Schadenfreude, a Love Story

  “Hallo? Halloooooooo?” repeated the voice on the other end, perturbed at my twenty seconds of heavy-breathing silence. My throat had once again coated itself as an immediate reaction to any attempt to speak German with anyone. I finally managed to croak out the single sentence that I’d been practicing under my breath all day: “Ist das Zimmer noch frei?” (“Is the room still available?”)

  The voice at the other end paused, but not because he didn’t understand what I said.

  “Äh … nein. Nicht mehr. Tut mir leid.” (“No. Not anymore. Sorry.”)

  I assumed he paused because he was attempting to process someone being so terrifically rude. Germans are in some situations a direct people: as Gertrud was so kind to point out, they will think nothing of telling you that you have gained weight. But in other situations, they have ironclad laws of politeness. One of these is that when telephoning a stranger, you are expected to give your entire curriculum vitae as your initial greeting. This I learned the hard way, after Gertrud overheard me have one of my doomed conversations and set me straight. The sole acceptable manner in which to announce myself on the other end of a telephone when answering an advertisement for a vacant room from the Zweite Hand rivaled a passage out of Robert Musil’s two-thousand-page novel The Man Without Qualities: Hallo, guten Tag. Mein Name ist Rebecca Schuman, und ich bin Austauschstudentin aus den USA. Ich habe Ihre Anzeige in der Zweiten Hand gelesen, und ich wollte wissen, ob das Zimmer noch frei ist. I wrote it out and practiced it two hundred times in front of the mirror.

  For my troubles, I managed to book exactly two viewings of available rooms within my monthly rent budget of three hundred deutsche marks (the rough equivalent, at the time, of $175), a price point at which the pickings were slim to none, and Slim had just walked out the Tür. Furthermore, any place that was available to the likes of me was nightmarish, such as the austere room (with yet another coal oven) in Friedrichshain, where the proprietor was a mopey schlub in his late thirties who insisted that anyone who moved in had to hang out with him.

  “So,” I said, when he wouldn’t stop staring at me, “what do you do?”

  “Ich bin Arbeitslos,” he said. (“I’m unemployed.”) “Und was machst du denn in Berlin?” he asked. (“What do you do in Berlin, anyway?”)

  I told him I was a student of German literature at the FU, which at this point was almost true—language class was over, the FU semester was imminent, and I was even mildly excited to choose between a course on Bertolt Brecht and one on Weimar modernism. Brecht plays were morally instructive and short (bonus), but Weimar modernism included the excellent paintings of Otto Dix, who specialized in the Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, in which Dix deliberately made pretty people ugly and grotesque, when he wasn’t drawing worms crawling out of the skulls littering the battle sites of the First World War. Another substantial selling point of Dix’s paintings was that I didn’t have to look any words up to read them.

  “Ach so,” said Herr Sad-Sack. “What authors do you like?”

  “I am a great admirer of Franz Kafka,” I said.

  “Er war kein Deutscher.” Did every German in the world have direct orders from the ghost of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself to disown Franz Kafka? They were the ones with the imperialistic language that colonized half the damn continent with their Lebensraum. Maybe they were just jealous that Kafka was so good and Faust II was bat-shit crazy.

  “Well,” I said, “I also enjoy the poems of Gottfried Benn.” I’d just discovered them, and because they were short and used small words, Benn had officially become my second-favorite author. Also because he was dark and disturbing: much of the verse was set in a Berlin morgue around 1912, because Benn was a medical examiner by Brotberuf, which literally means “bread-career” but is German for “day job.” My Lieblingsgedicht, or favorite poem, I told the guy, was a particularly graphic piece of expressionism called “Schöne Jugend,” or “A Fine Childhood,” about a family of rats discovered inside the decomposing body of a young prostitute. At the end, the mortician drowns them in a bucket. “Oh, how the little snouts squeaked!” Excellent dinner-party fodder, I found. “Have you heard it?” I asked my potential new roommate, who finally found occasion to stop staring at me.

  Directly after that, I schlepped out to the desolate nether regions of the eastern district of Treptow, populated only by neo-Nazis, their racist grannies, and Hans and Effi, the two incredulous roommates who were attempting to rent out a windowless closet, one that might have been able to accommodate a twin mattress on the floor if it were placed diagonally. “It’s yours if you want it,” said Hans. I kept the Gottfried Benn quotes to myself and tried not to weep openly until I’d made it halfway back to the U-Bahn.

  In the depths of my housing despair, Gertrud persuaded me to see a movie, the highly anticipated feature-length version of Kleiner Arschloch (Little Asshole), a proto–South Park cartoon starring a gleefully obscene little boy. I only understood about a fifth of it, and I was too deeply ensconced within my own personal storm cloud to laugh at anything I did understand, with the sole exception of the titular Asshole’s grandpa—voiced by legendary German comedian Helge Schneider—who insisted that he was a tithe-paying worshipper at the Church of the Holy Vagina. After the film ended, I very much wanted to harrumph my way home and feel sorry for myself within the confines of my own frigid four walls while I still had them, but Gertrud cajoled me into going out with her and Paul, a very tall and floppy-haired friend from Chemnitz who was now a computer science student at the FU. “Look, I’ll even invite you,” she said, meaning she’d pay.

