There would be no solitude for me here, it turned out. To my right sat two convivial guys from Spain pulling on a massive joint. And to my left sat a pale, slightly scruffy guy about my age, with dark hair, dark eyes and glasses, and a look of sincere, pensive focus, scribbling with a fountain pen in what appeared to be a well-worn journal. I eyed this young man surreptitiously. I did not walk up to him or touch his shoulder. I did not say “Hey.” I did not attempt to curate or direct. I was tired. I sighed, and I scrawled a heartfelt elegy to Kafka in my terrible German, which I ripped out of my artisanal travel journal and stuck under a rock below his headstone, where it joined a few dozen just like it. The guy eventually got up and left. We never so much as made eye contact.
The next morning, as I rumbled my suitcase over the cobblestones in Old Town Square on my way to the train station one last time, I heard the dulcet tones of all-caps American English. Sure enough, right there in my path was the How Many Hours girl from the train, brown corduroy skirt as fetching as ever, hair once again an immaculate cascade of corkscrew curls just grazing the small of her back. She was deep in conversation with a coterie of cute slack-jawed British guys, explaining to them what a “serious dive” her hotel was. I couldn’t help but think that I’d have been better off spending the past few days hanging out with her, skimming her British-guy castoffs, none of whom would dismiss my prose as Kafkaesque (because none of them would give two shits about my artisanal travel journal, or know what that word meant), and all of whom probably knew how sex worked.
Four months later, back at college, I got a curious postcard with a UK stamp. On it was a deftly detailed, Victorian-style narration of an encounter with a prodigious street violinist. The music, the train-station guy wrote, was so enchanting because it “swirled about the unsayable.” I thought twice, but I didn’t answer, and the textual intercourse ended there.
5.
Ostalgie
n. longing for the good old days of the German Democratic Republic, from east and nostalgia.
ex. All the Ostalgie in the world is no match for a sink-shower combo.
When I returned from my summer abroad in 1995, I had somehow managed to become a bit more conversant in German, though still, for some reason, not magically fluent. Still functionally illiterate in the language of my new college major, that meant there were no more compact-dictionary achievement awards for me. In fact, sophomore year every other German major got one except me, because my achievements had been terrible, and as a first-semester junior they only got worse. The remaining faculty in the German department, it seemed, did not have the reverence for my intellect that Professor Martin did. Either that, or they were justifiably annoyed that I refused to make the effort required to read things like E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann,” a story about a sexy lady-robot who walks around going Ach, Ach (and possibly some other things; all I understood was Ach, Ach and the word Automat). But didn’t these profs understand that it would be useless to make all that effort when I was going to spend the second half of my junior year in Berlin? And this time it would be different. I would make German friends. I would get a German boyfriend! (For linguistic purposes, natürlich.) I’d come home fluent without trying, ready to write my trenchant senior thesis on Kafka, also, I assumed, with minimal trying—so why did everyone insist I keep trying all the time? It was exhausting. Who was it who said that if your work feels like “work” you have the wrong job? I didn’t know (as looking it up would have required work), but that person was wise as hell. I chose Kafka because I loved him. Like most twenty-year-olds, I was fairly certain that real love didn’t take work. I chose a German major because I had a gift for language learning, and gifts meant you didn’t have to do anything. Right? Why hadn’t all these functional adults around me figured that out?
I packed for my six-month trip at my parents’ house back in Oregon while watching Shallow Grave, the movie where a baby-faced Ewan McGregor and his two flatmates find a briefcase full of cash under macabre circumstances and end up trying (sometimes with success) to kill and dismember each other. It was my favorite film at the time, not because of its Chaucerian cautionary tale about money (I hadn’t done well in my Chaucer seminar), nor even because it exemplified the psychopathic self-interest inherent in all young adults, but simply because I had a blinding crush on Ewan McGregor’s underweight, pasty, track-marked character from Trainspotting, Mark Renton. I was far too chickenshit to try heroin, but my spirit was, I insisted to myself, properly Rentonian, as I sat folding clothes into my gargantuan suitcase with an uncharacteristic amount of patience and care, hopped up on four Tylenol-3 tablets, the kind with codeine.
Some of my more earnest college friends had turned me on to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and since to me embarking upon six months as an exchange student in Berlin was pretty much the same thing as going to Vietnam, the significance of what I chose to take with me weighed heavily on my addled mind as I compiled the following essentials for my journey:
Guitar: On which I could play the five chords of “Wonderwall” and nothing else.
Discman: top-of-the-line model at the time, with ultrasophisticated anti-skip technology.
Beauty products: In a case that was larger than the entirety of what I now bring on month-long trips, dedicated solely to a palette of glitter finishes, which I applied daily with complete disregard to (or in full ignorance of) every cosmetician’s directive to emphasize one feature and one feature only.
My Time Out Berlin, already memorized, cross-referenced, and annotated according to a one-to-three-star system of priority.
Condoms: A twelve-pack, which I thought struck exactly the appropriate balance between caution and overconfidence.
