Ich bin Fremd hier #7

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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[1] Simon Winder, Germania, (Parador, London), 2010.

Ich bin Fremd hier #6

‘So I went into the house and took off the wall the fiddle I played so well, and my father gave me a few coppers to help me on my way, and off I strolled down the long street and out of the village …’[1] Another adventure begins in Joseph von Eichendorff’s ‘Life of a Good-for-Nothing’ and I wonder what my fiddle could be in Berlin. I turn to look out at the city below but the window has misted over. Another feast is being prepared behind me. The smell of fried egg and mushroom fills the hostel and I look down morosely at my Turkish yoghurt and soft banana. The meals that are created throughout the day at this hostel are fantastic: all kinds of food from all the cuisines that Berlin has to offer, frying and roasting and boiling and bubbling over my shoulder, and backpackers conglomerate together over the roasted banquet of vegetables and steaming sweet potatoes and sprinkled nutmeg, and delicately torn meat that spits and sizzles giving up scents of home, and healthy luxury throughout the hostel.

Through the haze of blazing peppers Happy Henry, in suit and tie, waves at me from reception, ‘Cheerio!’, and disappears with his briefcase down the grey stairs into the vortex of Kottbusser Tor. He would appear out of place, offensively so perhaps, but for his great ginger afro and huge grin places him at ease with everyone, staff and arties and Turkish kebab venders alike. Having flamboyantly quit his job at PricewaterhouseCoopers after only one year, with great eyes brimming with excitement and a juddering Adam’s apple, Henry had arrived the day before with his neat black briefcase inside his shining black suitcase, and told us – by ‘us’ I mean everyone else in the hostel, while I crouched like a gremlin over Craig’s List in the background - that he was starting an internship the next day and now frantically (but exuberantly) was searching for a flat. He was soon pointed, with whispers, in my direction with the information that I had also recently moved to the city. He parked up his laptop next to mine as he introduced himself and told me about his search for accommodation. I wasn’t yet searching for accommodation, having decided to stick it out for now in hostels and friend’s places, until I had regular employment. I didn’t want to break Henry’s excitement though, so kept this quiet and kept asking questions about the flat. That evening, through a tangle of leads and tottering bottles of Berliner Kindle, he would swivel his screen around every few minutes to show me another great two-bedroom find.

‘I could cover you for a bit,’ he offered, ‘if need be. And I can pass a credit cheque and can easily show my last three month’s pay checks. Although getting hold of them from the office might prove a little tricky …’ and he raised his left index finger to tap ponderously upon his chin. Henry had a plan that we put on suits and ties and shave and go round some of these flats pretending that we are based in London but looking for a work-pad in Berlin. ‘It would be much better than a flat-share. It would just take a little preparation. You have a tie I suppose? If not I could lend you one. And we could both get haircuts.’

Henry was only the latest in many that I have met in Berlin who like me had come to the city in search of exciting opportunities. ‘Not trying to start a life but find one,’ he said to me as we add each other to our German sim-cards. At the first hostel I had met Francisca who had moved to Berlin from Italy. She had begun a language course and the school had found her a flat. She was hoping to find work in an Italian restaurant, then try to set up a stall at a flea market and sell her jewellery. There was Joseph of course, and also Niel from Conventry, teaching himself with Tin Tin in German (Tim und Struppi), confident in finding work as a manual labourer then searching for something better when his German improved. And I met Calan, the bracelet-sparkling Amazonian Queen of this hostel and rich fountain of knowledge on secret corners of Berlin which she had pioneered into the week before. Calan had – as she related with stressed nonchalance the next day over breakfast of steamed pumpkin and cinnamon – paused on the street to look at a mural the other morning in one seldom-frequented district of Berlin and been approached by a couple of Germans who liked her look and asked her to a photo-shoot in Tiergarten. They took her for a beer afterwards and then offered their sofa for as long as she wants it.

And I was to meet Serious Roger who like Henry had left a well-paid job in the UK, but otherwise opposed the smiling cockney right down to his, gaunt gullet, and dark mournful eyes, and the tone of a professor of Emily Dickenson. Then there was Leo, of the Pub Crawl, who had only been staying in the city for the summer while his girlfriend had an internship here; and Ela who had been studying here for one semester, and the great Garth who had arrived in the spring, the crazed Mike from Leicester, cherubic Mike, smoky Mike. And there was Dai and Baz and Sam, Evelyn … I would meet more and more in the next few weeks, who like me had come to Berlin hoping to stay. Each of us one of the many flooding to the city, not out of necessity but with the thin idea that Berlin is simply cooler than London, or Melbourne, or Shannon. In search of the spark that we read about and hear about and watch on each cinema screen and yet is so elusive under days of necessity and CVs and TV; that stone conveyor belt we have stepped since Reception.

How is Joseph different from, Calan, or Leo or Evelyn? We are all Auslanders, happening to be in Berlin. Nuzzling our way in, or finding comfortable corners; walking confidently through Alexanderplatz and looking down upon those with packs on their back. This place, before it was filled with dawdling tourists bending their heads back to look up at the television tower, and before the U-bahn station and Döblin’s nightlife, and before the enterprising Jews from the eastern marshes arrived and occupied the ‘Scheunenviertel’, what is now Alexanderplatz, home of the World Clock, was a cattle market where outsiders from afar would come to trade their stock and make some cash. Since the Friesians, still cheap and with space to grow, Berlin has continued to develop as a ‘Welstadt’, welcoming the world to its streets, from refugees to the rich and beautiful, and seemingly thriving because of it; the place Bowie and Kafka and Isherwood escaped to.

