Chapter 4 | Berlin: Renewal
A lesson in how to look back, learn, and move on, onward into the future
The fourth installment in a serialized memoir of my year-long romp around the globe as a reluctant tourist in search of a life less ordinary. Catch up with Chapter 1, and Chapter 2. Check back weekly for the next installment.
I have never cottoned to Germany. Too middle of the road, too orderly, too many rules, too much darned efficiency. That’s what I’d gathered, at least, from my Germany-adjacent trips to Austria, including Vienna and tiny, storybook Merano high in the Dolomites. The latter an excursion into stiff-spined apres ski culture, which had the fatal flaw of being nothing at all like my childhood introduction to apres ski culture via Audrey Hepburn in Charade. Instead of glamorous people sipping a café on a sun-soaked terrace in a chic fur hat and sunglasses, I got Nurse Ratchet in an austere, chilly lodge, whose hotel happy hour was confined to one glass of champagne and a harpist as entertainment.
And the sauna was co-ed and naked (not in a fun way).
So I was arriving in Berlin — Mike’s choice — under duress.
But then, ahead of us on the sidewalk enroute to our “executive hotel” for a month was a man in a bathrobe and shower shoes next to a man in a Mickey Mouse outfit, sans pants. Now we’re talking.
David Bowie loved Berlin. So did Joey Ramone. Maybe this will work out.
It got better. We checked into our high-rise apartment with a code that only activated at 3:00 p.m. sharp, and across the street was the now derelict former Stasi headquarters. We were staying in the heart of former East Berlin. For a spy fiend like me, this was heaven. I’d played a game of Settlers of Caatan one long — very long — night in Chicago with a former East Berliner who had told me the history of this building that loomed outside my window. It was there, across the street, where the government kept the files and scurrilous details of East Berliners, as reported by neighbors and spies — my current board game opponent among them.
“Everyone snitched,” he said matter of factly. “It was the way you survived.”
Everyone snitched. What does that do to your view of humankind when your neighbor can be the source of your undoing, I wondered as I stared at the derelict highrise next door? And what happens to lofty goals of citizenship in a state apparatus whose sole goal is to undermine its citizens’ trust?
And once the veil is lifted and a wall comes down, how does a society — or anyone — recover and move on to a new future?
That was the question I could chase in Berlin.
Today the windows of the sprawling highrise are broken out, paint is chipped.
On one wall an illustration of a curling strand of steam above a coffee cup points the way to a long ago coffee break.
A coffee break, really? Was a cup of coffee truly what East Berliners wanted as they entered the doors of this building? It strikes me that those non-capitalists in the East had indeed learned the goal of advertising’s power to lull.
It’s hard to get a bead on how insane this all was, this East Berlin. A wall for Pete’s sake.
I try to imagine the conversations about building the Wall. Men in uniforms and drab ill-fitting suits, sitting around a conference table, worrying that their best and brightest were fleeing to the West. In June 1961 alone, some 16,000 East Germans walked across the street to the West. That had to stop.
“I know, let’s build a wall. High, so no one can scale it.”
A long pause. But with no other ideas on the table:
“Good idea Gerhard. We can put barbed wire on top and a few guards as a deterrent to climbing it.”
“Dogs, let’s add some dogs too,” Erich adds, getting into the spirit of things.
“How about two walls with a strip of quicksand between?” Gunter joins in.
“Don’t go overboard. Quicksand?”
“Deep sand then, and an anti-tank pit. But I still think quicksand would be better,” Gunter sulks.
“Put a massive pipe on top of the wall so no one can get a handhold,” an engineer in the group offers.
“Masterful.”
Not to be outdone, “We can call it an anti-fascist bulwark,” the PR guy adds, giving it that perfect Orwellian spin.
“Brilliant. A wall it is, gentlemen. Anyone up for lunch?”
And just like that, up it went on a Sunday night under cover of darkness. Monday morning dawned and the good people of East Berlin could no longer make the commute to their job or go see their family on the other side.
Just. Like. That.
Even the CIA didn’t see it coming it was such a preposterous idea. No star wars net to catch missiles in space, just a concrete wall. And two years later and 31 miles long, there it stood. A divider.
This absurdity calls for more investigation, I decide. A mission it is.
