berlin, past present future
Dear Y,
I just returned to Paris after three weeks away, and I'm late on writing two letters to you. I realized it was impossible to write, work, and live fully so short travels of four, five, even seven days, so I saved my writing on Berlin and Athens for later. today, I will tell you about Berlin.
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Berlin, past present future
I found a quiet love for Berlin as soon as I arrived. love not because the city charmed me with its beauty, or seduced me with its pleasures and possibilities; love not because of what Berlin offered or suggested or proposed to me, but love in an intuitively feminine way. love because of how Berlin made me feel.
that first day, it was blue sky weather. I got off the S-bahn from the airport, waited outside for a tram, and felt this sense of inexplicable ease. it was brisk and cold, but time felt airy, light, breathable. the streets were wide, looked old and new at the same time. there was an abundance of sky and a sense of collected quiet. that evening, I walked to the grocery store in the rain and back, looked towards the warm glow inside shops and cafes, waited at stoplights on empty street corners as if I’d been inhabiting the city for years. I recognized my Berlin life before I even began to live it — this feeling of a lived-in solitude, darkness without gloom: rainy weekends with Rilke and Chopin, eating large slices of black forest cake, tending to an indoor garden of thorny plants, seeing no one, and feeling very good about it.
my love for Berlin came from a feeling of frictionless-ness: as in, Berlin felt like a city where things worked, and people had a matter of fact calm; an air of acceptance — towards life, themselves, the “other”. I didn’t have to try so hard — to be anything or anyone — in order to exist. the city did not impose on me with any particular force or gravity — it did not pressure me to be busy and almost-famous the way New York did, nor to submit to the narcissism of French culture the way Paris did, nor to fit into the civil, organized collections of life the way London did. Berlin acknowledged me, and then it simply let me be; left me alone in a kind way, alone in a comfortable silence with myself. and so I was grateful for this. I felt a love that needed no proving.
on a Friday afternoon, I wandered through the Turkish market and tasted a bit of everything: drank Turkish tea and ate figs (an entire box for three euros), devoured a flakey spinich gözleme and then a strawberry sweet thing, ate a vegetable platter while barely sitting; then passed by tables drifting with the scent of palo santo, a table of honeycomb cotton Turkish towels, a stand of olives and feta cheeses, a table of curved knives and scary blades of all sizes, and thought, I would never see knives like this in the States (then thought: forget the States. with each new city, those states recede further and further away from me, like an abandoned island). here, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of exotic familiarity; a strange sense of home. and so I loved Berlin more because Berlin was also a portal; Berlin allowed me to dream of Istanbul.
that afternoon, a new friend told me that Berlin is a good place for hedonism — or to be a monk, if you choose. if the attitude in Germany is why would you do that, the attitude in Berlin is why not?. so she told me about sex clubs and dark rooms where you go and it’s pitch black, and you simply grab a body to fuck. Germany is very repressed, she said, and so the pendulum needs to swing to the other side, too — people need an outlet. so that’s the place where anything goes. I asked her what people wear to sex clubs. I wear fetish wear, she said, and then she showed me a picture.
I didn’t go to any sex clubs. instead I danced tango, and on my first night out, I left feeling robbed. even after four days, I found few Berliner embraces to hunger for. I decided that it didn’t matter; I would consider my five days in Berlin as no more than a first date. all I was looking for was a reason to return.
and I did. I found it in my first moments, and I found it in my last. but before I tell you about the latter, I’ll admit: I loved the idea and mythology of Berlin as much as the lived experience of it. I felt empathy for a city that experienced so much trauma, guilt, and shame — a city forced to reinvent itself from rubble and ashes, with humility and openness and an anything-goes attitude.
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