Simon Winder writes that the infamous Berlin of the ‘20s, portrayed in the pictures by Grasz, Dix and Beckmann, was not the reality. ‘Berlin was in the 1920s a city of ghosts, both at a private level and at a public one, with the militaty and imperial heart of the city ripped out and thrown away. The orgiastic feeling of the city, so enjoyed by foreigners, was based on a void.’[2] What are people like myself not seeing in Berlin today? How much can be seen from a hostel in Kreuzberg? It is from this district of the city, that which has taken a large brunt of the immigration to Berlin, where a wall can be found sporting the words: ‘Echter Berliner!!!! Ihr Nicht Fuck You’. ‘Real Berliner!!!! You’re Not Fuck You’.

The influx is many folded: tourism, the Wall and Nazism, the story of Berlin, sitting comfortably alongside night-time pursuits to Berghaim and the city’s famous moonlight offerings, originating in Isherwood’s cabaret. And then beneath these, are the immigrants and expats, begrudging the former group who give them a bad name. ‘Immigrants’ and ‘expats’. These two names conjure up different images and there are many of one group who would never label themselves under the title of the other. Is one of these groups less welcome in Berlin, or simply easier to mock, to rage against, to differentiate?

Immigrants and expats and real Berliners were the theme of a play staged at the English Theatre Berlin the month I arrived in the city. Having found no work going at the theatre I signed up as a volunteer and soon found myself serving customers Moscow Mules, drinking with the theatre staff, and watching their productions from the front row, kostensloss. The first play I saw was ‘Echter Berliner.’ Talking to a fellow volunteer before the show, himself a born and bred ‘Berliner’- though we were both tentative, before the show, to use the term – sighed when I told him where I was staying and asked me earnestly: ‘Where are all the Germans in Kreuzberg?

The director of the ‘Echter Berliner’ was from the States, and so like each of his five fellow actors, was, willingly or not, counted as part of an immigrant/expat community in Berlin.  The six of them interviewed ten members of their respective community to explore what it was like to move to and live in Berlin. They asked these people whether they felt like an outsider in this city; what it was to be a Berliner; and whether they could ever be one.

In attempt to recreated the tedium and anxiety of the dreaded Auslandercentre, when the audience received their tickets they were given a specifically coloured ticket dependant on where their passport was issued, and told, ‘There is likely to be a delay in the start of our performance as we are running behind.’ Indeed, they were taken into the auditorium fifteen minutes after the published starting time. The mass of Germans, clutching their red tickets in their palms, were taken in last.

Inside, the audience were faced with a sad looking character, in Jewish garb, sitting morosely on a stall and rummaging through a plastic rucksack, looking like the lost boy of a school trip. When the play begins, he is joined on stage by the other five actors, including the director looking suitably American in baseball hat and aviators, another shrouded in a Muslim shawl and a third looking like she has just glided off the set of Crouching Tiger Hided Dragon. Presented in such stark contrast, the six display the diversity of Berlin (or indeed, for that matter, New York or London) but also the stock stereotype that are cast upon individuals from these cultures. It is these stereotypes that the director is attempting to break down, however as the play continues such caricatures re-emerge to comic effect and are therefore more reinforced than dissected.

What was briefly looked at in the play is Berlin’s relationship with the rest of Germany. ‘Berlin needs to sort out its hate of people from Stuggart first!’ one of the actors cries. It is true, like London and Paris, Berlin sits apart from the rest of the country, inspiring narrowed suspicious eyes in the hinterlands beyond. Bismark distrusted Berlin. As did Hitler, who harboured designs to turn it into ‘Germania’, sporting a great dome to be called the Kuppelberg, which would dwarf St Peter’s by sixteen times. Indeed, hanging from the ceiling in my hostel, is a sign – alongside ‘I survived KitKat Club’ and ‘The staff are hot!’ – shouting: ‘Berlin is NOT Germany.’ Is that the criteria for a World City, to provoke the cold shouter of its home country in hosting the rest of the world?

As the audience listens to the trials of those who have moved to Berlin from Turkey and Taiwan and upstate New York, I wondered why there are was no testimony from someone who does undoubtedly consider themselves a true Berliner. Perhaps this is addressed at the end of the play where the one actor ‘originally’ from Berlin shouts that she knows where she’s from and doesn’t need to be told about it. Or the very last line of the play: ‘perhaps a Berliner is someone who doesn’t need to talk about it.’ Or perhaps, it is the audience who are considered the Berliners, being taught about the others in their city. Even so, it would have been nice to consider the identity of the author of that piece of graffiti in Kreuzberg.

            In Kreuzberg, from the edge of my hostel’s terrace, I cannot spot the any sign of the sad little wall that wants us out. Smoking next to me is a girl, also looking over the streets and roofs below us.  She lets out a ‘wow’ as she exhales. What do we not see? The view isn’t particularly pretty, but then much of the most spectacular in Berlin isn’t pretty. Not pretty like Paris. Neither does it have the golden grandeur of Westminster, or the crumbling splendour of Rome. Not a pouting, postcard beauty, but the rusting red balconies and swamps of ivy crawling up the building; the stretched stories that play out, frozen yet compelling, on the sides of buildings, provoking the wow of one gratified pilgrim.

‘Auslander Aus!’ one interviewees of ‘Echter Berliner’ had shouted at her once by a group of neo-Nazis. The word ‘Auslander’ has a sound to that is more repellent, than ‘foreigner’ for instance. Or even ‘extrangjero’, verging upon ‘etranger’ where loaded ‘stranger’ and clinical ‘foreigner’ ominously meet. ‘Auslander’ sounds foreboding. So I think of the word ‘Fremd’ and feel welcom here once more.

But what do I not see?

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

English Theatre Berlin - http://www.etberlin.de/

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[1] Jospeh von Eichendorff, ‘Life of a Good-for-Nothing’

[2] Simon Winder, Germania, (Parador, London) 2010.

