LIVING:WHEN THE DIARY of my first month in Berlin was printed here a few months ago, a sub-editor with a great deal more insight than I possess titled it "Falling for Berlin". At that point, I was still in denial. "Jeez," I thought, "it's not like I'm in love. I'm just here to have a good time. No strings, no commitment, no German grammar," writes LOUISE EAST
Six months on, I’m in the throes of a full-blown crush and like all newly besotted people, I’m kind of insufferable. On a bad day, I’ll argue that Berlin is woven from a blend of cashmere and unicorn milk known to solve nine out of 10 Middle Eastern crises and eliminate e-mail spam.
Most of the time, though, I’m more realistic about Berlin’s flaws. For several months of the year, clouds squat low over the city (with a wonderful absence of irony, Leo, a popular online German dictionary, cites 100 different uses for the word grey), and snow plays this mean-spirited trick of thawing and re-freezing to form a nubbly expanse of ice, useless for walking and skating, brilliant for broken elbows.
In personal terms, setting up home in a strange city can be a lonely business, ring-fenced with DVD box sets, language blackouts and a nauseating over-familiarity with Gmail’s homepage. Despite all this, my interest in Berlin blossomed into a fully grown love affair and perhaps that’s mainly because another relationship – the world’s attachment to free-market capitalism – has just turned badly sour.
The aftermath of any dysfunctional relationship is rarely illuminating, and right now, the world is in full finger-pointing, blame-assigning, self-righteous-fury mode: “If you hadn’t had that affair with the bankers! If you hadn’t pawned the house!”
What’s sort of depressing though is that actually, we seem pretty desperate to get back together. Once we’ve exhausted the possibilities of the blame game, odds are we’ll stick our fingers in our ears, sing “la-la-la, I can’t hear you” and resume our unhealthy affair with free-market economics.
There are exceptions, of course, the rare voices suggesting that maybe, just maybe, we should be in a different relationship altogether. Step forward Angela Merkel, the Relate counsellor of Europe, with her steely reminder to the G20 summit: “This is a historic opportunity afforded us to give capitalism a conscience, because capitalism has lost its conscience and we have to seize this opportunity.”
Angela Merkel is, of course, a Berlin resident, and I like to think her views are informed by the way her city has reacted to its own recession. Berlin has been bankrupt for years, with unemployment of up to 20 per cent in places, and yet the overall mood here is not one of gloom and despair, but of compromise, creativity and a pragmatic scaling back of consumer spending.
It’s Berlin’s ability to be happy without money that I admire, and yet I still wonder, almost daily, just how she manages it. Here then, is the diary of a love affair not just with a city, but with a way of life.
December 15th, 2008
For weeks now, my shower has been dying and I’ve been pretending not to notice, for fear I might have to call in a professional. Plumbers, it seems to me, are God’s way of telling you you’re making too little money.
Then there’s the language issue. When it comes to a fruitful discussion of S-bends and thermostats, my German vocab is about as useful as a small child’s trumpet. Last Friday though, I finally admitted defeat, and e-mailed the owner of my sublet, who is in Spain learning how to make shoes. She was gratifyingly horrified and promised to call back within the hour.
Ten minutes later, a plumber phoned and told me he was terribly sorry, but it would not be possible for him to attend to my situation until perhaps 3pm. At that point, it was noon.
At 2.50pm, he arrived and got to work. Five minutes later, he emerged from the bathroom, looking as if he’d just uncovered the corpse of his childhood hamster stuffed behind the boiler.
“I am terribly sorry,” he said again. “It will not be possible to replace the heater until 8am on Monday.”
Admittedly, that was on Friday afternoon, so I’ve had to put up with a further two days of lukewarm water, but still, I am beyond impressed, particularly as he did, in fact, turn up at 8am this morning with a new shower unit, an astonishingly handsome apprentice and a bouquet of fresh apologies.
A few months ago, I would have presumed such efficiency was inevitable, this being Germany and all, but I’ve come to realise that Berlin is an entity unto itself and in fact, revels in a kind of lawlessness.
Cyclists weave on and off footpaths, waiters move slower than tectonic plates, dogs are rarely on leashes, and cars are parked so carelessly the city looks like an abandoned game of dodgems.
When it comes to plumbing, though, chaos is not an option.
“Of course, plumbers come when they say they will,” a German friend declares. “Why on Earth would they lie to you?”
Why indeed.
January 20th
I have grown mildly obsessed with Toytown, a website where English-speaking German residents swap information on where to buy maple syrup or how to rent a tuxedo. The helpfulness of this site is almost creepy. When I was having a problem installing my Wi-Fi, I posted a question and within minutes received 12 detailed responses, including one from a guy who worked at the company who made the modem, apologising for the shoddy instructions.
Today, I noticed a post advertising an informal language exchange in a bar nearby. It’s organised by Blue Cow, a user so peppily proactive and sociable I decide she is almost certainly Australian, 26 and blonde. At 8pm, I am sitting in Bohnengold furtively scanning the other punters when a man introduces himself as Blue Cow – 40s, Sarf London, teeth to rival Shane McGowan’s. Round one to prejudice.
