Parking Lot

The winter after I graduated college, I moved out of Chicago and met my friend Katie in Berlin. We shared a little room in a guy’s Prenzlauer Berg apartment for a few months, and without school or jobs, we spent lots and lots of time just walking around different neighborhoods.

One morning, a week or two into our time there, we took the train downtown to Mitte to explore the city center. I had — as always — my big glass water bottle in my bag to stay hydrated (free water was hard to come by); and after a couple hours of walking around — as always — had to pee. I started looking out for somewhere I could pop in and use a bathroom, not yet understanding that that’s not really a thing in Germany. The one public restroom I did find cost €0.50 to use; I don’t remember if I didn’t have change or just thought we’d surely find a free one eventually, but I should have used it, because we never did.

We kept walking, and as things gradually escalated into a pressing, five-alarm peemergency, our surroundings simultaneously became more and more spread-out and residential. No restaurants, no coffee shops, no hotels… just wide streets, tall apartment buildings, and big parking lots. I was worried.

Finally, Katie was like, “Jess, I think you’re gonna just have to find a spot in that parking lot. There’s nothing around here.” It was the middle of the day, but she was right. So I did. I wasn’t proud of it, but I had to.

Then, two months later we went on our first guided walking tour of Berlin. Things started to look familiar toward the end of the tour when, abruptly, the guide stopped the group directly in front of the same parking lot. Katie’s eyebrows flew up her forehead. “Oh my god, Jess! This is the parking lot that you p — “ and I was like, “Yep, yes, I know!”

“…Now, I’m sure you’re all wondering why our last stop on the tour is this normal-looking parking lot,” the guide started. One of us, (me), was wondering that significantly more than the others, alongside a new, panicked curiosity of, “Oh god, what did I pee on?”

“This parking lot is actually the site of the Führerbunker — Hitler’s final bunker,” the guide said matter-of-factly, as if none of us had ever used it as a bathroom before. HITLER’S. BUNKER. Katie and I blinked so hard at each other that the slapping of our eyelids nearly drowned out the guide as he explained that we were standing atop the precise spot where Hitler shot himself and was hastily cremated; the bunker was blown up and eventually replaced with an unmarked parking lot so that awful people couldn’t turn it into a shrine.

I accidentally peed on Hitler’s grave. It’s hard to believe how not proud of it I was at the time, when now it’s — by far— my proudest pee.