Ich bin Fremd hier #5

The next day at 5.20 I arrive at Frankfurter Tor. I had been here the week before, walking up from Warschauer Straße in search of ‘East of Eden’. Somehow, immersed in my map and, presumably, looking east, I completely missed the Tor itself. The Tor (essentially a crossroads between the Karl-Marx-Allee, Frankfurter Allee, Warschauer Straße and Petersburger Straße) is wide, and as a premature Siberian wind bellows under the empty blue sky and down the road between the steps and pillars, the two twin buildings of the Tor cold, broad and resolutely stiff in their awkward bulk.  

Built with the specifications to herald the entrance to the first Soviet Boulevard, the twin buildings were completed in 1956 as part of the ‘Stalinallee’, and – so I read on an information board in the U-bahn station below - are good examples of the Stalinist architectural style. With their regularly-dotted, narrow windows and straight edges they resemble great industrial hospitals, rigid and durable in the wind; impressive and scary, with what looks like stretched bandstands on top, emphasising the quadrangular blocks below. I love walking under these buildings, and yet they offer nothing to grasp onto, no connection or way in. No way out. They sit strong while I shuffle backwards, huddling my shoulders inwards. This seems like a completely inappropriate place to hold Pub Crawl meeting. Maybe it was different in the summer.#

Spotting the second-hand clothes shop that Garth had mentioned, I cross the road and look back towards the city and saw the spectacular site of the Television Tower, the Fernstehturm. I think this is the greatest view of the tower that I have yet come across in Berlin, and in weeks to come, hugging myself in the wind as I shuffled to another meeting on the steps, I would have the pleasure of viewing it at dusk.

I find its alien shape magnetic. It is sinister too; a spiked orange on a stick, the inverse of a Christingle. A sparkling bauble speared and sent high up into the sky as a deterrent to joviality and smooth sides. It is technological in its function, not political like squat Big Ben; nor romantic like the Eiffel Tower, or imbued with the hope of the Statue of Liberty. But it is iconic like all of these. Built when Mitte was firmly part of East Germany, it is both magnificent and terrifying and striking me as I cross Frankfurter Tor, I am spellbound, and stop to stare amidst the traffic.

            In his ‘Berlinblog’, Simon Cole writes of the omnipresence of the Fernsehturm – ‘There it is again, as you cross the street. And over your shoulder as you drink a coffee outside. It’s like being shadowed by an impassive silvery spy.’[1]  I thought of this description the following week, wandering down Hermanstrasse, one place where the Fernsehturm is undoubtedly out of sight, when in the corner of my eye I noticed a television pole or something like an electricity pylon sticking up into the sky and I found myself looking up at it subconsciously expecting to see the tower. This has happened a few times as if part of becoming accustomed to living in the city was having the Fernsehturm stuck in the back of your head. Often in sight as well as in mind, to me it has acted as more of a comfort than an anxiety, leading me back to familiarity when lost in the city, and cheering me when I am cold and tired am waiting form my tram on a Friday or Saturday night, when it sparkles and, as Cole writes, ‘this trophy of the former anti-fun state resembles a glitter ball in a decadent disco.’[2]

            

           Small and too awkwardly gadgety to be scary, the World Clock, also found at Alexanderplatz, provokes more confusion than wonder. It is odd to think that at this clock, cut off from the rest of the world, from much of their country and their own capital, East Berliners could see what time it was in the rest of the world, and perhaps try to envisage what was going on in Honolulu and Kathmandu.

In Herr Lehmann, two of the characters, from West Berlin, plan to meet up in at the World Clock when they venture into the East. Why there? Herr Lehmann asks. It’s just what people do. That’s where everyone meets in East Berlin. At the World Clock. Because of this I get very excited when my German friend and I plan to meet ‘at Alex, by the World Clock.’ We may as well have been in a film; it was exactly the same, except that there were no cameras and no script. I was early to the World Clock but for a moment I pretended that I was on time and my friend is late and like the girl in the film I will wait and wait and then someone one else will arrive, a dark figure, the back of their black coat in the foreground of the frame. There is literature elsewhere in Berlin, but here it is cinema. I can see little of Dunble’s Alexanderplatz here.

Though not unlovable, Alexanderplatz is ungainly, and at times, utterly soulless. Especially cold in the winter for its wide open spaces and too concrete and busy for one to enjoy the warmth in the summer. It is confusing in its lack of a clear centre and mass of blocked grey buildings amongst a collection of platzes, a little more disagreeable than the one before, each without a centre to grasp onto, seemingly functioning but disorientating. Big, ugly shopping departments offer warmth and colour inside but display only big neon green capitals to the world: ‘GALLERIA’.  Below, also attempting to brighten the scene, men sell Bratwurst under red umbrellas for under a euro and yellow trams roll past at walking pace as pigeons toddle in front.

Venturing just a little further away out of Alexanderplatz I come across St Martin’s Church which I think is beautiful. Once I heard singing from within and tentatively approach the wide wooden doors. However there was a gruff looking keeper there clutching what looked like tickets, so I walked on. Behind the church I wandered and came across the Neptunbrunnen, the Neptune Fountain. Here the God of the Sea sits triumphant upon a craggy throne, surrounded by little boys with physiques like a wingless Eros but tired and fierce face as if they have just been ripped out of warm sea-weed blankets beneath the surface. Angry little eyes and wailing black mouths – shout furiously, pulling at their brothers’ hair and pushing each other off the rocks to the water below. Young men cling to the little island amongst them, cheekily grimacing fawns from the sea; a tortoise, serpent, dolphin and crocodile shoot water from their mouths upon the salty chaos, splashing over twisted faces and green bulging stomachs, not quite reaching the great Cracken who sits proud and regal over the scene. Four woman with robes carefully designed to slip down their torsos just enough to reveal their breasts, sit at the edge of the fountain,  lazily pouring water from jaugs and vases into the pool, looking away with resigned expressions that say, ‘Boys will be boys …’ Or perhaps, ‘Fucking men!’