Slowly, people trickle in, Germans who want to practise their English, foreigners attempting to speak German. I button-hole a man called Jörn, who teaches restaurant skills to juvenile delinquents.
“It is good work, but also,” he pauses. “Ärgerlich.” Tiring, I suggest. He shakes his head. Rewarding? Demanding?
Jorn just keeps repeating ärgerlich, ärgerlich, ärgerlich, with increasing desperation until somebody interrupts and says, “Irritating?”
Yes, he agrees. Very.
My next discussion partner is a sweet-faced Gwyneth Paltrow-lookalike called Marion who grew up in East Berlin and now works as a dress-maker.
Since arriving in Berlin, I’ve been reading incessantly about life behind the Wall: Stasiland, Len Deighton novels, Timothy Garton Ash’s We The People, but I caution myself against bombarding her with questions and instead stick to polite inquiries about her children.
She is curious about what I think of Berlin and eventually smiles apologetically and says, “I’m sure you’re not interested in East Germans.”
“I am,” I squawk. “Why would you say that?”
“The West Berliners called us ‘grey mice’,” she says with a shrug. “They are not so interested in us.”
I ask her what was the best bit about the Wall coming down and she says knowing she could travel. “I was 16, all I wanted was to go to London.”
Growing up, her parents used to caution her and her brother over and over, not to tell anything to anybody, even close family friends. After all, one in seven residents of East Berlin were Stasi informants.
“We were used to it,” Marion says. “You just never let your guard down.”
“But that must have been difficult when everything changed,” I say.
“Oh no,” Marion says. “We knew everything was different.”
“But were you not still instinctively secretive?”
She looks bemused.
“We were told it was okay.”
This is what all the reading in the world will not tell you. When you are 16 years old, ceasing self-censorship is easy; it’s imagining a life without Topshop that’s hard.
January 25th
Sitting in a peppermint-green tea shop (confusingly called Beer-Himmel or Beer Heaven) this afternoon, I observe a man in rectangular specs and charcoal knitwear happily forking up fluffy sponge the pink of Hubba-Bubba gum, and a pair of svelte, well-dressed women each going to work on a slice of vanilla chocolate cheesecake.
I haven’t seen such frank enjoyment of cake for years. Irish men rarely order it at all, and if they do, it’ll be one of the Muji-coloured, unisex brands (muffins, brownies, carrot cake), whereas women inevitably share a single portion and turn the eating of it into a weird fetishistic exercise, rolling their eyes, licking their lips and generally attempting to look like Nigella Lawson.
No such nonsense in Berlin. Those who want cake, order cake. Then they go for a long walk to ensure their thighs don’t turn to Arctic Roll.
February 11th
Tim is not the kind of hairdresser I’d have chosen for myself, but a friend and I had an argument, and the appointment with Tim is a peace offering.
“You’ll love him,” my friend says. “The guy’s a genius.”
Tim’s Kreuzberg salon is certainly unusual. Small scraps of paper pepper the windows, and inside, further fragments spangle the walls, the mirror, even the rim of the sink. Each slip is scribbled on, covered in glitter or carefully scissored along its edges. I imagine you’d achieve the same result if you fed a Montessori class several kilos of blue MMs and neglected to take away the craft supplies.
This studio is Tim’s art work and his real pride and joy. Much of his hairdresser’s small talk consists of anecdotes about eminent figures in the international art world who had missed out on the opportunity to enjoy it.
“I met Matthew Barney and in-wited him to come here to discuss the death of techno music, Tim tells me, lifting chunks of my hair, staring at them dispiritedly and letting them drop. “He said he would come, but he did not come.”
To illustrate Berlin’s death rattle, Tim disappears into a back room and puts on a track.
“Wow, that’s bad all right,” I say.
“No, no,” Tim says crossly. “That was the last good techno in Berlin. Now it is dead.”
And with that, he scoops up a handful of my hair and cuts six inches off it.
“Jeez, Tim,” I say. “That’s kind of short.”
“It was very – your last hair-cut, was very . . .” He shakes his head squeamishly. “Spießig. I don’t know the word in English.”
After that, we both descend into a dark Beckettian gloom in which leaving is as impossible as staying, and we both look like tramps. I remember, with a sudden, late-flowering guilt, that I once cut my friend’s hair, assuring him I knew what I was doing. As his curls dropped to the floor that day, his face in the mirror had seemed calm, trusting. Now I recognise it for what it was; the same Samson-like terror I see reflected back at me in Tim’s mirror.
Later I ask a German friend what spießig means. We decide bourgeois is the closest translation, and in fairness to Tim, my haircut is most certainly not spießig. On one side, it recalls Farrah Fawcett in her heyday, while the other is in discussion with Joan Jett. Meanwhile, the fringe is making a sturdy effort to re-introduce Jane Fonda’s look from the film Klute.
When my friend arrives at Tim’s to pay for my haircut, one look at my face tells him his gift has not gone according to plan.
“It’s fine,” I say, gamely. “Hair grows pretty fast.”
“Not that fast,” he says thoughtfully. “You’d be surprised.”
