Berlin

Quote: “I already have an opinion. I don’t need to hear yours.” Michael, on why he doesn’t read the Sydney Morning Herald anymore


I arrived in Berlin to meet Michael, along with all my clothes (joy!), my laptop (oh sweet relief!) and my ipod (oh burning ecstasy!), but Michael was immediately distracted by some bad news:

Berlin's pretty cool (but it also knows it).

I was told by a lot of people that I’d love Berlin. In fact, I can’t think of a single person that said anything bad about it. I arrived, therefore, with  mixed expectations. Universal recommendations don’t sit well with me. (I didn’t really like Smells Like Teen Spirit and, try as I might, I just can’t get into The Wire.)

However, I couldn’t help but be excited by the historical elements of the city. Judith Kaye, a few weeks before I left Sydney and on my request, had given me a list of European highlights. She had prefaced it with the shrewd comment that it was intended for someone “interested in places where power had been wielded”. I’m not sure if I’m exalted or insulted by this insight into my personality, but I do agree with it. Berlin excited me as a place where power has been won and loss, and most specifically by Him, that (indeed, the) great villain of the 20th Century. The details of how reparations would be made for World War I might have been hammered out in Versailles, but convincing a nation that they deserved more and that they could have it happened here. All those speeches in beer halls, all those quiet, backroom conversations, all those hundreds of thousands of machinations - political, economic, social - all culminating in Hindenberg, finally and against his better judgement, handing Hitler the reins of power, not anticipating, even then, the scope of His intentions or the boldness with which He would pursue them, they happened here. This is where Stillenacht had happened and where He had declared World War II open for business (with a lie). And somewhere amongst this sprawling mess of graffiti-covered streets and train lines was a small plaque in a quiet parking lot, noting that this was the place where His body had burned. It was a heady feeling entering Berlin, even after all these years.


I arrived at the hostel at about 11 at night, put on a fresh shirt (for the first time in three weeks) and Michael and I went for a walk to see what we would see and I will admit now, finally, on my first night, that Berlin is, as my sources had universally informed me, a young person’s paradise. We were living in the east and the streets at this late hour on a Thursday night were brimming with young, hip szene-sters, decked out in the clothes that marked them out as belonging to that scene or to this one.

5 minutes walk away from the hostel, I search for the East Side Gallery

We didn’t go out that night, but we did the next three. Rising at midnight from bizarre late-evening siestas we joined the thronging masses on WarschauerStrasse, finding cheap food and cheaper alcohol before stepping onto trains filled with the same buzzing crowds, all on the way to hidden clubs around the city. I remember sitting next to a pretty young girl in a train one night who had a little dog in a handbag (and who I think was smiling at me), when all of a sudden five big lads, dressed in leather and chains and stinking of spirits and old tobacco, and each of their accompanying enormous rotweillers boarded our carriage. The five dogs immediately caught whiff of the petite hand-bag pooch and, as one, made straight for it. They were restrained by the German boys ripping them bodily out of the air using the chains around the dogs’ necks and slamming them against the wall at the end of the carriage where they had just entered. I won’t pretend that I didn’t flinch, but I maintain that when five big sets of fangs launch at you out of the blue, it’s not an irrational move. The girl not only flinched, but got the hell out of there, taking shelter at the other end of the carriage, while the boys started leering at her boisterously from where we sat.

“What are they saying?” I asked Michael, not taking my eyes off the now placid dogs milling about my legs.

“They reckon that their dogs may be suffering from, uh, temptations of the flesh,” responded Michael, laughing.

I leaned back and took a sip of beer, determined not to be phased by the incident, and glanced around at the other commuters who, to a one, happily drank and laughed along with us as we rattled on together.

Well of books at the Berlin Jewish Museum

We arrived home at about eight each morning after dancing the nights away and generally chasing down any shenanigans there were to be chased. Eight in the morning, I felt, was not so bad an effort, but we were outdone every morning by the nude Germans staying in our dorm. Without fail they would saunter in drunkenly at ten or eleven, get nude, smoke cigarettes and then go to bed, waking only if their awful, one-colour-jump-suit-clad girls came round to smoke and drink beer with them. How were they doing it? Where were they going? What clubs pushed that hard? There were always the sex-clubs, which did go well into the morning, but they really didn’t seem the types; huge, young, fresh-faced Aryan lads, with not a stitch of leather or latex between them (though, I realise now, not a stitch of anything else either). We never found out.


After three days and as the weekend wound down, we decided that a break was in order and that seeing Berlin in the daylight may be worthwhile. We visited (amongst other things) the Jewish Museum, in which the stories are told through the architecture and spaces themselves. We saw the Topography of Terror, a great outdoor exhibit, located in the remains of the cellar of what was once the SS Headquarters. We avoided Checkpoint Charlie. And then we got drunk again.

Michael considers life in a world that just don't make any sense

And I didn’t see Hitler’s plaque. I wanted to. (I still do.) But I agree with the Communists who made the decision not to put anything to speak of there. I agree that it shouldn’t be a shrine. But it still drew my thoughts for much of the time I was there. I want to see it, though I can’t imagine what I’d get out of doing so.

Berlin has historical depth, but at the same time it’s right up to date. It’s edgy and knows that it is. It promotes itself as edgy, like a punk that hasn’t put out an album yet (but it has). But that’s really what I like right now. In ten years, I daresay that I’d rather go have a bit of a lie-down, but right now I could spend a long time in Berlin, going to the same clubs, listening to the same music, getting drunk and scrounging cigarettes from the same girls, waking up at three o’clock the next afternoon to hang around quietly eating super-cheap pizzas and doner kebabs, waiting to do it all again. I’d like to think that maybe I will.

Thanks this week go to Michael for getting my luggage from Budapest to Berlin for me and to Charles and Nichi for some top-notch recommendations for eats and sights in Berlin.

Best to all,

Michael