When I arrive at the designated meeting steps, Leo is already there, as are Mike and Mo. Garth soon turns up on his bike, trailed by two others, also both called Mike; one from Abergervenny, the other from Leicester. Mike from Abergevenny (Welsh Mike) only began as a promoter that week. He is wearing a trucker cap from under which spring great blond curls. He has a battered cherub’s face, red and round and ruddy, as if he has spent his time not floating on clouds but tumbling down earthy banks and digging in fields.  With twinkling eyes he is habitually smiling and laughing but doesn’t say much. He looks about fourteen. Mike from Leicester (English Mike) has been in Berlin for almost two years which, to the community of lingering back-ex-packers that is building about me, is growing towards an age. It is almost unheard of and imbues English Mike with a mysterious quality. What exactly he has been dong no-one is quite sure. He has promoted for the Crawl over the last two years but only very sporadically. This is his first time back on the steps since May. When asked what else he does he mutters something about cleaning out a Currywurst truck. He is wearing a fluffy hoody under an anorak, but on his feet, in spite of the bitter wind he sports sandals. Garth gives him some discount cards and flyers and points him in the direction of a hostel, and off he walks, mumbling to himself. 

I am to shadow Irish Mike that night, to watch how the promoting works. On the bus up to Ebenswalder Straße he tells me of his work as a promoter that summer, paying a rent of around 270€ a month. This is impressive considering that a promoter is only paid 4€ for every person he brings along to the tour. They work from roughly 7pm to 9pm, not including the trip over to the first bar. So if you bring in 15 people, which was common in the summer, Mike tells me, you are making almost 30€ an hour. I quiz him on how he got his flat, what kind of contract he is on and whether he has a social security number. With little interest and a little irritation, he gives out name of websites I should check out, tripwires I should be wary of and – after some coercion - his own mobile number.

I scribble these down, while he says to me, lazily rubbing off the date-stamp on an S-bahn ticket, ‘But really man, all this stuff – flats, jobs, security numbers - comes together through talking to people, and making friends, not through sending out emails and fannying about on the web.’

Heading into the hostel Mike essentially repeats what Ela said to me the night before.  ‘There is no one way to do this job. Everyone has their own technique, you know. Some go straight in for the kill, others are more relaxed about it. I try and be relaxed. Just grab a beer and get chatting. Go out for a smoke and ask for a light. Sometimes I bring in ten or so people and they have no idea that I’m actually working on the crawl.’

I ask Mike if he had been at the hostel I had stayed in the week before.

‘Yeah, I’m there quite a bit,’ he says, and I recall him sitting with us out on the balcony one evening with Bob and Bobby and Jim, telling us story about his neighbour from home being and MI6 operative. ‘Of course, sometimes I go there when I’m not working.’

In the hostel we manage to pick up four guys from Ukraine. They are friendly, and as we travel back to Friedrichshain they tell me that the people in Kiev are very nice. ‘They will invite you into their houses and you can sit down and eat with them. As long as you are not black.’

In the first bar these boys leave us as we sit with Welsh Mike and Mo. Mo is in good spirits and is Garth’s favourite that night for bringing in fifteen from a hostel in Charlottenberg. He says that one of them is a guy from Canada who runs a start-up based in Budapest that is branching out in Berlin. ‘He has jobs going here. I’m going to meet up with him tomorrow.’ He says to me, ‘If you want I can try and get you an interview.’

Irish Mike talks about his girlfriend who he actually met on the Pub Crawl. She is from the Ukraine and sends him constant texts about dreams she’s had of him kissing her sisters. He tells us these texts only serve to inspire dreams of exactly this nature in his sleep. Mo tells me that he also met his girlfriend on the Crawl. She is from Slovakia and doesn’t appear to be as much trouble as Irish Mike’s who repeatedly cuts into the conversation reading out more messages from her. Mo has no texts to read out and soon leaves us and spends the next half an hour in the corner of the bar chatting to Chuck from Canada about the interview the next day.

At the second bar, the sterile sushi joint, I obediently order my ‘Adios Mother Fucker’ and approach Garth. I try to strike up conversation but I don’t think he is really listening and when Irish Mike walks past, he grabs him by the shoulder and says, ‘Jesus mate – have you seen the little white panties those girls from Melbourne have on!’ I later find myself sitting with these four girls from Melbourne and see that Garth’s chances of getting closer to those little white panties are slim.

‘In Prague, we paid $14 for the Pub Crawl,’ they tell me and the rest of the table. ‘There were fifty of us on it, the first bar was a free bar for an hour, and we ended up in the biggest club in the whole of Central Europe … this sucks man. And in Barcelona …’ they continue to offer us reviews on the pub crawls in most of the biggest cities in Europe. They have been travelling for four months and are connoisseurs. Wondering if they had come across my Mexican friend from Liverpool, I nod along and furiously sip my cocktail.

The four girls leave after this bar just as Garth bounds out of a backroom of the bar with a bottle of vodka in his hand. ‘Who wants shots!’ And everyone leaps up and surrounds him flinging heads back and pushing out tongues for him to pour into their wide open mouths.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

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[1] Simon Cole, Berlin Blog at Bookpacking.com

[2] Simon Cole, Berlin Blog at Bookpacking.com

Ich bin Fremd hier #4

My first week in Berlin comes to a close. Mid-Monday morning I find myself once again traipsing through the streets of the city with my khaki bag slung over my shoulder, packed full of clothes and books and a resentful, unopened Kindle. It is not raining this time.

I have had to leave some possessions at the first hostel. As the check-out time ticked closer – the staff there were uncharacteristically strict about the check-out time –and I struggle to fit in my fairly modest collection of belongings alongside a tub of yoghurt and flyers from Berlin, in a moment of packing fury I flung my 2013 weekly planner and Fraktur copy of ‘Emil und die Detective’ onto Jann’s bed and leave the room. In a couple of days I missed both these items, and others that I didn’t leave intentionally.

