Großstadt Spaziergang

inspired partially by Alfred Döblin’s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, partially by impressionistic poetry read in our literature class, but mostly by our Lit professor Mrs. Opitz-Weimer, who begs us to write, write, write everything that we see.

A man walking on the street. Beginning of Torstraße, near Chausseenstraße. Camping pack, plastic bag, hat with a wide rim and heavy rimmed glasses. Short. He is talking on the phone in English, with an American accent, the kind that is nice to hear. Reminds one of clean bathrooms and efficient customer service. The man walking on the street has clearly finished a secondary education in a fairly good private university somewhere. Perhaps RISD. He is giving a friend love advice.
But the binary element…the binary element…that you present. In this situation…a paradigm…a connundrum…The binary couple between the two of you, tangent to how you define…
Here we lose track of what he is saying. He has stopped to try and open the door to a shop. The shop is already closed, so he catches up with us again.
Be it either engaged or married. The artist…he produced dedicated art, after breakup…would draw on sketchboard, tear out every page, but they were beautiful…of couples…men emmasculated while naked body woman lying…love….this thing…love is always combative. In every relationship one is in control while the other one…
He is heading from somewhere and knows his way around the streets, eventhough his German probably leaves much to be desired. He is an artist, and has been to an exhibit or an art fair, where many other people like him talked the way he is talking.
yes, it was tiring…I am so exhausted…well, yes, you know artists…oh, you are on Kastanienallee?
Here he looks around. We are on Rosenthalerplatz by now, Kastanienallee is a couple of blocks north, but it runs the entire length of Prenzlauerberg, it could take him half-an-hour yet before he reaches his destination and his plastic bag looks heavy. His legs are not very long so he takes two steps more per meter than most of us do.

A gallery opening in Kreuzberg. Photographs of New York City in the early eighties when it was still gritty and hard, like contemporary Berlin. Dead spaces, sites halfway between construction and destruction, naked men and candid policemen. Cities are like stars, they go through cycles. They do not all burn the brightest at the same time, and by the time we notice from far away, it’s too late. Berlin is now where New York was at a couple of decades ago, and where Vienna was about a century ago. Will these cities rise again, or will they continue to slowly turn to sand?
A man, short and old, with heavy-rimmed glasses. Also American, by the sounds of it. Contained in compact packaging.
…and sex that was public…the people…It all changed in 2001. 2001 was the turning point…the electric cards that you need to get into banks…surveillance and now it’s all different in the City. One can hear the capital C.
We stand outside, slightly to the left of the door, where the radiator warms our calves. We have shitty white wine in a plastic cup, bought for 1€ downstairs, where another exhibit was also opening. The one downstairs was about gay porn though, so we did not stay long.

So perhaps that is the experience of Berlin. This is how one lives big cities. Not by searching out the locals necessarily (who would they be? The postmen, the ticket-controlers on the BVG, that is the public transportation, perhaps?) but rather those who have chosen to live here for the same reasons that you have. The city breathes and lives and we all feel its pulse, without having to bend down to the ground to check every time whether it is still alive. No, you feel it resonate as soon as you hit the gleis (track) at the Hauptbahnhof (Central Trainstation), you adapt so that you move to its rhythms as well. As Lore Lotte described, one has that exhilarating feeling of holding one’s finger against the pulse of the future.

The skyline, far away, the Fernsehturm. Berlin’s Number One Landmark. Maybe not the smartest ideas to go for a walk with a bike that has no light and the night falling fast. End up farther from the familiar than was expected. But there in the distance, black cut-out against the bruised peach sky: the Fernsehturm. Unbeleivably ugly from close up, but from far away, the Kleines Schwarzes (little black dress) of Berlin.

A fleamarket on Boxiplatz. It’s Sunday and an empty stomach. Lean in closer, steady the wobbly wooden table with your hand. Yes, you pull your freezing dry fingers out of your pocket and place them on the edge of the table, so it doesn’t move. You glance up and the photographer who is displaying his work looks you straight in the eyes, through his half-inch glasses. Dankeschön, he says, and you smile. You want to say ‘You’re welcome’. On the spot, you’ve forgotten what the German word is. A smile will have to suffice. Lean over the wobbly wooden table and stare at the small prints. They contain more than most of the photographs at this market, you can suddenly see the city through his eyes. As you gaze from one picture to the next, you realize that you have a similar way of seeing the city of Berlin. You can’t explain it, but there’s something there in the photographs that you have seen as well. So you smile again at the photographer (you can tell he’s the photographer by the way he stands close guard over his pictures), still unable to express the thought in German. His pictures are put up against a wooden background, roughly painted with a brush more suitable for doing an extra whitewash cover of the garage than a work of art. They are small and square and you walk away. But the thought still haunts you that Berlin has been seen by others, many others. Berlin has amassed a palimpsest of visitors, artists, writers, watchers, flaneurs, and you are just another scratch.

And to round off, a quote from my friend Ryan Day: “Though we are half a world away, though an ocean separates us from the homeland, the motherland, the fatherland, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, we have all come to look for America. We have all made the same mistake—some misguided student’s attempt at finding himself. We chase ourselves with airplanes, busses and trains only to realize that what we seek can only be found in America. Only to realize that what we seek, we could never escape anyways.” Perhaps a little negative, but the question remains: what have we come here for, and where will we find it? In the S-Bahn? Our neighbours’ windows? Underneath the bridges that arch over the Spree? In the Besetzter Hauser (the squats that Berlin is famous for), or the libraries?