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.
Zeitgeist for beginners: A brief introduction to East Berlin
“How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.” G.K. Chesterton
Yesterday I moved to the East, after spending two months in the West, in elegant Schöneberg. Sandwiched between prim Charlottenburg and perennially radical Kreuzberg, this charming Berlin neighbourhood nowadays feels like an ageing courtesan reminiscing about her glory days during the Weimar Republic, when she was the cultural heart of Europe, the cradle of political radicalism, the centre of unbridled 20s hedonism, the home of the divinely decadent Sally Bowles. It has clung on, and rightly so, to the title of Europe’s oldest gay quarter, but is otherwise like an old aunt with patrician features and a glint in her eye. The radicalism has gone.
El Dorado - Europe’s most decadent club during the flapper era. Now an organic supermarket.
If Christopher Isherwood were to return to Berlin, he would go East, provided of course that he had a fondness for minimal techno, flea markets and psychotic cyclists. Oh and the alternative scene, of course. Everybody in East Berlin is into the alternative scene.
Even good old Kaiser’s has received the alternative treatment.
Bananas are no strangers to urban alienation. Who knew graffiti was the perfect medium to express the angst of tropical fruit?
So, what if Isherwood were to return to the Prussian capital and head to the West again, a place so obviously lacking in brutalist Communist architecture and kitsch GDR furniture? The fool! How will he be able to express urban alienation? Where would he hold his guerilla literary salon? How would he be able to express his individuality without the presence of state planned and mass produced orange wallpaper with floral patterns? I can sense you fear, watching the zeitgeist escape down an alley to an abandoned warehouse where Ricardo Villalobos is holding a clandestine gig.
Me pondering about the unbearable lightness of being, or how to get to my 5th floor saniert Altbau flat without a lift, after an 8 hour brunch and much Käse consumption at the local cafe.
Fear not, with this foolproof guide, you too can become an East Berliner!
1) Get knocked up: If you’re in Prenzlauer Berg, being pregnant will make you indistinguishable from a local. But only if you’re over 30. If you’re under 30 and over 15, you should consider Friedrichshain, which is edgier (read poorer) and also contains less information architects. If you’re a man, and are therefore hindered by nature, a pushchair that costs more than a Toyota Prius is an acceptable alternative. For that extra touch, bring all your sprogs into your local organic Osteria during Sunday brunch and set them loose, like a bunch of amphetamine-crazed marmosets who have just set their eyes on Del Monte’s banana warehouse.
Kollwitzstrasse: breeding ground for freelance graphic designers and gallery owners
2) Never drink at place with a name: Drinking a place with a Google map pin on it is not ALTERNATIVE. This whole business of naming things has been done for millennia. It so conventional. What is it with this penchant for labeling things? It stifles and limits the fluid and slippery postmodern identity. It fails to accurately reflect the transient ephemeral nature of human existence. Nomenclature is out, is too bourgeois. Plus it saves money on an actual sign.
There are of course two exceptions to this rule that will not result in social suicide:
-Bars/shops with stupid quirky names: You can name venues as long as it undermines one of its primary functions, i.e. to remember what the place is called, which let’s admit it, is too conventional and convenient. Convenience is an evil capitalist plot. So is logic. Your name should be as quirky and surreal as possible, and sound like something Lou Reed might have written after a four day binge in the Lower East side. Like ‘Ick koof mir Dave Lombardo wenn ick reich bin (‘When I’m rich I’ll buy Dave Lombardo’). It might have been an epiphany discerned through the marihuana haze. but now makes less sense than Mandarin video recorder instructions. Dave Lombardo is, in case you’re wondering, the drummer of trash metal band Slayer. Still no bells ringing? Good.
If you’re not an art student, and has therefore not had André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto inflicted upon you, or just can’t afford the drugs, you can always pick lyrics from hip alternative 90s underground bands like Sonic Youth (signed to Universal Records, and not Sony, like that other beacon of anti-establishment, Rage Against the Machine)
“I’m just popping down to ‘I stole my sister’s boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat, and flash. Within a week we killed my parents and hit the road’” (Luckily they know more about vintage clothing than nomenclature -excellent selection and very lovely people)
-’ Meta digits’ are okey: Bar 103 is, you guessed it, a bar on number 103. Street numbers are immune to the capricious and transient nature of urban topography. Number 103 is and will always be number 103, whether is a horse hospital or a bar, or preferably a horse hospital turned into a bar. Which brings me to the next rule:
3) Never drink in a a venue that was built for that purpose: Ideally it should have originally been a brothel (a horse brothel?), because nothing is as edgy as downing capirinhas in a former syphilis hotbed. Otherwise, anything else will do - a hedgehog hospital, a anarchist sanctuary, a nuclear shelter, a pickle factory. You name it -The more unusual the better. Unless it is one of those dives that has remained unchanged since the Wall came down, because as I have mentioned before, nothing screams individuality more than state planned and mass produced orange wallpaper with floral patterns.
The public baths in Prenzlauer Berg, now a funky edgy establishment for the urban disenfranchised youth. And corporate events.
The KulturBrauerei, because nothing says culture like beer
This is obviously a very brief sketch, although rest assured that I will fill in the contours as I become more familiar with my new neighbourhood. For a comprehensive and hilariously incisive take on the Teutonic equivalent of that most pretentious of London creatures, the Hoxtonite, I can’t recommend enough Ich werde ein Berliner. In fact, this post is my little homage to this brilliant blog.
Tom bowled over by the urban alternative experience. Or was it one too many Fruhstück at the Ost Fee?
Our local, The Fairy of the East. Many people in East Berlin are away with the fairies. Sometimes without chemical aid. Lovely staff, four different sorts of Chai and 5 min from my house. What more can a girl ask for?
