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.