 It is only a short distance to the new hostel and with the fresh air of new beginnings blowing upon me I was almost trotting. This hostel is as cheap as the first, but shares few other characteristics. Whereas the first was for drinking, partying and crashing, an extension of – or warm-up for, university halls - the second is a place of feasting and reading and sharing romantic and misty stories in the evening. It was established by two Americans who came to Berlin thirty years ago, loved it so much they moved here, inviting first friends and then friends of friends, and then anyone to come and stay, and share this city with them. I do not spot this mythical couple during my time at the hostel but their mark is everywhere.

           Up grey and grimy stairs akin to that of the first hostel, drafty and empty in an accidental fashion, opening up at the top is a long room that – contrasted with the playpen square that was the entrance to the first hostel – acts as reception, sitting room, kitchen and banquet hall. Rickety wooden cupboards make up the kitchen and large, communal, wooden tables support great smorgasbords throughout the day. This is a place for yoga; hippies and campfires and resounding choruses of Kumbaya. There are many sofas, not bright and squishy but faded and torn and hard in parts where springs have been bent out of place. Free coffee is provided all day, cheerily brewed by the hostel staff who one comes to recognise by the choice of music they play from the tinny stereo player. (One woman grows to become a particular favourite of mine with her selection of popular musicals in German.) The room is incredibly light as one wall is made up completely of big windows, one of which you climb up to and scramble out of to get on to the terrace with plants and benches and bird baths looking over the hub of the U-bahnhof below; traffic lights, and building works, kebab and phone shops offering cheap calls to Turkey.

            
            When I arrive I drop my stuff down in the dorm (sixteen mattresses again, though here they lie empty in the day) and after a second weekly trip to Kaisers I settle down on a table with my laptop, stroke a cup of coffee with one hand, a few readers and scribblers dotted about me, and begin searching for internships.

             My sense of time lapses as patchy internet connection and the complexity of Craig’s List in German tires me. As I am settling into another brown study my ears pick up to the familiar bass tones of Hot Chocolates’ ‘You Sexy Thing.’ Into this drowsy torpor, eyes numbed by the screen, head still echoing with Jean Valjean’s Saxon lamentations, comes something of a world far away, whether it is Top of the Pops in the 70s or The Full Monty or dad’s cassette player. It is only a quiet backdrop but a lone foot begins to silently tap across from me and shortly afterwards a couple of heads start to nod in subliminal approval; a few shoulders begin to bop and one head-nod turns into a soft bounce, like that of a lazy Churchill dog on a dashboard. Eyes look up from books into the middle distance and maps and pens begin to jiggle as with a slight serious pout one of the readers looks around and passed other faces of unabashed enjoyment as the tune takes hold. The beat expresses itself in legs and torsos and mouths indulgently miming the words as eyes catch each other and spur on this communal expression of shared appreciation; an air guitar begins to strum and a silent chorus emerges, as an infectious swagger and strut takes hold in this odd little hostel, taking us home, taking us back.

            Alas, the song fades too quickly and each soon returns to his own little matters. I close the tab on Craig’s List and commence sending emails to loved-ones. As it begins to darken outside I look forward to a comfortable evening and climb out of the window for a cigarette on the terrace. I look over the rooftops of Kreuzberg as the sun sets. As I smoke I recognise the blonde girl sitting down on a bench five feet from me, talking to a chirpy girl called Gerty from Holland. I met Gerty as we struggled up the stairs together that morning. She sports a jungle of curly golden hair on her hard which bounces about her face, like the ears of an excited spaniel, as she nods and grins and squawks in appreciation at the funny world that appears around her. It was a mass of these curls that I first saw, quivering above a great rucksack that appeared to be propping itself up in a corner of the stairwell that morning. Tentatively approaching I came to see the bright red face of Gerty, struggling for air, the other side of the bag that was almost the same size as her. She raised a trembling hand in salute when she saw me and managed to say: ‘Where’s a good dumbwaiter when you need one, eh?’ I wasn’t sure if she was being witty or was muddled over the correct terminology. I asked if she was OK and she said she was and raising herself up from the wall with a grin went to tackle the stairs again, but in the process of passing me, wedged us stuck for a few awkward moments in the narrow staircase, wriggling and apologising. We eventually freed ourselves and were soon tumbling together into reception.

           Back on the terrace, I imagined the girl sitting with Gerty must have been from the first hostel, however as I turn around to head back inside I hear the words ‘pub crawl’ and realise that she was the moody promoter who accompanied Leo and the basset hound the week before.  I turn back around and approach them.

           Introducing myself Gerty cheerily shakes my hand and says, ‘Yes, from this morning – my fellow mountaineer!’ while the blonde girl nodded slowly as she drew on her cigarette. She says, ‘You came on the Pub Crawl last week.’ I told her that yes I did and I had a great time and I was wondering how I would go about becoming a promoter for them. (I had already sent the company a couple of unanswered emails enquiring about work, and then got lost trying to locate their office behind Warschauer Straße.) The blonde girl introduced herself as Ela from Poland and told me that the best way was to come along that night and talk to her boss.

            
           ‘Garth?’

            She nodded. I hoped that my remembrance of the name would be a point in my favour. Ela told me that she was leaving at 9. I said I would see her then and returned inside, wrenching my mood from the lethargy it had been languishing in since my arrival that morning. I bought a beer and aware that Ela was lingering nearby quickly shoehorned my way into a conversation, talking loudly and trying to look like I was irrepressibly sociable and fun-loving and at ease persuading people that they were the same.  I spent the next couple of hours plonking myself down next to people and flittered about the hostel, always smiling, laughing and trying to make them laugh whenever Ela walked by. She sat sulkily in the far end of the room most of the time. I watched as individuals tentatively approached her, even the people from this place drawn to her long blonde hair, ashy-auburn eyes and midnight, Russian, winter hat.

