Berlin Diary

Avoiding the Love Parade

7/7/00: I touch down at Tegel airport with the grim knowledge, gleaned too late, that I should have postponed this sabbatical by just a few days. Only in the waiting area at Frankfurt for my Berlin connection had I noticed the clusters of suburban Yanks adopting exaggerated postures and looking very, very special. The silver-clad women's bleached or hennaed locks were arranged into fountain-jets by way of plastic grips; the men's buzzcuts were dyed into suspiciously logo-like patterns. Their self-conscious behavior indicated that they usually didn't dress or act this way?that this was for a special event. Then it hit me.

The Love Parade?the annual techno-dance festival Berlin has been hosting since 1989, attracting partyers from around the world. Why didn't I plan ahead? Why did I have to arrive in Berlin right before the city became a maelstrom of watered-down hipness, a quagmire of compromised unorthodoxy? Now, I reckon, I'll have to slice through undulating slabs of humanoid locusts just to cross the street. The bars will all be clogged with twits, and drug-wary customs officials will make getting out of Tegel interminable.

Or perhaps not. Customs, for whatever reason, is a breeze, and from the cab window leaving the airport I detect relatively few signs of the looming Love eruption. I've underestimated Berlin's immensity?at eight times the size of Paris, it's a space vast enough to absorb a few such rallies without smothering the dissenters.

Even so, adroit maneuvering will be needed this weekend to elude the bad. Darius James (expatriate novelist; author of Negrophobia and That's Blaxploitation; currently shaven of head) will know how.

7/8/00: Charlottenburg is Berlin's poshest zone, but only vaguely analogous to the Upper East Side. It is precariously close to the avenues in Tiergarten where millions of paraders will converge in uniform bliss tomorrow. Hence it's impossible to evade the occasional preliminary reveler-hordes as Darius and I trudge northeast in search of dinner. We venture through the area around Kantstrasse laden with Russian mafia-controlled lap-dancing joints (again, Berlin doesn't really have its own Upper East Side).

We're joined by a Mexican-American ex-skateboard-enthusiast who's just passing through and will escape by train late tonight. As we pass by the tip-draining lust parlors, I posit that there must exist those who fetishize the physical act of giving cash to their objects of desire. Darius agrees, citing cases he's known firsthand. Then our friend comments: "It's better than wiping yo' ass with yo' money. Why wipe yo' ass with it when you could give it to a lay-dee?" This statement's peculiar logic will perplex me during the weeks to come, especially when I run out of toilet paper.

Nearly every partyer on pre-Parade patrol toots aimlessly at a plastic whistle. These whistles all appear identical, conceivably pressed from the same mold. In fact, they all make exactly the same noise. I hark back to the smorgasbord of different fireworks sold here over New Year's when I visited in December, then further back to the many and diverse shapes and sizes of fart-churns used by holiday celebrants in Spain. You don't have such choices with these present noisemakers.

Strolling past the Charlottenburg Bahnhof, we see and hear that the station is stuffed with funsters partying to the blandest possible techno?all decked out in lookalike garb and all making noises with the same goddamn whistles. Witnessing this, it doesn't surprise me that recent electronic music by more disgruntled Germans is often arrhythmic, through-composed and stylistically mercurial. A marked contrast to this scene, which despite the hype is all about repetition and conformity: one hairdo for each gender, one uniform, one plastic toy and essentially one insipid beat to bob up and down to for hours on end. That's Love.

Several sausages later, we've ended up at a bar that supposedly retains some clientele from Charlottenburg's days as an anarchist hot spot. Even if it doesn't, there are no Love Parade types here. We drift into conversation with a man in his late 40s who identifies himself as a Berlin-based Scottish explosives dealer. His bearing is militaristic, and he does speak English with a Scots accent, although I would have thought him German otherwise. His story: he was stationed here with the British army in the late 70s and hooked up with enough business connections that it made sense to stay put after his discharge. He gripes about the general tardiness of Americans when paying for his product (he apparently doesn't discriminate along political or ideological lines). It seems that backwater, non-UN-protected dictatorships are far more likely to pay on time, lest they gain reputations as deadbeats and be denied further shipments of what they so greatly need.

There's something else connected to this business of his that he can't tell us about (so he claims) because it would jeopardize his and his clients' security, as well as our safety should we know about it. He needn't worry: the multiple steins of Jever are taking their toll, and I can't remember half of what he's deemed safe to tell me anyway.

8/4/00: I'm back with Darius at the old anarchist bar. Our explosives-dealer friend arrives, gives us only the slightest nod, then retires to the far end of the room, out of earshot. His head is covered with long, scabbed-over lacerations, giving the impression that he has been chain-whipped.

Darius: "That mo'fucka's no Scot. He's with organized crime. Maybe Interpol."

The Witch Bar

7/16/00: Neukölln, the district where my sublet is located, appears to be former West Berlin's main non-boho working-class neighborhood. In the years following reunification, tolerance among former Westerners and the various (predominantly Turkish) immigrant populations has steadily increased. Cynics or realists might argue that this has been at least partially spurred by continued East/West antagonism between Germans; nonetheless, one can see West German and immigrant Berliners mingling, or at least peacefully coexisting, in this community's less hermetic spots.