February 25th
An unexpected side-effect of my move to Berlin is that I’ve started jogging, an activity I’ve loathed at a distance for years. I put it down to my increased cake intake, and a desire to absorb as much of the rapidly fading daylight as possible.
My local park is called Volkspark Hasenheide, and during daylight hours, it hosts roughly equal numbers of drug dealers and toddlers, the former dressed in black puffa jackets and beanies, the latter toting small plastic toboggans and also, confusingly, wearing beanies.
Everyone seems to co-exist fairly peaceably, which demonstrates an admirably laissez-faire attitude on the part of the toddlers’ parents. In truth, there’s something almost appealing about the drug dealers, who gather in indolent groups of two or three, looking as mournful and hopeless as unwanted dogs.
This afternoon, as I complete my first circuit of the park, I notice a sudden and unusual burst of activity. All the drug dealers break from the bushes at once, gambolling down the grassy slope to the exit like startled deer. Looking up, I see a green-and-white police-car slowly snaking along the path.
It’s hard to decide who the open-mouthed toddlers in snow suits admire more, the police-car or the dealers, but either way, it’s turning out to be a good day to be two years old in Berlin.
March 14th
The produce in each of the five or six Turkish supermarkets on my street looks identical at first glance, but closer examination throws up differences. One sells particularly huge bunches of fresh coriander, another stocks the crunchy little cucumbers I eat like peanuts. One I go to simply because the butcher looks like the off-duty Santa in Raymond Briggs's Father Christmas, and there are few things more startling than watching Santa carve halal stewing beef.
The one I decide on today, a Saturday, is the largest of them all, a kind of Turkish cash-and-carry, full of women in headscarves pushing their own body-weight in chickpeas, while children slip bumper packs of Kinder Bueno into the trolley and the men browse the roast pumpkin seed department. It’s fairly chaotic, with a strange, unexplained system of queues and tills and precedents; vegetables must be weighed and labelled by the man at the door; meat paid for separately.
While I’m queuing up for the vegetable man, the hubbub suddenly gets noticeably louder. The vegetable queue wordlessly consults then swarms for the door to stare down the street. A large group of protesters are ambling out of Hermannplatz and marching towards us. Berliners march about pretty much anything: pro-Israel, anti-Israel, against GM foods, in support of immigrants, and most animatedly, about any small infringement of their civic rights. Today’s march is in defence of squatters’ rights in Berlin, so the ratio of body piercings per square inch is high.
Everyone is wearing black. Everyone. The grass-roots organisation to get it worked out must have been phenomenal. There are dogs, dread-locks, and more army fatigues than at Shannon Airport. A girl with hair the colour of Cillit Bang packaging shouts out a protest chant, but as the crowd is not over-burdened with life’s joiners, the response is a little ragged. The Turkish supermarket finds the whole spectacle unspeakably hilarious. A particularly vivid Mohican passes and the woman beside me collapses in giggles. The big, round-bellied man who shouts out the day’s bargains, picks up the protest chant, accompanying it with a little hoppety-skippety dance and the whole shop erupts in laughter.
Soon, it is the marchers who are staring in at us, this strange carnivalesque fruit shop full of dancing fat men, women sniggering into bunches of carrots and children making for the door with packs of Kinder Bueno. Anarchy comes in many forms.
March 24th
A recent article in Der Spiegel online confirmed what I guessed already; the recession is not hitting Berlin in the same way it is affecting the rest of the world. With jobs not there to be lost, and consumerism already scaled back, Berlin appears to be practically immune to the black panic gripping the rest of the world.
Or, as one gallery owner quoted in the Der Spiegelpiece puts it: "Berlin is now the only place in the world you can go where everyone isn't depressed. In this evolutionary cycle, they're perfectly adapted for survival."
Clearly, much credit must go to the quality of Berlin’s social services (high) and its price of living (low) but increasingly, I wonder whether some tiny, seemingly trivial differences may, in fact, be the opposable thumbs of city evolution.
Here then, is my Darwin Memorial Edition of Notes on Surviving a Recession.
Meanness. In Berlin, it’s standard practice for everyone to pay for themselves (“One beer, one small salad”) rather than splitting the bill (“€88 for your mojito and beef fillet”) . The waiters are like human cash registers. Initially, I bridled against what seemed like pettiness, but increasingly, I think it’s why Berlin cafes and bars are full every night of the week. If you can regulate how much you’re spending, you’re more likely to still go out – even when skint.
Dogs and bikes. Everybody has one or the other and sometimes both. A bike is free transport. A dog is free exercise. Cats, of course, are capitalist overlords, commonly described as “fat”.
Shopping. In Berlin, ping-pong is a hobby. Skate-boarding is a hobby. Swing dancing is a hobby. Shopping is not a hobby.
Candles. The Berlin facelift. Cafes here appear to be full of deeply charismatic and beautiful people when in fact the cafes have just ditched the overhead lighting.
Rent, don’t buy. Then someone else pays for the plumber.
Have a really grim winter. That way summer seems like true wealth.
Use socialism for capitalist ends. Divide your city for 27 years, recover slowly for 20 more, then flog the “genuine” DDR experience to curious tourists indefinitely.
Eat more cake.