            At 9.15 we set of from the hostel and I skipped my way to the front of the throng and chatted to Ela about the Pub Crawl. She told me that they are no longer allowed to promote at the first hostel because of an ‘incident.’ She doesn’t tell me much but enough for me ascertain that the hostel proprietors had taken offence to the intimidation techniques of the Bulgarian.

          ‘Each have their own methods,’ Ela said, shrugging. She doesn’t smile once when I am with her, and avoids looking at me with her big painted eyes. But I think that I like her, and that given time, like some of the frosty Polish girls I used to work with in Bath, she would come to like me, and we would sit and smoke together and she would smile patronisingly at my frivolity and I would shiver contentedly in her crispy company.

          ‘They told me they were going to fire me after my first week,’ she continues. ‘But then I got lucky and brought in twenty Scottish soldiers.’ 

          As we approach Garth he calls out, ‘Alright guys! Where are you all from!’ And I shout back ‘London!’ and bop excitedly in the crowd as he takes us through the nights itinerary: three bars, one awesome club, free entry, free shots with every drink, litre cocktails, a shisha with the fifth drink you buy, Beer-Pong! Flipcup! 12€ and unlimited return!

         Once all the others have received their wrist bands and been herded inside the bar I approach Garth with Ela and she introduces me and says that I want to become a promoter. Garth casually says ‘cool’ and tells me to come al ong to their meeting the next day at Frankfurter Tor.

        ‘5.30. On the steps by the second-hand clothes shop.’

         ‘I’ll be there!’

          Inside I meet two of the other promoters: Mike from Shannon, who I recognise but can’t place, and Mo from Birmingham. Mike has long ratty hair and a stubbly spotted face. He smells of stale smoke and is wearing odd shoes and a worn-out grey hoody. He is extremely friendly and chatty and with his smiling dry lips and yellowing, misshaped teeth he welcomes me on board the Crawl. Mo, in comparison has a great bushel of jet black hair and smooth skin that glows in the light. He is wearing full winter gear, a big puffer jacket, zipped down just enough to see the multiple layers beneath and the sparkling laminated card that also hangs from the necks of Mike and Ela. He shakes my hand and welcomes me to Berlin, saying that if ever I want to crash at his when I get tired of hostels I am welcome. ‘You can just whack up a camp-bed in my room. Or, hey, if you don’t want to buy one of those, jump in my bed!’ And he laughs. He offers me his number and, despite thinking this is all a bit forward I take it readily.

        ‘The work isn’t bad,’ Mike tells me as we sit down with our discounted beers. ‘It’s a good laugh, y’know. You are essentially just going out to hostels, drinking and chatting with their guests. The girls can be great as well. I’m telling you man, some of the action I’ve had …’ he falls into gruff chuckles shaking his head and smiling. ‘You spend the evening with them and then that’s it! You aren’t going to see them ever again! Unless they come back as Returners which is no good to anyone as no-one gets commission for Returners. One night I told this group of girls from Bruges that I was actually an undercover journalist for a magazine here, writing about the Pub Crawl. That backfired though. They didn’t trust from that moment on. I thought it would be attracted to the whole stealth-thing. But they weren’t having any of it. I tell you though, the girls from Shannon would have gone crazy for that shit!’

         Onwards to the next bar we go, and as the evening progresses with Beer-Pong and more turquoise shots, by the time we reach the club I have fallen into the pleasure of being abroad and the numbing comfort of it not mattering.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

'Echter Berliner !!!! Ihr Nicht Fuck You' at the English Theatre Berlin

Before it was filled with dawdling tourists bending their heads back to look up at the Fernsehturm, and before the U-bahn station and Döblin’s nightlife, and before the enterprising Jews from the eastern marshes arrived and occupied the ‘Scheunenviertel’, what is now Alexanderplatz, home of the World Clock, was a cattle market where outsiders would come to trade their stock and try to make a living. Since the Friesians, still cheap and with space to fill, Berlin has continued to thrive as a ‘Welstadt’, welcoming the rest of the world to its streets, from desperate refugees to the pleasure-seeking wealthy. Kreuzberg over the last twenty-five years has received the king’s portion of this influx, and it is in this kebab and hostel saturated district that a wall can be found sporting the words: ‘Echter Berliner!!!! Ihr Nicht Fuck You’.

It is from this piece of graffiti that Daniel Brunet found the title and inspiration for his piece of documentary theatre staged this month at the English Theatre Berlin, part of the ‘Aliens of Extraordinary Abilities?’ project. Considering what makes a real Berliner, Brunet and the other five in his cast – all from an ‘expat’ or ‘immigrant’ community – interviewed ten people from that respective community, exploring the shared and differing experiencing of moving to and living in Berlin. Together they collected over 115, 000 words, and it is from these testaments, performed on stage verbatim, that Brunet and his cast devised their piece of theatre, asking, what makes and who is an ‘Echter Berliner’?

Brunet commences his production at the Ausländerbehörde, the bureaucracy centre for all foreigners in the city, provoking sensations ranging from tedium to fear. Upon arrival each member of the audience is given a coloured ticket dependent on their country of origin and are curtly informed that ‘There is likely to be a delay in the commencement of the performance this evening’. Indeed, it is not until fifteen minutes after the stated starting time that the first group of coloured ticket holders are lead into the theatre. The mass of Germans, clutching red tickets in their palms, are led into the auditorium last.

Inside we see a sad looking character in Jewish garb, sitting morosely on a stall and rummaging through a plastic rucksack, looking like the lost boy on a school trip. When the play begins, he is joined on stage by the other five actors, including Brunet looking suitably American in baseball hat and aviators, one actress in traditional East Asian wear and another in a Muslim shawl. Each clearly represents not simply a culture, but the stereotype that is cast upon individuals from that culture; that which Brunet is attempting to wrench open. Yet such stereotypes are continually presented on stage to comic effect throughout the evening, whether it is the Turk laying out his tea-set with painstaking care or the proud Yorkshireman with the plumy voice. Because of this, Brunet runs the risk of reinforcing these stereotypes as opposed to breaking them down.