One such place is the Körnerpark, a gravel pit transformed (1912-'16) into a sunken, faux-Baroque terraced garden. It's within spitting distance from my apartment on Nugatstrasse, and I go there often to read. On Sunday, a quartet plays salon music in the late afternoon, and children of all ethnicities can be seen frolicking together on the central plot of grass as their parents lounge on benches or at covered tables near the orangery. The park closes at sundown and is pitch-black until dawn, since it is entirely unlit and, being recessed, is denied all light from the streetlamps and neighboring buildings. This poses no hindrance to the fun-loving Turkish youths who don black-market infrared goggles, sneak down the stairs and cavort in the absolute darkness, all night long, doing Wotan knows what.

Another neighborhood cornerstone is the pub, or Kneipe, just a few addresses up from my building. Families with children stop there in the daytime to relax on the outdoor plastic furniture (weather permitting). But at night it becomes a morsel of Walpurgisnacht trapped in amber for further reference: a septic, profane grotto for working-class alcoholics.

On a sign over the door there's a traditional broom-riding crone and, in Gothic script, the words "Hexen?Baller?Bude," or "Witches?Billiards?Booths." Inside is a dingy cavern sculptured from carved wood and slot machines, its walls riddled with long-accrued paraphernalia such as: Yankee license plates; antique, pornographic beer ads; countless trophies without plaques or inscriptions; ceramic poodles and pretzel-shaped wine bottles perched on sconces; hack paintings of idealized people in dated clothes groping each other; mounted, moth-eaten beast heads; framed photos of semiconscious former patrons, and like curios.

But the foremost exhibit is the frozen swarm of wizened, carbuncular witches on broomsticks, each crafted by a different hand, suspended by long threads from the ceiling. There are enough of them (in addition to the odd pedestrian hag on a counter or window ledge) not only to create an identity but to suggest a purpose. I'll see other Hexen-hütten during my stay in Berlin, but those others are just ordinary German taverns with a few witch ornaments. This is different: here an already grotesque interior is dominated by these hellcats, such that they seem the key elements in effecting a charm. But what sort of charm?

I get oblique or unenlightened answers from the regulars regarding the witches, although all agree that they make the bar unique. Even the owner can't help, but I'm interested to learn that he's a Jordanian immigrant. He and a few fellow countrymen can be seen here on a given night, along with Turks, the German majority and whoever else stumbles in. The peaceful unity endures even when we witness a vanload of police drag a screaming woman out of the building across the street one night at about 2 a.m.?for the Witch Bar regulars, it's just another example of "Deutschland Polizei Stadt" and an opportunity to ridicule some cops. But it doesn't spark any heated arguments.

A visitor might at first glance think of this bar as a humbler version of Klo, that famous pub across town that serves up urine-beakers of beer within a lavish forest of scatological clutter. But Klo is extroverted by nature: an edificial dirty joke pandering to curious tourists. Its crowd changes every night, whereas the Witch Bar was created by and for a certain community. As that community develops and varies, the dangling crones work to maintain its harmony with their potent spell of hooch and sleaze. All the same, it's strange that I haven't noticed any East Germans here.

8/14/00: Well, I've enjoyed my times at the Witch Bar, but I think last night was my final visit. A towering, obese Austrian man covered with prison tattoos kept me in a corner for more than half an hour as he attempted to explain the merits of Jorg Haider. He may be back. It was fun while it lasted.

The Long Night of the Museums

8/26/00: Twice a year, Berlin keeps its museums open way into the a.m., during which time visitors may drink openly and profusely. This amusing tradition has so far not resulted in serious damage to any exhibits, but it does guarantee a quality night of compare-and-contrast fun, as the discriminating spectator gets to watch pilsner-sodden knaves mimic, in posture and expression, the subjects of nearby Breughels, Picassos or forensic displays. But tonight I'm not headed for the classic galleries. Tonight's chosen cultural faux pas will be utterly contemporary: a multilevel mini-exhibition held in the Allianz, the city's tallest and most antiseptic monolith.

I've decided to drink absinthe with every artist represented. Now produced (I'm told) only in Spain and points former east, absinthe is not strictly legal in Germany, but at least one shop up in Hackescher Markt employs arcane loopholes to sell all extant brands of this venerable poison. Tonight, I'm armed with half a bottle of bile-colored spirits as I scale the ornament-bereft concrete ramp toward the rotating crystalline entrance-mandibles of the Allianz.

The elevators already inform on the Dr. Mabuse-like infiltration of kunst, being covered from floor to ceiling with blazing incandescent strips of tape applied in op-art fashion by German artist Birgit Ramsauer. I stop off first on floor 2 and immediately confront the volatile, near-abstract panoramas of painter Susanna Heller. Her work seems to complement or critique the Godzilla's-eye view through the facing windows of the Treptower suite, the river Spree and environs. She claims the absinthe makes her tongue numb.