Mike and Todd arrive for happy hour and we chatter on about our Augusts. They spent theirs (smartly) hiking in the Swiss Alps and had the tans and robust “Heidi” health to prove it. We’d spent our August in Paris on the assumption that only the tourist spots would be closed up tight for le holiday. Wrong. We were reduced to ordering Domino’s pizza and eating in our mosquito infested courtyard with unmowed grass tickling my knees.
The four of us rewarded we brave souls for enduring Paris in August by tucking into a farm table for dinner at Katz Orange, a restaurant that knows how to make an entrance.
Expectations are duly lowered by the approach down a slightly tarty residential street. But a duck under a small arched entryway into a courtyard and, bam, jaws drop. A red sandstone former brewery of awe-inspiring scale is aglow in soft lights. The 19th century Josty brewery was owned by two Swiss brothers who had a knack for drawing the pre-war bohemian crowd to their café owned by Johann and this brewery by Daniel. A veritable cathedral to Weiss beer and a good life about to come to a screeching halt.
Inside, the marvel continues with art studio meets steam punk vibe.
It’s good to have Mike and Todd back. They tell us they are going to continue this mode of travel for at least another year, maybe more. Why stop? “We like constant movement, the change,” they say. “It’s never dull when you are on the move.” They have taken to hopping more frequently than we do — a week here, two weeks there. They are not settlers. They’re like dragonflies. They hover in place for a bit before flitting off to the next option, never truly landing. They’ve been to Thailand frequently and will return again. Same with Seychelles. Berlin, too. Switzerland seems to be a keeper. But not forever. A month, in fact, feels too long.
The old chestnut, “people hate change” isn’t true for all of us. Some of us freaks actually live for change.
I recognize this restlessness. The old chestnut, “people hate change” isn’t true for all of us. Some of us freaks actually live for change. For us, change incites a shiver of glee. I love preparing for change, I love making the change, and most of all I love the afterglow of change, whether a new living room arrangement or a new city. It’s just the problem of acclimating to the change where it begins to bore.
I’m sure a psychiatrist has a rather disturbing answer to this need for change, but another trait I have fully embraced is not to look too deeply into anything or anyone. Saves a lot of money and time.
A noisy neighbor is not a need for deft and diplomacy, and a rattling window is not. my. problem. Instead, I pack a bag and go.
In our nomadic year, change is the only constant. It is a delight to have a “next place” to escape to just as the immediate spot begins to tarnish. I have no time to allow the furniture arrangement to gnaw at me, or time enough with a pesky wall to wonder what the room would look like without it. A noisy neighbor is not a need for deft and diplomacy, and a rattling window is not. my. problem. Instead, I pack a bag and go.
And yet.
It’s been niggling at me lately, this constant movement. To what end, I have begun to wonder? And more worrisome, why haven’t I landed on the spot yet? Arles? Perhaps, but it was our first spot and we were still heady with escape. Edinburgh, nope. Croatia. Gorgeous for a vacation, but could I live without frills and no cosmopolitan zing? Yes, I am a snob, and I am not a “simple life” person. Paris, mais oui, but can I live in a 10x30 apartment? (Wherever we are, Rex and I pause in front of “for sale” photos pasted to real estate office windows. For a split second in the Marais in Paris we thought, my God, we can live in Paris. Then we realized that “36m” is actually only 360 square feet. And that’s one of the bigger ones.)
I’ve started to mildly panic, to be honest. How can I not find a place and just know it will work?
It’s been niggling at me lately, this constant movement. To what end, I have begun to wonder?
As if reading my mind, Todd chimes in, “Who says we have to live in one place? Why can’t we continue to move from place to place? The costs are no more, maybe even less. Why commit?”
Why commit indeed.
And yet.
How do you ever know which bagel shop is the absolute best or which neighborhood has the best bookstore and espresso if you are never in one place long enough to get in with the cognescenti? On the other hand, maybe it would solve a lot of my problems, this not knowing. Perhaps I could find a decent enough bagel and not even know it wasn’t the best. Or shop in a store that no one else shopped in but actually had great stuff?
What a concept. I could live judgment free!
Afterward, not wanting the night to end, we walk a few blocks to Breck and Buck, a cocktail lounge Todd had read about in TripAdvisor. Alas, the address was correct, but the storefront looked abandoned. TripAdvisor fail.
He disappears. We look at each other. Are we accidentally joining a young couple in their living room?
