‘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
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