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?
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.
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!
Containing Gentrification Banksy Style
So, apparently this anti-gentrification movement called Hedonism International is sending its members to view flats in Berlin’s most sought-after areas posing as would-be tenants. Once there, they strip off and prance around with only a Mickey Mouse mask to cover their identities, and with slogans such as “too expensive” or “rip off” painted on their birthday suits. Their stunt is often uploaded on Youtube the following morning.
Gentrification is a bit of a touchy issue in Berlin, to put it mildly, so I’m carefully going to side-step round it. But let me stress that I fully sympathise, nobody likes high property prices. I should know, I lived a decade in London. I’m however a tad semiotically confused…I mean what does Mickey Mouse has to do with high rents? Is there something else we don’t know about him (apart from a tendency to walk around in only pants?) Has he - unbeknownst to us - been dabbling in hedge fund management too? And more importantly, where are Donald Duck’s pants? Oooooh, it’s something to do with Capitalism, right? I always associate pant- wearing mice with unrealistic property prices. We should all thank Hedonism International for bringing so much nuance and insight to the gentrification debate. Such helpful tips! They have clearly taken a page out of Banksy’s book of guerilla protest. In case you didn’t know, Banksy smuggled a life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner into Disney World. Hardcore! Not being a curator of hardcore myself and lacking Banksy’s tenous grasp of semiotics, I completely failed to see the link between Mickey Mouse and waterboarding. First torture, and now real estate speculation? Holy cheese what an evil rodent!
You know you’re in Prenzlauer Berg/Mitte…
When a loud bespectacled American enters the joint where you’re having lunch and asks very loudly whether they still have Pitfall, orders a Bionade (they don’t sell Club-Mate) and loudly proceeds to play it while you’re trying to eat your puerco especial. Retro games, you say? Wow! Edgy! Wasn’t wearing an Atari vintage t-shirt. Loser.
The Berlin Integration Test!
So next month I’m doing this so-called “Orientierungskurs” as part of my language course. For those not plugged into the matrix that is the Volkshochschule (like any other institution, the Volkshochschule heavily favours green for all decorative purposes), an Orientierungskurs provides students with a grounding in German history and politics. The participants do not only become “oriented” but also integrated into German society. And apparently Danes are heavily encouraged to integrate (well our potatoes are different, and we have been known to open beer bottles with things that aren’t lighters. Like newspapers, or other bottles of beer). Actually I don’t know if the German government is particularly concerned about the accretion of Danish ghettos, as long as it doesn’t involve longships of course. I do, however, get half of my course fee reimbursed at the completion of the Orientierungskurs, so I assume that’s the gist of it.
Apparently there is now a greater sense of urgency to the Nationalist debate after a certain Thilo Sarrazin not only added fuel to the fire but, as far as I’m concerned, took a huge dump on it. Many people outside Germany are (blissfully) unaware of this gentleman, busy as they’re with their own homegrown racists, (and they don’t trust foreign ones anyway). Sarrazin is the author behind a book called “Why Germany is going to the dogs and it’s all the BROWN foreigners’ fault because they’re genetically more stupid and they’re dumbing down our once great nation”. Or something along these lines. It has been hard to avoid this self-proclaimed martyr to freedom of speech, given that he has been peddling his putrid pseudo-Darwinian “theories” with a healthy dose of rancid xenophobia on every single platform that would have him. And most of them would because, as far I’m concerned, there seems to some confusion between the right to be heard and the right to be listened to. Mr Sarrazin has the right to regurgitate his racist bile. I have the right to ignore him on the grounds that his arguments are more bereft of logic than a Tea Party convention. His arid field of prejudices is thirsty for logic! ( And yes, I know that I’m giving the guy press by refusing to give him press, but I’m just another tiny little star in the great constellation of internet whiners).
Yet I’m not a target of Sarrazin’s dubious proclamations on non-lederhosen wearing people (and word is that there are quite a few of those amongst “natives” too), despite doing an Orienterungskurs, because I’m white and middle class. HAH! In yer FACE, pseudo Darwinian arguments barely disguised as raging xenophobia! I would still like to integrate into my host country, even if my recent levels of beer consumption might be contributing to this alleged national dumbing down. I have therefore devised my own integration test! It’s still a work in progress but without further ado, here are some potential questions for my “Berlin test”:
You know you’re seamlessly blending into the capital without dramatically affecting general levels of stupidity when:
1) You view people who open beer bottles with an actual beer bottle opener with suspicion. That’s what cheap plastic lighters are for!
2) You have to ask other people for “Feuer” because you ruined your last cheap plastic lighter trying to open a beer bottle
3) You hand roll all your cigarettes and view filter cigarettes as an evil capitalist plot to deprive you of all the money you could spend on a significantly higher number of hand rolled cigarettes to which you’re by no means addicted, because everybody knows that only filter cigarettes are addictive because they’re capitalist.
4) You view hand-rolled cigarettes as an essential part of a healthy (but laid-back!) lifestyle.
5) You enthusiastically rave about Berlin’s “Multi-Kulti” which to you translates as “eating as many falafels/kebabs as possible when out in Kreuzberg”.
6) You always claim to have recently discovered Berlin’s best falafel/kebab that’s “like €2 because you would never pay €3 for one - that’s what inebriated backpackers do” - said backpackers clearly, unlike you, not self-appointed falafel guru and kebab connoisseurs.
7) You prematurely bemoan the sad demise of this cherished street grub establishment, knowing in your heart that it will soon become overflown with the great unwashed masses as word of mouth spreads that the best multicultural deep frier is to be found here, a rumour to which you by no means contributed. You know you’ll eventually have to pay €3 for those crispy chickpeas as the establishment’s popularity dramatically increases (something about supply and demand and the owners not necessarily wanting to be multicultural snack providers for life!!!!)
8) You think that 5am is a perfectly reasonable hour to go clubbing. You thus avoid rush hour at Berghain.
9) You can’t understand what those pedestrians are doing on the pavement - they’re getting in the way of your bike. Can’t they walk on the road or something?
10) You are so over Mauerpark fleamarket, which is not only a tourist trap but occasionally also seems suspiciously profitable. You still go the park though, because you want to catch the Sunday Karaoke, as you can’t beat its feel good factor, and also because you secretly want to sing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (Ok, the last one might be just me, and it’s actually Blondie’s “Call Me”)
Birthday in Berlin
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?
Teufelsberg: A Metaphor for Something
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.
