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?
The miscellaneous invasion
“The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.”
John Galsworthy
After reluctantly eschewing materialism for 3 months like a grumpy Buddhist monk, I was finally reunited today with all of my earthly possessions, and Bagpuss, of course. How can I forget my favourite unnecessarily twee hot water bottle? That’s encouraging, because during this time I had completely obliterated all memories of my current life inventory, and had instead been left with the unsatisfactorily vague ‘some stuff’. It turned out to be quite a lot of stuff. Too much stuff in fact. After months of pining for my salad bowl and my Hungarian geese feather pillows, nostalgia had clouded my memories and I had become blissfully ignorant of all the accompanying clutter that humans seem to accumulate and that had now followed me to Germany.
A mountain of paper, literally.
It’s not just the take away menus that were packed down in the confused flurry that was relocation, although I wonder if they will still deliver having yet to come across a decent curry house here. It’s all those homeless hairpins, forlorn cables, lonely birthday candles, novelty freeze magnets and half empty paracetamol packets that seem to cover your bedside table, lurk in your kitchen drawers and populate your desk, plotting world domination while you sleep. Before you know it, all your flat surfaces will be invaded by this tiny miscellaneous army, composed of seemingly innocuous trinkets hell-bent on colonizing the back of your sofa. You’ll spend the rest of your life moving stuff from one surface to another, unable to eradicate it. This is because clutter is not immune to the first law of thermodynamics - random crap can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.
On the bright side, I now have my Wii and most importantly, my Wii Fit, which I will now assiduously use once again, after having become the Kaiserin Käse.
Of Mice and Moles
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - G. K. Chesterton
I was going to write about my rekindled relationship with potatoes, after almost developing a phobia towards them after a childhood in Denmark. A girl can only take so many spuds. Especially if come January, they’re old enough to vote. But I just wasn’t feeling the potato, and besides I was missing Bagpuss. Not the actual Bagpuss, of course, but my hot water bottle incarnated as the old cat for the extra cuddle factor. Bagpuss has faithfully being keeping my toes at the optimal temperature for years, and now he is gone, packed away in a box and stored away in a warehouse in London. So are most of my earthly possessions actually. This is rather upsetting, which frankly puts a crimp on my modern nomad credentials. Bagpuss and I had a history together. Now I’m surrounded by unfamiliar objects - my sofa is an acquaintance, my microwave, despite best efforts, still a stranger, and the washing machine downright antagonistic. My domestic atlas is gone.
All that tat I accumulated over the years, all those material memories I collected and clung onto are not present in my new habitat. There are few more sobering experiences than witnessing five guys putting your life into boxes in less time that it took you to assemble those damn Ikea shelves. They might just be Billy, but they were my Billy shelves. Silly little me - I will hang onto anything that might promise to anchor my insignificant presence on this planet. I’m feeling rather rootless at the moment, like an ivy without a wall. And I always think of that passage in Wind in the Willows, when Mole, swayed by the delights of the river neglects his own little subterranean manor. And then one day, on the way back to Ratty’s abode, he smells his little house:
Poor Mole found it difficult to get any words out between the upheavals of his chest that followed one upon another so quickly and held back speech and choked it as it came. “I know it’s a—shabby, dingy little place,” he sobbed forth at last brokenly: “not like—your cosy quarters—or Toad’s beautiful hall—or Badger’s great house—but it was my own little home—and I was fond of it—and I went away and forgot all about it—and then I smelt it suddenly—on the road, when I called and you wouldn’t listen, Rat—and everything came back to me with a rush—and I _wanted_ it!—O dear, O dear!—and when you _wouldn’t_ turn back, Ratty—and I had to leave it, though I was smelling it all the time—I thought my heart would break.—We might have just gone and had one look at it, Ratty—only one look—it was close by—but you wouldn’t turn back, Ratty, you wouldn’t turn back! O dear, O dear!”
Well, so I’m getting a bit sentimental, but I’m a bit of a territorial mole too, and I’m suddenly missing my unnecessarily twee hot water bottle. I’m aware this is not often covered in Condé Nast Traveler.
In case you were wondering, or haven’t read Wind in the Willows (Philistine), the story has a happy ending. Our two heavily anthropomorphized furry friends return to Mole’s humble abode where Ratty admires a bust of Queen Victoria in the underground front court. Then he sends some poor mark mice, who have come round to sing Christmas carols, to fetch him and Mole some food. Because water rats are apparently above mice in the social hierarchy. What a smug rat.
P.S: Bagpuss and I will be reunited in January.
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.