We peered into the dark window to boxes of booze and other detritus stacked in the entryway, and a neon sign blinked “closed.” Such is life, we think. But then I spy the apartment’s buzzer system, with one of the floors marked “booze.” Plus, I say, who splurges on a neon sign to announce their closure? So we ring. After a few minutes, a big burly guy comes out, featuring a clear “what do you want” look.
Mike deferentially asks, “Bitte, sprechen sie Englisch?”
A nod.
Timorously: “Can we get a drink?” The lack of language facility cuts down any urge to overexplain why were are standing in the empty street asking to come up.
Long pause. “Wait here. I’ll check.”
He disappears. We look at each other. Are we accidentally joining a young couple in their living room? The buzzer was for a second floor flat, it appeared. We wait on the street, feeling like interlopers. The man’s shadow precedes him, and then he’s saying, “Follow me.”
So we of course must try the absinthe. The allure of danger and madness surrounding this liqueur are simply too tempting for us artist wanna-be’s.
We had found a fake speakeasy full of pretense. Hallelujah. We are led down a hallway to a small room, dark and glam, with a small bar, very serious bartenders, and smooching seats in the back. So we of course must try the absinthe. The allure of danger and madness surrounding this liqueur are simply too tempting for us artist wanna-be’s.
It arrives. We toast in anticipation. We look at each other over the rims of the glasses. We sip.
Bleck.
A perfectly good Sazerac ruined. Or, “an acquired taste,” as adults once said to children sneaking a sip of black coffee.
We suffer through and order regular Sazeracs. Conversation continues. I half expect Joel Gray to take the stage. We talk about the urgency of our need for change and what it says about us that we thrive on it. We debate whether not wanting kids came before or after the cart in our need for motion. Did we not have kids because we couldn’t handle the obligation or did not having kids allow us to discover our fear of rootedness (We are too tipsy to decide). We all rather smugly pat ourselves on our back for being “different.”
Yet still there at the back of my mind is an honest assessment that I cannot do this indefinitely. I am not that untethered. And I am beginning, on some days for a fleeting moment here and there, to, yes, miss my stuff. That much I don’t admit at this moment, however.
And then all too soon it is 2:00 a.m., and we must be responsible adults once again. We pour ourselves into an Uber for a short, fast ride through the empty night streets of Berlin. It has rained and the cab’s tires splash through puddles and the store fronts paint the street in technicolor.
The driver lets us out in front of our apartment building and the four of us attempt to be quiet as the elevator doors open to our floor. For some reason they use orange hued lightbulbs in the hallways in an attempt at a hip, urban feel but instead looks like a tanning bed. It is also extremely hot and close. There is no such thing as air conditioning it turns out. I fling open the windows to the night air and we flop on our massive king-sized bed in our bland-is-beautiful room and sleep the sleep of the contented — and soused.
The next morning Mike and I must suffer errand-running, he to Primark, me to the grocery store. Sundays, stores are locked up tight here in Berlin and it takes a bit more planning than we Americans are accustomed to.
On the tram home, Mike asks me about the latest condo updates. Last we heard, I say, the vote is inching up toward 75 percent at a snail’s pace. “But we’re hopeful,” I add, to basically console myself.
“What will you do when it sells?” Mike asks magnanimously.
To be honest, this is the conversation I’ve avoided with myself. What will we do, where will we land? This entire trip is purportedly to help us in that decision, but frankly, it’s done nothing of the sort, unless muddying the waters is a good strategy.
This entire trip is purportedly to help us in that decision, but frankly, it’s done nothing of the sort, unless muddying the waters is a good strategy.
Too many choices make for a bad decision is my motto. I once got accidentally locked in a card shop when the owner lost track of me dithering away over the perfect birthday card and went to lunch. I came out of the back room, card in hand I might add, to a darkened front room and locked door. Let’s just say someone was surprised when returning from lunch found me sitting by the cash register.
Plus both Rex and I tend to let decisions come to us. We ambled into our careers by process of inertia and a snowballing set of skills that locked us on a path like cross country skiers on a track. We moved to Chicago because I had a job option and someone else would pay for the move, not because we imagined Chicago would jumpstart our lives somehow. We moved to Guam because, why not? Eventually, the decisions make themselves and you just follow along — that’s the Ray household motto that no one embroiders on a pillow.
Eventually, the decisions make themselves and you just follow along — that’s the Ray household motto that no one embroiders on a pillow.
So this decision, this huge decision, that I was studiously avoiding wasn’t exactly crystalizing in any form.
