Dispatches from Berlin II
24/10
A friend called Alex takes me and my friend Alex to his friend Alex’s exhibition opening. It is an exploration of the digital and the virtual, and we put on black silicon gloves and headsets to enter a dystopian world where you craft a room guided by the omnipotent Artificial Intelligence. The software does not recognize my voice even when I yell, for which its female maker apologizes that it doesn’t tend to recognize women. My friend Alex does not comply with the AI, and finds himself trapped inside a dark box for eternity.
25/10
We take a brisk walk through Grünewald towards the hill that it surrounds. The hill is a giant pile of the rubble and ruins of Berlin’s destroyed wartime houses, piled on top of the structure of an unfinished Nazi technical school, and perched right on the top is the abandoned Cold War spy station. It’s so autumnal that it feels like stepping into a back-to-school advert, all crunching leaves and bundled up children on bikes. The listening towers are closed to visitors, but there’s a speaker system to project your voice into one of the domes and hear it reverberate as if you’re standing in the centre up there. “Hello my dearest treasure”, whispers a middle aged German woman into the emptiness.
Afterwards I order a large schnitzel that he eats most of in a Bavarian restaurant by the station. The TripAdvisor review that led us there references “Gleis 17”, and we walk through the station to find it. It’s a huge, empty, leaf-strewn platform memorializing the more than 50,000 Jews transported eastwards towards the ghettos and concentration camps beyond Germany’s border. It is quiet and peaceful. These memorials to genocide exist all over the city, invisible until you stumble upon them - the huge empty pool to murdered Roma and Sinti in the Tiergarten, the hulking block to murdered gays, the forest of concrete pillars by the Brandenburg Gate. Roses and candles and piles of stones spill across the platform, and people move quietly along the edge reading dates and numbers of Jews on the transports, and the destinations that marked the ends of their lives.
When I look up the location on Instagram in the evening there are a lot of posts by Israeli teenagers smiling and posing on the tracks. Many use the train emoji. One woman stands by her husband with the caption “I’m more interested in the future than the past, because I think I’m living in it”. It includes the hashtags #eineinzigesleben (one life only), #healthandbeauty and #networkMarketing.
26/10
I walk along the canal towards the Zoologische Garten, thinking I’ll see an exhibition at my favourite photography museum if I can work up the courage to face the intimidatingly brusque women at the desk. I cannot. I spy on the flamingos several hundred meters away through several layers of railings. I have a coffee in a beer garden where small scavenger birds fly close enough to my face to feel their wings beat against my cheeks.
27/10
The technician at my film lab warns me it won’t be so fast this time as 3 of his colleagues are ill. Not COVID - everyone seems to have forgotten that other illnesses exist still, he tells me.
I sit on a friend’s balcony in the South East and watch the sunset with a coffee (mine) and a cigarette (hers) while she tells me about the Berlin porn film festival screening she went to in a cinema round the corner. Audience members kept reprimanding other audience members for getting off to the film too enthusiastically, which seems like a pretty reasonable audience response to me.
The toddler above me cries a lot, at a lot of different times of the day and night. Imagine crying for long stretches until someone fixes the thing you’re crying about for you? It sounds cathartic.
28/10
The older gay men of my area continue to live their lives to the fullest. Today a table of four sit with matching aperol spritzes at 11am. The older gentleman who passes my local cafe every day at noon is wearing a full brown suede suit with a matching trilby, and a silk neckerchief.
Walking home after dark a first floor bedroom serves as a beacon on a typically unlit street. As I get closer a mahogany ceiling full of colourful and detailed frescos comes into view. A man eating a doner kebab on a bench below observes me staring and says, “it’s nice right?”. Later, I wonder whether it’s actually his flat and he sits outside with the lights on to watch passerbys’ responses to his luck.
29/10
I visit IKEA alone to buy atmospheric lighting. Shamefully, it is my first time in IKEA and, shamefully, I do not bother to look up how the system works before going and, shamefully, I do not have time to eat the meatballs in the canteen. I spend €30 on horizontal lighting which I interpret as a huge win and then march through pitch black Tempelhof with my new FADO under my arm to meet another English transplant for a beer while we’re still allowed to do that.
30/10
I find a French fry in the inner pocket of the trench coat a friend has brought me from home. I can’t remember the last time I wore that coat. It has hidden for several months and traveled on the plane from London. A taste of home.