These are Berlin’s Terror Days
The Berlin I knew has changed, maybe forever.
BERLIN
In Berlin, when people start being nice to one another, it is normally a worrying sign. Berliners are usually no more polite than Muscovites or New Yorkers. So it was clear on the day after the attack, when absolutely everyone was on their best behavior, that Berlin was experiencing its Terror Days.
We knew, during the Paris attacks, that this would happen to our city one day. In the week following Paris, the U-Bahn was shut down over and over again. A colleague arrived late to work one day. His metro line had been closed, and police had exploded a package nearby.
And though we knew it would happen, we still couldn’t believe they would strike us. Berlin is a city of proud do-gooders, layabouts and freelancers. Why would they attack a bunch of liberals who do no evil and only want to help others?
Still, last week, terror came to the Kurfurstendamm. It’s a mile-long avenue of big-brand designers that stretches through the glitziest part of the city’s West. Ku’damm was bombed to pieces during the Second World War. Then it became a propaganda showpiece for capitalism, in the days when communism still seemed like it had a chance.
And this Christmas, it was again at the center of a city’s pain. Over and over again, Germany’s leaders and the city’s residents gathered there. Very soon after the attack, there was a pile of flowers and candles carpeting the floor of the market.
The attacker had hit one of the touchstones of German culture, its Christmas Markets. These are the places where we go with our friends, or our work colleagues, to get drunk and get over all the stress, all the politics, that fill the year.
On the night he did it, people were selling candles (not laying them on the footpath, as mourners have done ever since). Then, Breitscheidplatz was full of modern Berliners — that is, the bright and wild from all over Europe, and the world at large. They were just celebrating Christmas!
Now, some of those new Berliners on the Platz are either dead or wounded. Afterward, in a tabloid, there was an article about the 21-year-old law student from Spain whom the attacker ran over.
Iñaki Ellakuria came to Berlin on a European student exchange, so probably to learn the language a bit and carouse a lot in the clubs. Due to the attack, his leg was broken in three places, a foot is destroyed and he couldn’t go home for Christmas this year.
And Ellakuria had some luck in his bad luck: Fabrizia Di Lorenzo moved to Berlin from Abruzzo, in Southern Italy, to work in logistics. She was there when the lorry ran over people drinking wine and shopping for presents. For days, no one — not even the Italian Embassy — knew where she was.
“Some1 found her phone and metro pass on the site. #help,” Di Lorenzo’s cousin tweeted.
It turns out that no one knew where she was because she had died. “This violence profanes God’s name,” the priest in her home town said at her funeral. (Even the most vehement atheist would agree with him on that.)
Ellakuria and Di Lorenzo symbolize the new, post-Wall Berlin, Europe’s creative capital. Since the city reunited, the educated and the artistic from across the world have come here. Something about the geist here, the spirit of this city, attracts dreamers with plans.
Today, the city’s hipster neighborhoods still feel like a mixture of 1968 in France and 1980s New York. Posters for demonstrations — often internationalist, pro-refugee and anti-neonazi — are stuck to the poles on every street corner, plastered to every wall and displayed in many shop windows.
At night, Berlin parties until 4, or 6, or 8 a.m. One of Berlin’s biggest cliches is that Nights in Kreuzberg Are Long. It’s a ‘70s hit song about sitting around with your friends, drinking yourself into a stupor, probably talking about leftwing politics or philosophy.
But suddenly, after the events of Dec. 19, Berlin doesn’t feel like an enchanted playground for overgrown children anymore. Already, rent is no longer cheap, except in comparison to Sydney, New York and Paris.
And above all, there’s a growing tension in this city. Turks and Kurds fight in the streets. Journalist colleagues point out buildings to me and say that there are rumors of al Qaeda fighters living inside them.
Don’t expect Berliners to turn against the migrants now. This is the home of Germany’s Willkommenkultur, where the idea is to integrate refugees by sharing cultures and friendships. Since the migration crisis began, people have taken in Syrians to their apartments, donated clothes to Afghanis and given spare change to Romani.
But all the same, these Terror Days are the end of something: perhaps, the end of a time when people from Beirut rolled joints in gay bars, and Russian mafiosi drove their Mercedes through Charlottenburg.
That time is over because, despite what all the politicians say, it feels like some of our freedom is gone. And today’s Berlin is nothing, if it is not a place where the wild and the free can do whatever they please.
Charles McPhedran is a writer and filmmaker who has lived in Berlin for eight years.