The play continues with irritable accounts of the staff in Starbucks refusing to respond in German, or being constantly asked, ‘No but seriously, where are you really from?’, refracted and repeated by from varying perspectives. It soon becomes apparent that the only thing to be comprehensively broken down and explored is the set. This is principally six wooden frames with paper screens, that are re-arranged, dismantled, toppled, walked through and twisted throughout the evening, representing booths, and doorways, and ironing boards, eventually all brought to the floor and ripped into their component parts. In deconstructing these barriers and boundaries Brunet shows the liberation - or wasteland - that will emerge when stereotypes and assumed differences are offered the same treatment. However by constantly tampering with the set he stalls any pace that the piece may hope to accumulate, and instead of intrigue and insight the audience is offered tedium and weariness. More effort should have been spent on stretching and exploring the question of what makes a real Berliner, achieved through a more nuanced engagement with the interviews and the theatrical versatility of the actors, who in comparison to the six wooden frames come across static. At times it appears that we are simply watching a group of friends gossiping about their travails as they embark on a communal evening of DIY. We are offered brief moments of excitement when a door frame occasionally falls down.

At one point in the production the six sit around a table and push a camera into each other’s faces while they are speaking. This is projected on to the stage, showing a dark and patchy picture of disorientated faces, like an amateur and intimidating interrogation video. This effect is unnerving, particularly when one of the actress recounts being confronted by neo-Nazis screaming ‘Auslander Aus!’ However this section at the table is also stretched out until it loses all drama. When a few muted clips of some of the real life interviews are shown, I wondered whether anything had been gained by presenting these stories in the theatre, and if simply an edited version of the research would have been more powerful.

At the end of the play the cast leave the stage chattering away to each other and one wishes that the audience had as much to chew upon when walking out of the theatre. It appears that the hard work of Brunet and his actors was spent in the conception and embryotic development of the play and not in its deployment. Sixty fingers wriggled into the colour and diversity of Berlin, and when put together on stage, glopped into a bland grey of generic urbanity and common complaints. An interesting result to consider in itself, but not, I believe, the intention of ‘Echter Berliner.’  

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

Ich bin Fremd hier #3

‘Everything is established in London. Here, there is still experimentation! And liberation!’ An artist from Chile is showing me the pictures of plants he has created on his MacBook; skeletal and neon they look more alien than anything of botany. He tells me about patterns and fractals, looking at me with earnest, amber eyes. Curls of silver twist about his tangled hair, down his goaty beard and along his eyebrows. He could be any age and I imagine he always has been and always will be.

He grabs my hand and holds it up. ‘It has flesh! Like this here! The plant is still living! I have not killed this plant. It is still alive today, back at home. ’

I fill the silence that quickly descends and ask more questions about fractals which excite him to the extent that ‘we drink!’ and he trots off to his dorm to bring out some absinth in a glass, blue bottle. ‘Absinth,’ he tells me, while he pours, ‘I have drunk, from this same bottle, at all the very special places in the world that I have been. At the Eiffel Tower, on London Bridge, at the Cordillera de la Costa… and now here with you. Prost!’ And we drink.

More absinthe is poured and I see beyond the Chilean artist, Jann, the big South African, walk morosely out onto the terrace. He sees me and comes over. The night before, Sam and Sammy whipped up fifteen or so of us from the hostel into a frenzy with tales of their exploits anecdotes about High Wickham that silenced stories from Prague and Budapest. Jim from Sheffield, hanging at Sam’s elbow, suggests that we play a drinking game but Sam begins rolling a spliff and tells us he knows something better. He gives a nod to Sammy who goes into the kitchen and brings back a glass and various other accoutrements for the game. After the game, at about midnight, Sam talks of the guy he knows in Golitzer Park and says that he is going to head there later to pick up. I walk with Sam and Sammy into the park and with us comes a skinny guy from somewhere nondescript with darting eyes and a high voice who began twitching as we enter and begins to hiss into my ear, ‘-this is sketchy man, this is fucking sketchy…’

As we enter we lose Sam and Sammy up ahead and are accosted by two latino looking men. One starts bopping his leg up and down between my legs as if to try and trip me up. I’m not quite aware of what is going and the two us hop together onto the grass in a kind of jig, and I catch sight of the skinny guy’s aghast white face as we dance past him. Eventually the bopping stops and I stumble back onto the path.

We head on. ‘Oh man, what was that about? You dealt with that well man! I wouldn’t have known what to do … Jesus this is fucking-’ At this point we are called back and one of the guy is pointing to my phone that is lying in the grass; the phone I’m using in Germany, of which a touchscreen is the most high-tech feature is possesses. I pop back and pick it up thanking him and it is only much later that I realise this phone must have been taken from my pocket and subsequently rejected.

Jann, with his iPhone5, following us into Golitzer Park, was less fortunate. Hours later I found him at my shoulder, keeping pace with my swaying and stumbling on the way to a club in Kreuzberg. He put a heavy arm around my shoulder.

‘Bertie, man, I gotta tell you something …’

‘whatsthat?’

‘I lost my phone. I was mugged! They took my phone …’

‘When?’

‘Tonight. In that park. These three guys surrounded me. And they took my phone man. But shush …. shhhhh - don’t tell anyone. Shusshh man, ye? Just between you and me …’ I was too drunk to feel sorry for Jann but I did in the morning. He sat down with us now and he launched into his day trying to sort out the mess. (He is one of many. A week later a Texan wearing shorts laughs about the same happening to him. ‘Fuck it! I suppose you can’t really say you’ve been to Europe unless you’ve been robbed, can you?’) When Jann gets up to leave I hear the Chilean jabbering the other side of me and I realise that he has been showing me and Jann pictures of plants for the last five minutes. He pours us more absinth and resumes.

