That second Friday
evening found me once again feigning enthusiasm on the steps of Frankfurter Tor.
I was designated to promote at the hostel that I was actually staying at. This was
a little awkward as I was acutely aware that due to my focus upon learning
German and applying for jobs, like at the last hostel, I have built up an
unsocial reputation. Each day I sit on the much desired high-table that I claim
early each morning, reciting verb formations, remaining until lunch when I
munch upon some tomato and cheese, before leaving for an afternoon handing out
CVs. In the evening I continue the job search online. And now, I will have to
casually join them around the fuseball table or discussing politics on the terrace
and try to entice them upon a night of shots and Beer-Pong.
To my relief, as
I return to the hostel I spot new arrivals. Four lads from Liverpool. I approach
them and open a discussion on the city and when asked tell them that a little
shisha bar I know in Friedrichshain is undoubtedly the best spot I have found
in Berlin. ‘In fact I am going there tonight,’ and pull out some flyers from my
pockets, attempting nonchalance. My heart thumps as they mumble to each other, ‘Well
we’re pretty lost here … have no idea where else to go …’
I leave these
four drinking on the bunkbeds and am approached by a Swedish guy – with an
accent so British I initially thought he was mocking me - who had spoken to
Ela the night she was promoting at the hostel. He has shown interest in coming
along later in the week and said that he would ‘poke his head in’ that night. He
directs me towards an Australian girl who was also keen, and she in turn nods
her head towards Gerty of Holland, who was meeting three friends from Amsterdam
that night who would were hoping to visit a few bars in East Berlin. With the
addition of one lone traveller from Australia twiddling his thumbs on his last
night in Berlin, I suddenly found myself elatedly leading eleven people back to
Frankfurter Tor, repeatedly multiplying eleven by four. 44€! I think of Leo
shepherding myself, Barry, the Swiss sisters and the rest of that crowd on this
route just a week before. Look at me now!
I was still
happily multiplying on the tram when the Swede calls out to me: ‘Ur-hum, excuse
me! Are we not supposed to get off here?’ We were. I sprang into action and
leaped in between the beeping doors of the tram, holding them back as my group
tumbled excitedly passed me under the red flashing lights and out onto the
pavement. I released the doors and I follow them out, thanking the Swede as he
delicately folded his map and placed it back into his breast pocket. Trying to
regain some authority I trot in front of them spieling off some garb about the
classic Stalinist architectural style, and lead them onwards to the first bar where
Garth is waiting for them outside.
I don’t join
them on the Crawl that evening but think of them the next day as I walk along Warschauer
Straße and past the club they would have ended up in. I love walking about here
as it reminds me of the last day of my first trip to Berlin the previous summer.
It was a Sunday and my German friend took me down to a flea market here and I
came across a bright orange school satchel with red reflectors and a picture of
Disney’s Robin Hood and Prince John. The man on the stall didn’t speak English
so I told my German friend that she would have to bargain for it. I told her I
would pay no more the 10€, but my will was week and her bargaining half-hearted
and so I walked away with the satchel strapped upon my back having paid 25€. We
then walked to another flea market. This second one was further into Friedrichshain
and much bigger. Here I had leafed through German children books, Peter und die Wolf, Emil und die Deketive, Die
unendliche Geshichte, and quietly contemplated learning the language. Afterwards
we had had ice coffee off the grass square and I had thought of Berlin as not
the scruffy underdog of Europe but in its Wilhelmian splendour. And it was with
the taste of that coffee in my mouth and that satchel digging into my shoulders
that, on the way back to Schonefield Airport, I had looked at my faint
reflection against the landscape of bare Templeoffer Freiheit and half-consciously
thought to myself, I could move to Berlin.
Through Friedrichshain
and then up to Prenzlauer Berg I hand out more CVs to more hostels and bars and
slowly my enthusiasm for the city begins to ebb once again. Walking down
Landsberger Allee I saw a stone archway with a rusted iron gate leading in to a
tatty rubble and grass lane at the near end of which I could see only trunks
and leaves. On one of the pillars there was a mettle plaque with illegible
German. If the gate had been closed I would have thought it was perhaps the
entrance to a small mid-city estate. Wearily I turned up the path and came to what
first appeared to be an ugly and deprived city park, shaded from the light and
noise of the road and flowing self-absorbed city life that I had been traipsing
through.
As I entered,
amongst the trees to my right was a mettle railing which barred me from a
gravelled playing court and I thought I spotted a little wall that enclosed us.
About me in other directions were scraggly bushes and shrubbery and immersed
between these I saw grave stones and realised to my delight that I was in a
cemetery. I was tired and knew that here I wouldn’t be disturbed. I found a
little bench along the twisting paths and saw a gap in the wall which I assumed
led to another great road of the like that I had just escaped. I would stay
here.