What would we do next? Oh come on? Who the hell knows.
“This much I know,” — which is a true statement. “If it sells, we’ll be homeless and if it doesn’t sell, we’re still homeless. So finding a home is top of mind I suppose. Where you ask? Not the foggiest.”
The tram hums along on its perfectly engineered tracks when there’s a commotion upfront. A man in his early forties is ambling down the aisle pausing to check people’s tickets it seems. Three people immediately rise from their seats and rush the door. But the tram is in midflight, the next stop not for some time. They all take out their phones and stare intently at the screens. Nonchalant they are not. I can practically feel their flop sweat. The man checking tickets knows he has them and is prolonging the torture.
“They didn’t pay,” Mike whispers to me gleefully. Mike loves all German systems and this one in particularly delights him for its efficiencies and perhaps the whiff of a more upright time — at least I hope that’s what delights him and not the prospect of the punishment that befalls rule breakers.
I can practically feel their flop sweat. The man checking tickets knows he has them and is prolonging the torture.
In this case it is the operation of trains and trams. They work on the honor system — which evoked peals of laughter when Rex and I first encountered it. But it is true. To speed train boarding, passengers need not scan a ticket at any turnstile or entry point. On you go, on the presumption, naturally, that you have purchased your ticket.
At the time of our laughing fit, we were admonished by a young German that when you give people the responsibility to be upright, they do abide. Duly noted.
But do they?
Because right now there may be kinks in the system — as the three young men are now glancing nervously at the ticket checker approaching while the next stop looms far in the distance. The ticket-checker — in plain clothes one should note, that perfect combination of trust and gotcha — is suddenly absorbed with a woman and her child, the mother angrily denying any wrongdoing. The tram glides toward the next stop. Mike’s eyes are darting between the ticket-taker and the grifters. Who will win out? The Hobbesian side of human nature gets my vote. By the looks of it, Mike is betting on Germany efficiencies.
The ticket-checker — in plain clothes one should note, that perfect combination of trust and gotcha — is suddenly absorbed
Ding, the trams slides to a halt and the three men tumble out and hit the ground running. Mike’s shoulders slump. Score (another) one for Hobbes.
The next week, we are all to meet up on a dusty fall day at the ghostly Templehoff airport
We have gotten wind of a kite flying extravaganza on the abandoned grounds. Hundreds of people have gathered to fly kites of all shapes and sizes, from big enormous dragons to humble balsa wood and paper. Kids squeal and point while dads run after a downed affair. A group of twenty-somethings attempt to get another kite off the ground. The joy is contagious. The kites in primary colors against a perfect blue sky is simple beauty.
But it’s also hard not to feel the rush of time passing when the history of this airport as the site of the Berlin airlift is still a very modern history. Close your eyes and you can hear the drone of airplanes landing every four minutes in 1948, feeding a city suddenly cut off from the West, the first grenades lobbed of the Cold War.
Close your eyes and you can hear the drone of airplanes landing every four minutes in 1948, feeding a city suddenly cut off from the West, the first grenades lobbed of the Cold War.
The belly button of a city in a partitioned Germany, Berlin — itself partitioned by the spoils of war — was vulnerable. Deep in the Soviet section, Berlin, still up for grabs by the international tussle, found itself suddenly cut off by a Soviet blockade. Roads, trains, everything in and out blocked. But not the airport, which sat in American hands. Thus a feat of coordination commenced that would wow any Harvard Business Review case study — and prevented Berliners from starving.
And now we fly kites.
The next weekend, clamoring for a bit of Cold War history, Rex and I stand on Bernhauer Strasse, on the spot where a row of apartments once lined the border between East and West. In perhaps the definition of conundrum for East Germans, the apartments themselves were on the East side but the sidewalk out front was on the West. If the residents come out their front door, they’re in West Berlin. A dilemma indeed. Answer: seal up the front doors. This is where creative minds go to when air is short. It is also the site where residents jumped into the nets of waiting West German firemen on the night the border was sealed. Not everyone survived.
Just to put the point on that sentiment, where one of the infamous death strips lay — that booby trapped, sand pitted, barbed wire desperate run to freedom — today is a karaoke pit.
I snap a few photos, of what I’m not sure. Life has moved on. Just to put the point on that sentiment, where one of the infamous death strips lay — that booby trapped, sand pitted, barbed wire desperate run to freedom — today is a carnivalesque flea market and karaoke pit — the cognitive dissonance and an ever-present reminder of crazy men and the havoc they can wreak.