I am very happy, sitting here drinking with the Chilean, half-listening to him talking about his art but that morning hadn’t been happy at all. Groggy and more than a little miserable I forced myself to leave the hostel and caught the U1 to Warschaur Strasse with the intention of walking towards Friedrichshain in search of the an English bookshop called ‘East of Eden’. As I got further from the hostel I felt better, and gently began to fall into the city, content in the knowledge that I had a lot of walking in front of me. I love walking through the city, through any city; on foot no one has any reason or interest to stop you. On the pavement you just walk and the houses and the tarmac and the railings were made for walkers like you, and say ‘stay with me, you can keep walking here …’

I have scribbled on to my map that ‘East of Eden’ is off Frankfurter Allee, passed Frankfuter Tor walking away from the city. The television tower must be behind me, this means. I follow my map diligently and find the street on which the shop is supposed to be situated and find no shop but beautiful houses with falling ivy and explosions of graffiti across the building, turning concrete space into that crux that lies between surface and window into another world. Indeed, here the sound of the road is muffled and it appears that I have entered another city. I forego all plans to locate ‘East of Eden’, don’t think about how long it has taken me to get here, how long it will take to get to the next book shop on the list, and walk down the street towards an avenue with a two rows of trees and a pebbled path running down the centre to steps leading up to a small church at the end.

It is Sunday morning and I sit down on one of the benches under the trees.  

A man in loose sky blue shirt and brown trouser pushing a pram slowly down the avenue towards me. He walks slowly and looks about him, his eyes briefly passing over me and then retreated unconcerned and relaxed to hover over nothing in particular. The baby was silent and invisible under white blankets. The man walked slowly with a slight board but content expression. After him comes a woman and her dog, coming down at a quicker pace, the dog skipping ahead while she looked at the screen in her hand. Neither noticed me save for half a sniff in my general direction. A van drives up the avenues and parks opposite me, breaking the quiet for the street, and then silence again for a moment before, the rumble of the men’s voices, a quiet echo of the rumble of the engine, and the clap and swing as they opened up the back of the van and began to unload furniture.

It is true, that there are no foreign countries, just foreign people.  

Here I see a Berlin. That ‘real’ Berlin that I have had glimpses when, for instance, my friend rushes to meet me, late because she got tied up in a meeting at work; or the school children who play football in the playground that hostel balcony look onto. (‘Jesus,’ Jann said to me one morning. ‘There are children in Kreuzberg?’) A Berlin that is functioning like any other city, home to people with lives like those in Paris and London, with work and school. There are no tours to see that city, and it is one with almost complete exclusivity, until you too live in this city. Until you work in the city.

Rising from my bench and thumbing my wind-battered Lebenslauf I yearn to be part of it all. It was a beautiful autumn day, and as I wandered about the pretty streets off Gneisenau Strasse and Sonnenalle and Kottbusser Dam I watch people sitting outside cafes, restaurants and bars, eating and drinking and laughing. It looked beautiful and I saw myself sitting with them relaxing after a week of work and retiring to our favourite spot in the city and complaining about things like construction on the U-bahn and negligent landlords. But as I passed each table German words mocked my incomprehension and attacked my spirit. The chirping voices on my BBC Learn German Disk (Kann ich hier deise Reisencheck erinlosen?) were not from here. The people weren’t welcoming me with breezy, languid directions. The voices are no more Berlin than I am   

The light was beginning to fade when I came across a great gothic church. I wasn’t sure where I was and as yet haven’t been able to locate this church again: I was somewhere in between a pub in Charlottenburg and a theatre in Kreuzberg. I decided to stop and sit, and went up to the great gothic building that reminded me of the castle in Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’. It was scissored by two roads where cars and bikes sped past, and looked resentful and sulky at what had grown up around him.

Old churches, like old pubs, I love, and hold a presence that I find hard to feel in building such as the Reichstag or Big Ben, impressive architecturally they may be. Imagining Stresseman drafting laws or Churhcill or Disraeli’s speeches, or even the lighting of the Reichstag fire of the Gun Powder Plot aren’t as accessible as simply thinking at the doors or a pub or church: who has walked through these doors to sit inside? What murder and conception and skulduggery happened here? How many students, travellers, artists and pilgrims have arrived at these doors seeking sanctuary and comfort from the road?

The Reichstag, Big Ben and the like are to look at - you can’t see the Eiffel Tower from the top of the Eiffel Tower. But confronted by this church here with only an imagined history what is best to do is to go inside, and if closed – as this was - but to sit on its steps, and feel place your hand on its cold stone – picking up a pebble if there is one - and join the many that have come before.

Back on the terrace that evening I don’t recognise many people. Sam and Sammy are nowhere to be seen. Jim from Sheffield left that morning for Amsterdam; the Swiss sisters were going home that morning as well, and camp Barry had caught a flight to Munich the day before. Joseph and his girlfriend had returned to the UK.

I sit down on a table with includes four Israelis and an Australian who attempts, seriously, to speak Hebrew to them, and cites his Syrian heritage every few sentences. Soon it is too cold for the Israelis. They head inside followed by the Australian and I am left with the Chilean artist. 

 ‘Tomorrow I will drink it at the Berlin Wall,’ he smacks his lips. ‘Very good yes? Very special drink absinth. You an artist, I can see that! Like me, you are an artist! And together we drink to art, and the city. Of course, it is not completely right. If we could be like Baudelaire and drink with opium. Then we would be ready to create art!’

He falls into a gabbled Spanish and I begin to laugh. He begins to laugh also, for no apparent reason other than I am, and that we can, and that we are together and there is really no reason not to, and now we have started, no reason to stop.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013