The abstract canvases of Yang Yin?actually hybrids of canvas with textile, paper and industrial materials?are strangely in sync with the steel vs. beige color scheme of the Allianz interior. Yet her surfaces, when examined, betray the traits of advanced, highly personal creative work: application of hard-won craft; trial and error; investigation. Yang is appropriately both industrious and investigative in her approach to absinthe drinking, preferring to mix minute portions of it with stillwasser in a plastic bottle cap. She claims to like the result.

The exhibition's second half is all the way up on floor 22. Here the crowds collect in healthy gobs to gawk at the best skyline view south of the Reichstag. But blocking their glee in all of one room's windows are Luke Murphy's brutally spartan, presentation-size charts and diagrams. Like a clump of white blood cells doing their job too well, they clog the interior, reflecting the fluorescent urinal-light and denying attention to anything else. They look like ordinary statistical maps, but the harsh blandness only exacerbates the content: "Gullibility vs. Precision"; the fractal expression of fear; the gradient slope of "Obligate Sickness and Necessary Redemption." These are the hypnagogic winces, the suppressed bipolar dribblings of anyone who has had to stage a lecture in a building such as this, and they belong here. Murphy himself takes his absinthe in hearty slugs. Is it any wonder he doesn't shun the strong stuff?

By 1:30 a.m., the absinthe is gone. After extensive prowling, I bid the Allianz a wistful goodbye and cab to the Museum für Naturkunde for a good half hour of watching people behave like idiots beneath a brachiosaurus skeleton, then head off to a still-hopping party near Schlesisches Tor, where Dusseldorf moonshine far more toxic than absinthe is served and statuesque women wait in line to argue with me.

Ruptures, Scars and New Beginnings

10/5/00: Viewing Berlin from an overhead S-Bahn reminds me of a recurring dream?or related suite of dreams?in which the planet's mass has increased but its population has stagnated. Urban areas, now free of congested zones, sprawl in all directions. Decaying splendor, eccentric renovations, shiny new artifices and gutted ruins coexist on any given city block. There are great all-night snack-food joints everywhere.

Berlin's repeated traumas over the past century have despoiled its Old World charm and measurably decreased its conventional beauty. The depression following World War I; the bombings of World War II; division during the Cold War; the subsequent reunion?each alone would suffice to distort a city's identity. Each time, there was no choice but to reinvent. Yet Berlin today is neither a prefab capital sans history nor a plastic replica of its former self. The wake of each crisis saw competing teams of city planners eager to cast their ideal metropolises over the yawning spaces and doomed structures riddling the town. No single vision triumphed, or could triumph, over such a vast area in a democratic situation. The result is instead a melange of modernist fads, Schinkel relics, tactile philosophies and still-barren intervals of grass and rubble.

Increasingly, those unused lots are swarming with diligent cranes and tractors. This is only sensible. But once every square meter of Berlin is developed, then what will remain of that peculiar urban gusto, that schizoid coziness that even today's global monotony has not wholly smothered? I have come to believe that this sense of uncertainty should be preserved like any tangible treasure.

In these past few months, I've often been struck by Berlin's incongruous yet seemly adaptation of older surroundings into new contexts. At a modern architecture retrospective inside the still-unrenovated Neues Museum, I glimpsed crumbling sham-Egyptian frescoes beyond the struts of the exhibit's sleek temporary housing. The Caffe Burger?an enduring boho beacon in the once-communist, then hip, now yupscale district of Prenzlauer Berg?stubbornly retains its pre-'89 flavor in its impossibly tawdry wallpaper, fixtures and nightly programs. Its stamina attests to a seamless transition from volatile subversive symbol into codified artifact. The Maria am Ostbahnhof down in Friedrichshain is another GDR relic, but it has been completely made over from post office to nightclub. This two-story monolith of stark concrete feels like a bunker built for pleasure. A large intact chunk of the old Berlin wall facing the club seems preserved specifically for the clubgoers' delectation.

On other nights out I discovered arbitrarily selected host structures for one-off events. Here the clash between the venues and the happenings betrayed the feebleness of an ideology when it's invested into functional public works. This was especially the case with a colorful blaxploitation party held at a bleak former GDR pavilion. Was this intentional irony or simply a shrewd usage of available resources? It worked either way.

There is a definite and admitted thrill to be had from witnessing Berlin change once again. The gentrification of former eastern zones isn't so appetizing (first Mitte, then Prenzlauer Berg; now they're working on Friedrichshain), but everywhere is evidence of exciting new developments?of disparate architectural firms racing vigorously to fill in the gaps; to repeat the controversial success of Potsdamer Platz. I've peered at dozens of coffee-table books put out in the last two years or so, all crammed with neo-utopian proposals for the city. Berlin is thriving and it must evolve. So much of it, even now, looks half-finished, awaiting completion.

But Berlin should never be completed. The physical stasis that defines or preserves the glory of most major Western European cities has no application here. Berlin's splendor is flux. It is not a fossil, but a living and evolving organism that periodically regenerates itself. There were three or four different Berlins in the 20th century alone, and closure is still not an option. The capacity to become something else is what makes it remain Berlin.