Such is Berlin.
And what joy that karaoke is. Crowds pack in each Sunday afternoon, perched on stone seats of an open-air amphitheater, the round pit below transforming into a one-ring circus.
“Zacktacular,” a circus performer from New Zealand, warms up the crowd.
Slowly he brings the crowd along with him over the course of his act. Step by step, joke by cheesy joke, he gains our trust. We begin to let our “cool” guard down. We drop the ironic pose. We become six-year-olds watching a magic act. We give into the sheer fun of it. We laugh at the banter while he juggles. We root for the child he pulls from the audience to help him. We hold our breath as he totters, balancing on one hand atop three stacked chairs. We really, really, really want him to blow fire. And when he does, we all applaud like the delighted adults we are.
More is to come, though. The main event. Bearpit Karaoke.
An Irish bloke shows up each Sunday with an amateur sound system and a library of music. The crowd of regulars knows the routine and sit ringside, hands in the air to be chosen to sing. First-timers need a couple of home-made mojitos being sold by entrepreneurs in the crowd before they raise their hands.
A toothpick of a man in black jeans and a denim jacket takes the stage. He stands with hands in his pockets and quietly answers as the Irish bloke tries to draw him out.
“And what will you be singing today? What’s that? Highway to Hell? Really?”
The man nods with a slight grin.
“Ok, AC/DC it is my man.”
The music cues up. He takes the mic. And breaks into a terrible rendition of Highway to Hell, utterly terrible. The crowd is not sure what to do. We’re rooting for him, but oh dear, this is bad.
But slowly, slowly he unfetters his inhibitions and lets it loose. He attempts a Chuck Berry move with air guitar, pulls his hamstring. Laughs. The crowd sings full throttle with the chorus in return.
He cracks a smile. Hands the mic to the Irish bloke, and leaves the stage to wild applause.
Another woman sings her heart out, also badly, this time to a Meatloaf ballad. A darling German girl sings a cabaret song, with an impish angelic sideways glance up as if trying to recall the words.
For it is a form of love, pure and simple. Joyous generosity of the human spirit.
No one boos. No one makes fun. We are joined in a desire to see the performer win, to live out his or her dream of performing before a live audience and being loved. For it is a form of love, pure and simple. Joyous generosity of the human spirit. We sit for three hours, barely registering the wet, now-cold stone or the mud at our feet.
This place, this crazy place, this place that thumbs its nose at convention and inverts the weight of history, not to forget, but as an embrace of the belief that history can trap us as well as guide us.
Serious irreverence. At a Nazi bunker a yellow banana is stenciled on the wall where the Nazis cowered. Seems apropos.
Street art adorns every empty building side. While walking the length of the Berlin Wall remnants, I spy a poster for the Ramones Museum across the river. More modern nostalgia. Given my punk rocker phase, which basically didn’t stretch beyond the clothes, I just had to visit. Everyone of any artistic bent in 1980 had to have a Ramones album. I bought mine at the Electric Fetus record store next door to my apartment and tortured my neighbors with repeated play.
It’s what this city does to me that I love, I realize as we walk the grungy streets after revisiting Joey— which itself was fully underwhelming.
This place that thumbs its nose at convention and inverts the weight of history, not to forget, but as an embrace of the belief that history can trap us as well as guide us.
This city, it revives that sense of discovery, of trying on new ways of being, that we all dive into in our twenties. But it does it without sinking into nostalgia. If ever there was a city inoculated against nostalgia this is it, and so it presses on with a freedom from the shackles of that very deep urge to go back and relive a better time.
Berlin just continues trying on the different clothes and moving forward.
Yes, I have to give it to this city. Berlin knows that more than most. And yet, and because of it, Berlin is a place Mickey Mouse walks ahead of you, without his pants. A place where once planes landed every four minutes to feed a cut-off city, Berliners now fly kites. A place where the twenty-first century sings karaoke in the former death strip. A place where if there is a wall, there is art. Above all this is a place where we can all feel young and energized once again.
And so, miles covered, history seen, the month winds down. We end our stay in Berlin with a long walk in Tiergarten, with its woods and ponds thick with lime-green scum of late summer. Hundreds of acres that were once denuded by bombs and desperate people foraging for firewood. Today, the trees are back and ready to drop their leaves. Renewal is possible.
