Musings from The Hague
Berlin, my old friend. It's time someone told you, and as someone who's seen you on and off for about twenty years now I guess I feel obliged to give you the truth, difficult though it may be to fathom: you're losing it. Difficult to say what 'it' is, I guess. Call it spontaneity, call it open-mindedness, I'm not even sure. For decades, you weren't quite finished: people living inside you had to be constantly aware of changing circumstances, had to adapt to a city that would morph around them as they went about their lives, sometimes changing quicker than they did. I used to walk through your streets in the 1990s, and every few hundred meters there was a hole where a house had once been. It had been bombed away, caved in after decades of GDR neglect or just torn down because of property speculation. But the holes were filled in, streets faces became complete again and their tattered past only remained in my memory, and that of other Berliners.
Ah, yes, your inhabitants. The typical Berliner could once be typified as working-class, cynical, sharp-tongued - and usually unemployed. But that has also changed. Much of your innards now appear to be dominated by people that put their brand of sunglasses above their livelihood - or survival. Bikes with an alarming lack of stopping power shout you to the side, and the family neighbourhood supermarket is gradually replaced by bead string stores and topical T-shirt vendors. Unfortunately, most of this takes place with an alarming lack of humour: the 'old' Berliners don't involve in this sort of behaviour, and the Swabians that do wouldn't recognise irony if it farted them in the face. And if they grow up, they appear to be mainly preoccupied with reproduction, perpetuating their selfmade cocoon into the public space, ignoring everything and everyone around them and using their buggies as a means of communication - mainly conveying: 'don't you dear prostrate yourself upon me or my children'. Not in the darkest days of the GDR overlords would you have seen a child on a swing with a bicycle helmet; but the sight is all too common these days, a consequence of the misapprehension that children are fragile egg-shell like things that can be shielded from any risk, any adventure even. So gone are the spaces where they may just enjoy themselves, away with anything that might - might! - pose a risk. Complacency is setting in: the existential crisis that was so much part of the years after 1990 has ebbed away. And your liberal spirit, your alternative scene, has become one of those many commodities, a marketable item that you're selling to the tourists, who lap it up in droves. You've become a common German city. A big one, to be sure, but not all that different from Frankfurt or Munich. Your mayor is driving around in the biggest armored car in the country, the ultra-right and ultra-left have become fringe nuisances instead of big problems and there's only the old communists of the SED (PDS, Linke, etc.) to remind us of your history. And I quite understand. For years, people have been telling you how much history there is everywhere, to the point that you became thoroughly sick of it. The wall went away, the Palast went as well and let's be honest, the fact that the Holocaust monument turned out to be a playground suited everyone very well. You have had your day as a free haven, and you yearn for peace and tranquility. Away with Kaisers, nazis, bombardments, dictatorships, building cranes and arguments about which little pictures of men should be in traffic lights: let tranquility set in.But I won't be with you. You see, for me you were never just a city: you were a home. A home that was tied to a critical period in my life, one in which I fled from the sheltered existence of university life for the first time. And I want to remember you in your prime, as something of an experiment, something you were never quite sure of. Of course, you were also unreliable, you had tantrums and your could be crudely unforgiving. But most of all your were always enormous fun. And that fun, my dear Berlin, is the price you have paid for your ease of mind.
May your rest in peace.
"Do me one of those Adimas shoes. Our street is very dull. Some prostitutes might liven it up a bit". Spotted in Leicester, UK
Tried Facebook. Didn't like it. Might be great for some people, it's not for me. But I did give Twitter a serious go. Twice, in fact, and for about a year in total now. The problem is that I honestly have heard virtually no one say anything that struck me as particularly revealing or surprising in that time. Of course, there is as much stupidity and intelligence as you'll find elsewhere on the web. But most of Twitter is, most of all, shockingly banale. And what's worse, there's an inordinate amount of time you have to invest to get even the smallest bit out of it.
Translation: 'Advances in wireless telephony'. From the Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, 1910.