I sat on the
bench and sighed into my solitude. In front of me were a couple of small,
neglected and slanted grave stones and to my right there was a man crouching
silently on the ground. He had come here not to get away, I thought to myself,
but to connect, or travel back to what was lost. A moment later a woman turned
up at his side and they began bickering in agitated muffled German. Was he
visiting the grave of dead mistress? Were they perhaps siblings, rivals over
the disputed will of a lost parent? Old lovers encountering each other at the
grave of their lost child? In bursts and beats they argued there for about ten
minutes and then disappeared down the path, still snapping at each other.
In time I rose
and thought to do a quick round of the cemetery before heading back onto the
noise and stretch of Landsberger Allee. I took the path the couple had taken
and found that it led through another stone archway and saw that the cemetery
expanded to an enormous size in leafy splendour housing magnificent graves and
small crypts, reminding me of Angkor Watt and ‘Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’. This place stretched far beyond the little
guttering corner I had stumbled upon and lingered in so readily. In the
distance I spotted the man and woman quietly sitting on another bench by other
gravestones. Maybe they were also simply searching for a fragile tranquillity,
meeting tempestuously in their lunch breaks.
On the path I
was confronted by a fat cat with a squashed face. It was no Salem or Binx but looked
arrogant and satisfied, at complete at peace with the world, living and dead. I
was wondering from whence he came when I heard a voice saying ‘Langsammer!
Langsammer!’ Walking on I saw that crouched amongst the grave stones was an
equally fat woman pouring cat food into a steel dish, next to watch filled up
with water. Two more cats meowed about her ankles, squeezing their portly
bodies under her thighs and buttocks, needing at her calves and then dipping
their ugly, crumpled faces into the bowls. As I wandered further along the path
I saw more of these cats, licking their paws and gazing indifferently at me.
They didn’t seem very graveyard; they didn’t seem very Berlin either. But
nonetheless, I was certainly on their turf.
I turned off the
path to a where there were more family crypts and no path but wooded floor;
more leaves and twigs here. ‘Familie Otto’, ‘Familie Shmittd’, ‘Familie Ende.’
Often it was only a husband and wife named. Where were all the children? Perhaps
they were sterile siblings. They were dying in the 1920s and 1930s, as Weimar
and then Nazi Germany took hold, and the Imperial country of Prussia and
Wilhelm dissolved further into the ground.
I was aware that
I was gratifying a voyeuristic tendency. My German friend told me that she
believe we like art galleries so much as they have enough life within them to
engage us, but are devoid of the clutter that the rest of our lives confront us
with. Cemeteries are similar; simply walking through them there is little of people to see or know, but enough to
stir interest. I am always surprised how sparse the words on gravestones are.
How does one connect to that person beneath there? Is it possible at all? We
like to think that a connection is possible. That because once men levelled the
coffin down into a whole that was dug by other men and a stone was placed and
the beloved’s family knelt by it, and that we are now standing in that exact
same spot we have somehow bypassed time. Do these places have a memory? Is there still
an essence of what was? The ivy and shrubbery took the stones back and the
inhabitants lay quiet and neglected and forgotten inside. Such a sight, though
beautiful to the uninvolved wanderer, is a fantastic argument for incineration.
Two generations go by after your death and you are left to neglect and
vegetation. Not part of it, but simply held beneath it, as vagrants drink
tinnies and people walk their dogs. Bertolt Brecht’s had apparently requested
that his gravestone be just an ordinary stone ‘which every dog wants to piss
on.’ This would be a place for that. Not somewhere like the famous Père
Lachaisey cemetery in Paris. Brecht should have been buried here. If the dogs aren’t
scared off by the cats.
Walking my
aunt’s dogs in a cemetery in Fulham, it was not cats but foxes that I was wary
of. I saw no foxes here in Berlin, but did to my joy look at one point to see a
bushy red squirrel swinging from the branches above me. This was the first time
I had seen a red squirrel and I remained swaying with the branches underneath
the tree after it had disappeared. Fat cats and red squirrels! In his book ‘Germania’,
Simon Windsor describes the latter, ‘with straggling tufts of unkempt hair and
hectic eyes that give them something of the air of traditional Berlin
squatters.’[1]
I sat down on the twig-strewn ground next to a particularly black grave and
looked up in the trees, hoping to see more of these squatters. I felt very much
alive. Cemeteries give me this feeling; a feeling of youth, and power in being
alive, when so many others aren’t. The sootier and grimier and more crumbled
gravestone, the better I feel spending time amongst them. I would like to think
that those beneath would be grateful for my time, if they could be. And I dwell
upon that imaginary connection that only exists in a mind turning in upon
itself. For what can be felt in cold
stone but the comparative heat of our own palm?
Bertie Digby
Alexander
Berlin
2013
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