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?
An Introduction : Berlin…Is That Outside Zone 6?
My name is Rocío Rødtjer, and until last month, London was my home. Sure, I wasn’t born within the sound of ‘Bow Bells, but neither was Vinnie Jones. And I have never addressed anybody as a ‘guvnor’, but neither has Vinnie Jones outside a Guy Ritchie film.
A London wardrobe staple: the raincoat.
After a decade in the capital though, I too was convinced that a cuppa was a solution to all life’s ills, and was rarely seen leaving my glorified North London shoebox without my trusty 5 quid Boots umbrella, replaced within a month, alas, after disappearing down the great umbrella vortex known as the tube. And when the tube would, inescapably, become a victim to yet another ‘signal failure’, I would exchange sympathetic glances with my fellow passengers (only time when interaction was allowed) and would inwardly curse Transport for London, and not London Transport. This discontent would later be vocalized by an Evening Standard board, that would make up for the complete absence of verbs with nouns. MANY nouns (Black Monday Tube Chaos: Commuters Horrible Ordeal). For a collection of the Standard’s finest apocalyptic verbless visions see:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lmg/sets/69593/
And yet I’m typing these words in Schöneberg. Just west of Mitte, this Berlin neighbourhood, was the setting of Isherwood’s ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ (of ‘Cabaret’ fame), as well as being the place where Kennedy later gave his famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech. And in between these two, Goebbel delivered his infamous ‘Total War’ on Postdammer Strasse, 15 min down the road from our house.
My current hood: Schöneberg
How did I end here, you might ask? Well, about three months ago my better half got offered a position at Nokia’s Social Location Department. Which just happens to be in Berlin. The thought of leaving zone 2 horrified us at first, but then we slowly began to warm to the idea. The ability to be able to swing a cat in your living room without having to move to Kent, or to east Croydon for that matter, where I’ve been told that a cross cat is the least of your problems, greatly appealed to us. All those shiny carpet-free continental square meters waiting for us for the price of an Islington bedsit (in Holloway prison). Also, having grown up in Copenhaguen and northern Spain, I was seduced by the prospect of experiencing seasonal weather once more, instead of spending 9 months of the year in opaque tights and a raincoat.
London was my home though. I had come to love its strange and idiosyncratic ways. I had even developed a penchant for Marmite, despite fighting the inescapable feeling that this is how it must feel to lick on a battery. I spoke the language, even when I arrived ten years ago, when my vocabulary was more limited and my accent would swing between Spanish and Danish, depending on the mood.
I don’t speak German, hence the title of my blog ‘Wie bitte?’. I believe the gist of it is ‘sorry, could you repeat that?’…. Or in my case ‘I have no idea what’s going on, I’m trying to get to Alexanderplatz but I no longer know if I’m east or west, and I can’t even say “I don’t speak German” although my completely ignorance of your most august language should be quite obvious by now. But I’m nice. See? I’m smiling. Where’s Alexanderplatz again?’
Or something to that effect.
Wie bitte?
Becoming _vaguely_ conversational is definitely one of my chief aims during our stay. Although so far my pronunciation of ‘Ich’ has been described as belonging to the Hamburg dialect. And the seemingly innocuous ‘Wie geht’s dir?’ had people in stitches and elicited the comment ‘You sound like a Bavarian!!!’. Which I don’t think is meant as a compliment in Berlin. With my luck, I’m sure I’ll sound like a Berliner in Bavaria.
