Saved by the Book: How I Warmed up to Berlin (Part One)
My first days in Berlin were terrible. The apartment I agreed to rent based only on photographs was too cold: Spartan in its hyper-masculine functionality. It would not warm up. It also became clear that I could not get by on English alone despite Berlin’s reputation as a cosmopolitan hub. I bought cream cheese when I wanted yoghurt, and had to use sign language in the grocery store, bakery, and flower shop. Buying tickets for the subway was not easy either. I walked around in an alienating landscape in which most of the signage was incomprehensible, newspapers made no sense, and I required GoogleTranslate to use the washing machine. It was unsettling to be able to discern the letters, but not the words. I realized that German acquisition, even basic German, was necessary if I wanted to interact with people outside the Anglophone expat cocoon, and if I wanted a more meaningful connection to my new home.
Fortunately, I am good with languages. That talent paired with a six-week language course and being unabashed about speaking terrible German has made a difference. Now I can talk to the butcher, the baker, and the Siemens washer. The other thing that has made a difference is my decision to get to know this city through its bookstores. I resolved to visit a different bookstore each weekend, and from there to launch my explorations of the neighborhood in which the store stood. This would get me out of my (cold) apartment, and into Germany’s capital, get me walking, looking at buildings, and discovering food, shops, and public spaces.
How happy I am with my choice, because Berlin is thick with bookstores. I won’t bore you with statistics, just my anecdotal experience coming from New York via Los Angeles. Brentwood, my old neighborhood in La-La Land, is thick with movie stars, and nail salons. There’s no lack of storefronts offering manicures and pedicures and juice cleanses, but there was not a single bookstore within walking distance (or even easy driving distance) of my apartment on Sunset Boulevard. Contrast that with at least ten bookstores within a ten minute walk of my current apartment in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, and several just steps away. Even Morningside Heights, my Manhattan neighborhood, can boast of only Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth Books), the wonderful, intellectual heavyweight on 113th Street, and its sister store on Broadway and 116th Street, across from Columbia University’s gates.
But it’s not only Berlin’s high per capita of bookshops that I wish to extol, it is also their variety, specificity, and idiosyncrasy. You find the usual suspects of course, like bookshops devoted to children’s books or used books or art books, but I have also found bookshops aimed at naturalists; crime fiction aficionados; cookbook enthusiasts; travel nuts; theater buffs; sci-fi fiends; visual design freaks; and expat Anglos. There are so many others still waiting to be discovered. Let’s take a short walk from the Wasserturm,
the 19th century brick water tower that anchors my part of Prenzlauer Berg, to see what I mean.
Walking north on pretty, cobblestoned Ryke Straße, past the synagogue and its security detail, will take us to the intersection with Wörther Straße. A right on Wörther leads to St. George’s Bookshop, a purveyor of second-hand English books since 2003, and a left finds us in front of Georg Büchner Buchladen and its enticing window display. From Wörther Straße, walk north on Kollwitz Straße and its popular cafes and restaurants and cross Danziger to Senefelder; continue north until you get to the intersection of Senefelder and Raumer Straße and Buch Reigen. Their beautiful children’s books (yes, in German) have been tempting me since I moved into the quarter. Then walk west on Raumer to Helmholtzplatz, a lovely square where, on Sundays, neighborhood folks sell clothes, books, and toys. Then a quick right on Duncker Straße and a left on Letter Straße, following the tree-lined square, until you reach Buchbox! and its outdoor racks with postcards and wooden toys. From there, take Lychener Straße north and turn left on Stargarder Straße to find the Buchhandlung Moby Dick. If instead we had walked east and south from the Wasserturm we would encounter about one block east at the corner of Knaack Straße and Prenzlauer Allee the Mowgwa Antiquariat, a used bookstore with a small English section. Continuing south on Prenzlauer Allee and then going east on Heinrich Roller Straße takes us to the Einar and Bert Theaterbuchhandlung, a sweet corner where, on the right day, you can enjoy your tea and book in a sunny spot overlooking Leise Park.
Admittedly, Prenzlauer Berg, which was formerly in East Berlin, has changed dramatically since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989: the once dilapidated apartment buildings are festooned with refurbished balconies and terracotta ornamentation, and their marble floors, tile work, and stained glass windows gleam. Coffee shops, yoga studios, organic food joints, and chic boutiques welcome both the local gentry and tourists.
Yet the bookstore is flourishing, when it has all but disappeared in comparable neighborhoods in American cities. In Berlin, the bookstore thrives even in less affluent and more demographically diverse neighborhoods. Two such are Kreuzberg and Neukölln, where a range of booksellers coexist with mosques, döner kebab shops, and Middle Eastern food marts.
What is it about this city? How do the book and the spaces in which it can be held, beheld, smelled, heard and, dare I say it, tasted, continue? Is it rent control? Is it state support? Is it Berlin’s vaunted independent artistic sensibility, emblematized by repeated references to body art and body piercings? Is it Berlin’s exceptional character, its special air, and its sexiness, as in Berlin ist arm, aber sexy? Translation: Berlin is poor but sexy.
Whatever it is, I have been seduced. I have fallen for this city’s intellect, its understated style — or is it studied shabbiness? — and the opportunities it presents to engage with the physicality of the book in a variety of spaces — sleekly modernist, cheerfully colorful, musty and cavelike, or hiply furnished in typical Berlin style with wooden pallets and mid-century modern. The sheer somatic pleasure of letting the eye wander, having it alight on a book, picking it up, feeling its heft, the pliability or resistance of its binding, turning its pages, noticing their typecasting, the sprawl of lines or their compact containment in stanzas, getting a waft of age or crisp newness, finding an inscription, a coffee smear, a tear, underlined text, or marginalia in a brisk hand.
I think it’s telling that the German word for bookstore is Buchhandlung, a compound of the words buch and handlung, the word retaining, unlike the English, the tactility of the operation, and the implication and involvement of the hand, and of the entire body in the act of engaging the book.
Editor’s Note: Tomorrow, we feature Subhashini Kaligotla’s interview with St George’s Bookshop bookstore owner Paul Gurner.