Yes, I did engage in some low-level high-risk behavior (mild opiate abuse; wearing sunscreen with an SPF of less than 30), but when it came to the big things—pregnancy and STDs, arriving on time for international flights—I was the clear precursor to my current self, who uses a turn signal in empty parking lots. So that is how I found myself, in mid-February 1997, in the international departures lounge of JFK, four hours early but looking like an extra from a low-budget rave movie. As I reapplied my rings of black glitter eyeliner, my classmate Laurel’s dad wondered if I had designs on the pilot. (Maybe!) But seriously, this was Berlin; I had an image to maintain, even on the plane.
The meticulous cultivation of my image had actually begun several months prior, when I filled out the worksheet that would match me with the appropriate host family for my initial one-month homestay. Living with a German family would, once again, serve as simultaneous language and cultural immersion before I moved into my more permanent home in the Freie Universität dormitories, which were populated entirely by English-speaking international students and located deep in the bucolic woods of the village of Dahlem, which is barely even in Berlin proper. The homestay might have been my only chance to experience the actual city I had chosen specifically because its sheer size, very recent history, large immigrant communities, and legendary nightlife had made it the least-German of all the German cities that offered study-abroad programs. Berlin was a place where I could soak up the language by way of staying out until 10:00 A.M. at an impromptu art-club, not sitting through another awkward Kaffeeklatsch with a bunch of uptight, statuesque blondes who disapproved of me—so, my experience in Münster still smarting, I wanted any future Herrmanns to know what they were in for.
When it came time to let my new German Mutter and Vater learn about me, my policy was unflinching aggression about the unabashed me-ness I was not going to compromise for anyone, thank you very much.
“I am a strict vegetarian,” I explained. “This means that I do not eat meat, ever. This includes chicken, which Germans generally view as a variety of potato, but I do not. This also includes meat stock, which I can taste, so there is no point in trying to sneak it in.” This last bit, by the way, was a lie; I had eaten plenty of meat stock on my last trip, much of it unnoticed. “I wear my hair very short and dye it bright, unnatural colors with great frequency.” This was included specifically to avert any Kelly-esque bait-and-switch disappointment. “I am a moderate smoker and would like to be able to smoke in my room.” “I am Jewish and would hope that whatever family houses me treats my religion with the appropriate amount of cultural sensitivity, given the context.”
What the beleaguered program directors managed to come up with was a compromise, one that ended up making me the envy of all of my program friends (until, that is, they saw my bathing setup): I was offered a sublet in an apartment with a “host mom” who was another student, four years older than me. And the apartment, I found out to my breathless delight, was located in Prenzlauer Berg.
Back in 1995, when Herr Neudorf’s tour bus had finally pulled in to Berlin, I’d asked him in total earnestness: “Where do all the punks hang out?”
Without missing a beat, this seventy-year-old German man had answered: “Prenzlauer Berg!” (and then threatened to tell my muzzah where I was going and what I was up to). After a mere seventy-five-minute ride on the S-Bahn, Justin, Freddie, Anneke, Layla, and I had been treated to the single coolest tableau of outdoor cafés and pubs we had ever seen. All the buildings were unpainted stone and concrete, pockmarked with the craters of what I assumed was actual World War II damage (it was just from age, but allow me my historical fantasies). Every centimeter of sidewalk was covered in tables, and every table was full of young people, all of whom were drinking beer at noon and had more holes in their bodies than they were born with. The neighborhood, at the time still so freshly colonized by the postreunification youth that it didn’t quite know what to do with itself, was a six-square-mile clubhouse of people too cool to go to school or have jobs.
“Prenzlauer Berg?” I therefore squeaked on the frigid day we all met our host families, in the hesitant, overpronounced German of a college student who’s rarely had to use the language in the wild. “Prenzlauer Berg!” I was already excited enough that while everyone else was making awkward, bad-German conversation with middle-aged uptight people, I was making awkward, bad-German conversation with a bona fide real-life German young adult: Gertrud, twenty-four, a student of Anglo-American literature at the Humboldt-Universität, who had grown up in Chemnitz, a town in the former GDR that until quite recently was actually called Karl-Marx-Stadt.
She had blond hair down to her chin, as angular and unadorned as East German architecture. She smoked cheap cigarettes, wore no makeup, and her voice was low and sultry, like Marlene Dietrich’s. She had several handsome suitors, all of whom knew about each other. And she lived, on her own, in Prenzlauer Berg. “But that is the very best quadrant within the city!”
“Don’t get too excited,” she warned. “I don’t live in ‘cool’ Prenzlauer Berg. I live in far Prenzlauer Berg. I live in the East.”
“That is so perfect,” I said. “I love the East. I love everything about it.”
