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?
