. Great Britain might have won the war but Germany won the battle against shoddy fillings, botched roots canal treatments, unnecessary excruciating pain and peagreen coloured waiting rooms!… What’s that conscience? I can’t restore my karma by making another country the target of my bad puns? I was under the impression that throwing some abuse at my former host country would cancel out all my recent gripes about Germany. Like the yin and yang of insults. Ok, back to square one.
Berlin’s Monokulti
If you live in Berlin or were even planning to, you’ll be aware that the city is a veritable melting pot of cultures, a modern day Alexandria. Or so you keep hearing. Kotbusser Tor is a delta into which many a meandering and permanently plastered Erasmus student has converged. It is not the Nile, but they’re certainly in denial. You see, Kreuzberg is multikulti, if your idea of a transcultural encounter consists of purchasing a falafel from a Turkish joint at 4 am before moving on to the next clandestine bar. Here, of course, you will hobnob with other fearless intercultural explorers, with whom you share a passion for fried chickpeas, cheap beer and other less legal substances. And they will most certainly be white. Berliners like to picture themselves as extras in a Benetton advert, whereas in reality the city has the ethnic diversity of an Al Jolson concert. But refrain from saying this aloud, mentioning the city glaring lack of different skin tones will not get you many Frühstück invitations. Contrary to what you might think, pointing out the Emperor’s lack of clothes will not cast you as the innocent lonely voice, perilously floating on a sycophantic sea. Instead you’ll get the look normally reserved for Swabian real estate speculators.
But enough with tortured analogies, let’s return to overstretched definitions, like the semantic content of this Berlin mantra. What is “multikulti” exactly? And why does it differ so significantly from its English equivalent? According to the Oxford Dictionary of Politics, “The term ‘multiculturalism’ emerged in the 1960s in Anglophone countries in relation to the cultural needs of non-European migrants. It now means the political accommodation by the state and/or a dominant group of all minority cultures defined first and foremost by reference to race or ethnicity; and more controversially, by reference to nationality, aboriginality, or religion, the latter being groups that tend to make larger claims and so tend to resist having their claims reduced to those of immigrants”.
Call me a pedant if you like, but labelling Berlin “multikulti” just because it contains an unusually high number of Swedish graphic designers and Chilean DJs strikes me as a tad inaccurate. And please correct me if I’m wrong, but I seldom meet someone of Turkish descent not manning a deep fryer. I have no intention of discussing the merits ,or lack thereof, of cultural pluralism, neither is this a contribution to the assimilation debate. And yes, Berlin does contain a visible smattering of individuals that hail from other continents with higher concentrations of melanin in their skin, but these are not usually the main actors in Berlin’s much trumpeted multiculturalism play, full of sound and fury but little else. Amongst the ensemble we encounter Scandinavian art students, interning Iberian architects, Icelandic illustrators, French Erasmus students, Midwestern fashion designers, Estonian bloggers, English TEFL teachers, Australian backpackers, and Polish programers, all of whom enthusiastically take part in this self-proclaimed cultural cornucopia. A pluralism that boils down to bar hopping around Kreuzkölln, drinking cheap beer on public transport and in parks, demonstrably slouching in squatter chic cafés or scouting flea markets for the holy grail of vintage. All while waxing lyrical to new, wide-eyed Ryanair arrivals, about the truly diverse scene, home to a plethora of different lifestyles. Some might start viewing this constant reminder of Berlin’s status as a hotbed of cultural interactions and encounters (it is full of Erasmus students after all) with suspicion, as a symptom of a barely disguised inferiority complex.
But let’s view it in a positive light. With the worrying rise of the extreme right in Europe and many pronouncing multiculturalism as a failed social experiment, it is reassuring to know that MacBooks and street art can unite so many people. So let’s hail Berlin’s monokulti, because frankly there’s no escaping it. Originating in Mitte and moving to Prenzlauer Berg, it is an unstoppable mono culture that keeps expanding, always in search of a non-gentrified host in which it can propagate, colonising Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain and spreading to Wedding and Moabit. Like a huge petri dish in which identical scarf wearing non-comformists are cultivated. I should know, I myself am part of this micro-cosmos.
Berlin Related Books
In my blog I often poke fun at my current host city, which I would also do if I were still back in London, but, to Berliner’s misfortune, I started my public whining career in the Prussian capital. If you’ve occasionally laughed or curled your toes with embarrassing self-awareness at my gripes and complaints, I recommend you the book “Ich werde ein Berliner” by Wash Echte, the anonymous author behind the eponymous blog. With his characteristic sharp wit, Wash Echte cuts straight through Berlin’s hype and lays bare its new bohemia and their rites of passages. Often reading like an acerbic anthropology manual, nothing escapes the author’s unimpressed gaze: from club veterans, complicated relationships, counter-culture, creativity, to the omnipresent techno. Isn’t it just another book satirising hipsters? Well not really. First of all, the word “hipster” is avoided as a label. This is because hipsters are just the latest incarnation of the flâneur, the urban figure Walter Benjamin was already raving about at the turn of the last century. Benjamin grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Berlin and had a lifelong phobia of meaningful employment (he only considered joining the workforce as a secondhand book dealer funded by a loan from his father. His idea, not his father’s). Instead he spent much time in cafés refining his sauntering and lounging techniques after developing an admiration for substance-abusing tortured Parisian poets, all whilst griping about the shallowness and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie. Sounds familiar? Then go to your nearest bookshop and pick up a copy of “Ich werde ein Berliner”.
A Year Onwards
I am the passenger and I ride and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, the bright and hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight
So today I woke up nursing a hangover - not that this is unusual for a Sunday - and realised that on this date, a year ago, I arrived in Berlin. That’s all I’m able to muster really, because Berliner Kindl (filed under “acquired taste”, “beggars can’t be choosers” and the sadly overused “Why?”) really affects your ability to string coherent sentences together the following day. Some things are never a good idea. Like invading Russia in winter, declaring your ship unsinkable and letting Leonardo Dicaprio play an Irishman. Or mixing cheap beer with raspberry syrup to hide the flavour.
Anyway, so in honour of this anniversary I’m playing a Berlin soundtrack of sorts, something with depth and melody, a classic. In other words, no techno. Long before The Age of the Turntable, Berlin inspired many artists, like Iggy Pop, a passenger who rides through West Berlin in the 70s and finds himself full of lust for life.
Thanks for being such a wonderful host Berlin!