I had just decided this fact on the spot. Yes, I thought, I love the East. I mean, it made perfect sense. I hated Ronald Reagan, after all. It turns out that the Germans have a word for the feeling I was affecting: Ostalgie. It’s a portmanteau used to describe selective longing for the “good old days” of the GDR—and it’s big business. Today, Ost-themed clubs and parties charge patrons hard-earned euros for the opportunity to dress in drab eighties outfits and sit around drinking intentionally bad beer, and an unironically (or perhaps meta-ironically) materialist fervor exists for the products of the GDR. Starting as early as 1992, there was a rush on: furniture in the relentless mustards and oranges that comprised many a socialist realist film set; giant bleep-bloopy electronics (some of them designed to facilitate spying on one’s nearest and dearest); housewares and packaged foods; and, finally and especially, the Trabant car (or Trabi), whose iconic shape—like a 1955 Buick washed and dried on the super-hot cycle—reappeared in the form of planters, sculptures, or in rare cases still sputtering down the road. (I’m sure Erich Honecker’s ghost is very proud.) As far as trend affectations go, Ostalgie is probably one of the least understandable to outsiders from the West, given that for most of us, especially in my generation, East Germany was a punch line, best signified in a 1988 women’s Olympic gymnastics team sporting identical feathered men’s haircuts and painfully obvious signs of steroid abuse. And after all, what would be the American equivalent of nostalgia for one of the most universally disliked political eras of the past? A Red Scare prom? But, I say with either pride or shame (I haven’t decided yet), some of us totally got Ostalgie.
My wholehearted adoption of East German identity was especially impressive given that I’d had a particularly apolitical few years since my attempt with Dylan Gellner to turn AP Civics into the Sixth International (or at least Sweden). Sure, I’d voted for the first time, for Bill Clinton, in the 1996 presidential election. But the Internet wasn’t a thing yet, and the only television I watched was Melrose Place once a week in the Main House smoking common room, so I was a far cry from the bleating social justice warrior I am today. Indeed, my choice to declare a near-immediate allegiance to all things Ost upon my arrival in a city whose dividing wall had only recently been dismantled was 100 percent based on which subset of Germans I perceived as being slightly less prone to yelling at me all the time. I guess the personal really is political, Monsieur Foucault.
“You’ll find out just how much you love the East when you see your room,” said Gertrud with a near-imperceptible smirk, which is German for laughing your ass off. “Come on. We have a long way to go.”
Gertrud wasn’t kidding. For our orientation, the study-abroad program had put us up at a youth hostel in the same pastoral western outer district, Dahlem, where the university was located, so the first leg of our journey took place on the S-Bahn, which ran from those leafy outer neighborhoods to the main transit hubs of the central districts such as Mitte (which means “center”). I watched out the window as the sky turned from silver to purple, trying not to topple over while I kept one hand on my boulder-sized suitcase and the other on my guitar. The buildings of Dahlem, Steglitz, and Schöneberg whizzed by, with their innocuous mixture of fake-old, real-old, and IKEA-chic. Slowly the gentility gave way to graffiti, and I thought of the Iggy Pop song “The Passenger,” which legend has it he wrote while riding the S-Bahn in the late seventies. As the train vibrated under my feet and I watched the buildings get grimier, Iggy’s lyrics started to make perfect sense—here I was, the passenger, under glass, both a part of this immense, sprawling city that seemed almost like a living organism, and alienated from everyone who actually belonged there. These, I realized, were the city’s ripped backsides! This was the bright and hollow sky! Too bad that song’s killer riff was comprised of three chords that weren’t in “Wonderwall.”
Then, in the distance, what looked like the dismembered skeleton of a mammoth extraterrestrial robot-dinosaur came into view against the sunset.
“Was ist das?” I whispered.
“Das sind Kräne,” said Gertrud. “Cranes. The biggest continuous construction site in all of Europe.”
It was Potsdamer Platz, whose endless panorama of just-started building sites would be the defining silhouette of Berlin’s skyline for years. The prewar Platz, or square, was once the nightlife and traffic epicenter of the German capital, its spirit immortalized in a jubilant expressionist painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—two chic women, one in black and the other teal, whoosh along in a blur of grand hotels and foot traffic. Potsdamer Platz was blown to kingdom come during the war, but its real demise came when it was split in two, with much of its former glory paved over in favor of
the “death strip” between the Berlin Walls. For the Berlin Wall was actually two parallel walls, the western one covered in graffiti, the eastern one pristine; between them was a wide expanse pocked with gentle methods of interloper discouragement (trenches, beds of nails)—and, lest those not be discouraging enough, patrolled by armed East German guards in towers. But now, with the Wall and the death strip gone, workers at the largest construction site in Europe were busily erecting a sleek, supermodernen corporate park, whose defining decorative features would be the mammoth logos of Sony and Daimler.
“Come on,” said Gertrud. “We get off here.”
Somehow a full working S-Bahn station was in place amid the endless scaffolding and no doubt heavily managed chaos, so we dragged my suitcase a frigid kilometer through the rubble until we got to a bus stop. Gertrud looked at her watch. “Should be here in three minutes,” she said. And it was. Exactly.
As the cranes of Potsdamer Platz faded, I noticed yet another bizarre silhouette. This time it looked like the Death Star impaled on a chopstick. It was the Fernsehturm, the Alexanderplatz TV tower, unofficial symbol of East Berlin. I craned my neck as we grew closer. It was immense. “Riesig,” said Gertrud. “Huge, right? Some people say it was supposed to look like an eye that could see you everywhere.”