Berlin Feels Like Home. Two Years From Now, It’ll Be Gone.
Sundays are slow days in Berlin. Except for Spätis and a handful of supermarkets, everywhere shuts: forget to shop during the week and you’ll find yourself tuna-packed at Ostbahnhof or the store near the zoo. At lunchtime, leaving the memorial, I make for my café of choice. This is the first weekend since I came back, and only once I get there do I remember what day it is. My hostel isn’t far, so I keep on walking.
The in-between seasons don’t last long here — most years winter is October to March, while the Berlin summer scorches from May till September — but spring is what today feels like. Around the lakes to the city’s southwest, the woods are turning green again, and as I wanter into Kreuzberg the shrubbery smells like carrot cake. At eighty euros, a month’s underground travel is cheap, but I don’t regret deciding to make my way on foot.
The Berlin half-marathon starts at Alexanderplatz, looping around Charlottenburg and returning through the Brandenburg gate. I pass the racecourse several times, at Checkpoint Charlie, near the finish line and finally at Spittelmarkt, where runners of every colour rush past. I’m no one’s fitness fanatic, but coming to Berlin always makes me feel healthier. Like the racers, I’m glad to be outside.
A couple of minutes from Hermannplatz, Geist im Glas is one of Neukölln’s best kept secrets. Café by day, cocktail bar by night, it sits inauspiciously on Lenaustraße, a quiet side street. You have to be tipped off about this place — I first came on a friend’s birthday — and if you haven’t been inside, it’s easy not to notice it at all. On Sunday night, when people with real jobs are at home, I wander in, finding the bar by candlelight.
I don’t spend many nights in English bars. At most of twenty-six, I’ve never tasted alcohol, and my tolerance for bright lights and loud music is low. Geist im Glas has neither. After visiting the men’s room — built with train doors and a Laurel and Hardy print — I ask for something soft-but-interesting. The bartender is a New Zealander, and furnishes me with iced mango juice. Paying my two euros, I head upstairs.
There’s only one floor in this bar, but the room in the back has — for want of a better word — a shelf. Climbing a step ladder with drink in hand, I crawl onto the carpeted alcove near the ceiling, furnished with legless old cinema chairs. I’ve spent hours up here with friends and more-than-friends, overlooking the room’s tables and chairs. Tonight, stretching my legs over the side, I write a new post on my phone; the mango juice doesn’t last long.
I’m a writer because I can’t not be — because I’ve never had a nine-to-five, and because I’m a carnival of mental disorders — but there are things I love about my job. Cinema afternoons and Sunday nights in bars are a couple; journalling for a living is one too. The best part of my life is that this is what I’ve turned homelessness into: a busman’s holiday par excellence, hostelling in Europe and writing about the state of the world to pay the bills.
I want to have a place to live this year, but I’ll miss doing this; I couldn’t if I had rent to pay. More to the point, it’s being taken away from me. In two years’ time, I won’t have the chance to come back here indefinitely — to live and work in the EU for as long as I want, in a city that feels more like home than anywhere. I doubt the people who voted for that know how it feels. I can deal with not having a place to live, but this feels like losing my home.
