Berlin was excellent. I continue to adore it, though I have no idea what it makes of me.
I was there to catch up with wonderful Halie [1] rather than to do tourist things. We enjoyed many excellent conversations [2], catching up on love and life and academia. It had been a while: we last socialised at Offbeat’s 2022 Xmas Special.
So I didn’t see the centre of Berlin on this visit. Though Halie disputed what “centre of town” really entails in a city that was divided for many decades (“do you mean Mitte?”).
Most of my time was spent hanging in her south Berlin village-turned-suburb of Neukölln. The population includes students, anarchists, and Turkish and Arab Germans priced out of hipster Kreuzberg.
You get a feel for what it was like before it was swallowed up by the city, with an old, old blacksmith still in operation, and a medieval street plan, leafy squares and pre-20th century housing. If you walk north towards the grid, there are anarchist cafes and mindful communist yoga centres aplenty.
This was part of the American sector after WW2, and I tried to imagine GIs swaggering around with their gum, cola and nylons.
I couldn’t do it. Easier to visualise was an early 20th century of anarchist plotting, in cafes and meetings in apartment blocks that now host BDSM parties and whip-torture classes.
The main Karl Marx Strasse drag is home to Arab and Turkish businesses aplenty, including a Yemeni restaurant with wonderful food and photos of the various architectural wonders that have since been destroyed with the financial, military and political support of the British government.
Food, more than sights, dominated this trip. I had many delicious things: a traditional Berlin street döner, the owner’s children playing an excellent game of “who can kick their sandals highest into the air” while we ate; Japanese karaage and cold chicken salad at a neighbourhood izakaya where the owners greeted each customer like an old friend; savoury pea tarts at a hipster bakery with bare walls and concrete; and, to keep things retro, a Weiner Schnitzel the size of my head at an old-school Vienna restaurant next to a traditional market.
Berlin is so big, and so many people cycle, that it is a city that doesn’t feel choked with cars. I ate, drank, and had coffee outside, on tree lined streets, and didn’t once have to ask someone to stop idling their engine so I could enjoy my sausages in peace.
How does this work? Well, car hire is very popular here if you do need one to get to IKEA or whatever. There are “Miles” cars and vans everywhere, this brand name regularly and subtly altered to read “Milfs”.
Being old-ish, we didn’t go out much in the evening, though Halie did jokingly suggest we go to Berghain, Berlin’s infamous techno and piss-sex emporium.
Our one evening out was to a nearby improv theatre – the opposite of Berghain – as it was in our neighbourhood.
The Berlin Comedy Cafe is a 70 capacity, air conditioned venue, and they do performances in English and German. English dominates, as it often does in international improv hotspots.
The performance we saw [3] – in the Deconstruction format – was dominated by Americans, with a couple of English people, a hangdog Irishman, and a token German.
The German was my favourite player, with expressive eyebrows and a sense for the ludicrous in every scene. I was gently encouraged to talk to some of the troupe afterwards, and the two we spoke to (Lisa and Lauren) were very friendly, and encouraged Halie to get involved (it’s not a pyramid scheme).
On my penultimate day, we headed to a swimming lake on the edge of the city, to escape the summer heatwave. Through a combination of tactics and incompetence we didn’t arrive til mid afternoon, which was perfect: it wasn’t very busy, but it was still very much hot enough to swim.
These lakes are popular, but felt a very different crowd to the multicultural, multiracial city we’d left behind. Walking out of the station, Halie commented I could have been back in England, and she was right: this was a car culture suburb, with lots of angry white middle aged men in Audis bigger than anyone will ever need. [4]
Ah well. Away from the main drag and the main lake, the swimming was heavenly, the water perfect. We shared the lake with day tripping families in pedalos and holidaying older couples basking in the late afternoon sun. Even Germans are more prudish than they once were; we had none of the naked grandparents that would have been ten a penny round these parts a mere twenty years ago (for better or for worse).
The contrast with England, where pretty much nowhere is safe to swim any more, was obvious.
I will be returning to Berlin next month, as a tribute to my dad. But I don’t want to sugarcoat it, or Germany or Europe in general. There’s a melancholy and a undercurrent of resentment and grievance politics that will continue to explode at the ballot box and on the streets.
Things used to get better; the main promise here is that things will get worse more slowly, compared to the full neoliberal basketcases of Britain and the United States.
It was nice to leave the American sector for a few nights, nonetheless.
Editor’s note: I started writing this on a train from Gatwick Airport, having flown back from Berlin. The return journey took two hours instead of twenty four, and was approximately twenty seven times more stressful than the rail and sail.
This was nicely topped off by my being shouted at by heavily armed police as I legged it for my train from the monorail. They insisted I stop running and join the queue of terrified people walking past the sniffer dog, which I did, hands up “don’t shoot” style.
The dog seemed nice tho, he was just doing his job.
[1] Not her real name. We met on a Graham Coxon messageboard 24 years ago and I’m almost convinced she’s not a spy.
[2] Some of which were about her amazing-sounding friend who has been in Germany doing anarchist and then academic things since the 1980s, and planned (with her collective) to seize and occupy a famous church by the border for revolutionary purposes, only to be gazumped by… the Berlin Wall coming down.
[3] The group were called Health Plan.
[4] These will be the “respectable” middle classes voting for those modern-day Nazis, AfD. A pretty obvious and clear bit of racist snubbing of my friend by a vendor at Markthalle Neun back in town was a grim reminder that Berlin isn’t exactly perfect either.
jamesofwalsh 