  Unable to pass up free beer, I moped my way to the bar and then fretted in silence. I had had it with Berlin—it was fucking freezing, everything had meat in it, there were racist grannies everywhere, and nobody would let me live with them. And, worst of all, I definitely wasn’t cool.

  The good news is that if you are in an uncool mood and don’t feel like talking to anyone, going out drinking with a bunch of Germans is exactly the right thing to do with yourself, as you will not have to utter a single syllable. There’s an old joke related by Walter Benjamin (another legendary German comedian), about three authors who are out at a pub. After fifteen minutes of silence, one of them says: “It’s hot today.” After another fifteen minutes of silence, the second says, “No wind, either.” And the third one, after another fifteen minutes, goes: “I came here to drink, not to talk!” The joke was supposed to be making fun of the Swiss (Germans are always picking on the Swiss), but I have instead found it to be a nonfictional account of almost every night out I have ever spent with German-speakers of any nationality. These are people who do not engage in small talk. If you ask a German-speaker wie geht’s (how they are), you’d better be prepared to hear some details about irritable bowel syndrome or some such, because that motherfucker assumes your query is sincere. Germans either talk about real topics or they don’t talk at all. If you don’t know the person well, or are not intimately familiar with either German football rivalries or the ninety-thousand political parties, you can expect to sit there in silence.

  The bar Gertrud and Paul chose was near pitch-black inside, which saved the proprietor the trouble of decorating, save for a row of sticky semicircular booths. Paul disappeared and reappeared with three beers. The three of us drank in silence, lit cigarettes, smoked them, put them out, lit more. After the requisite hours of staring, Gertrud became the evening’s abject blabbermouth.

  “Na du,” she said to Paul, who was hunched over one of the same cheap cigarettes Gertrud preferred. “Rebecca’s looking for a place to live.”

  At that, Paul shot up to his full height, and his small round glasses almost flew off his pale visage. “We have one for you!” he said. “Wait, how much can you pay?”

  “Three hundred.”

  “That’s exactly what it will cost!”

  “Oh, you’ll like their place,” said Gertrud. “It’s in Kreuzberg. And it’s not really a flat per se … it’s a Fabri
ketage.”

  I had gotten mildly better at admitting I did not know every German word in existence since my time in Münster as failed Ersatz-Kelly, so I believe I actually asked what a Fabriketage was, since its literal translation, “factory story,” didn’t conjure up any sort of human dwelling. “I don’t know the English word,” said Gertrud, and Paul just shrugged—I would soon learn that Paul, like a proper East German child, had learned Russian as his foreign language. “A Fabriketage is a … you know, a Fabriketage. It’s like a big space that takes up the whole floor.”

  “Oh,” I said. “A loft.”

  “Ja genau!” said Paul. (“Yes, exactly!”) “A loft.”

  Was he serious? Had I just been offered, sight unseen and purely because of my excellent ability to materialize three hundred deutsche marks per month, a room in a super cool loft in Kreuzberg? Was I about to stop being polite and start getting real?

  Not necessarily. The place went by the official moniker Loftschloss, or “loft-castle,” which was a play on the word Luftschloss, which literally translates as “air castle” but is the German word for “daydream.” And it was the stuff of daydreams, if you daydreamed about living in a midcareer David Bowie video, which I obviously did. It took up an entire story of a building not zoned for residence, just above a ground-floor tire shop and below a third-floor Turkish mosque. It was located near the Görlitzer Bahnhof train station, which had once held political significance as the final stop on the U1 line before the Wall. Correspondingly, Kreuzberg had been the grungiest district of West Berlin, its property values plummeting when the Wall bisected many of its streets (and a few of its actual buildings, for good measure). A lot of its apartment houses were simply abandoned, and then reoccupied by members of the counterculture who elected not to pay rent in exchange for living without electricity or heat. A mere seven years after the Wall fell, Kreuzberg had gentrified only slightly, home to a vibrant community of Turkish immigrants and the working poor, some of the city’s most legendary dive bars, and most of its few remaining actual squats. It was undisputedly Berlin’s most interesting neighborhood, and not just because its main thoroughfare, Oranienstraße, boasted one otherworldly watering hole after the next, so many that I once tried to order one beer at each of them and only made it halfway down one block before I ran out of money and lost the ability to see straight.

  There was Milchbar, whose jaunty underwater murals—complete with a 3-D shark eating a surfer—were in stark contrast to its rough-and-tumble clientele, which allegedly included the members of Die Toten Hosen, Germany’s most famous punk band. There was Schnabelbar, another pitch-black affair with spiky postmodern sculptures jutting out of the wall. There was a place just called Z, which I am pretty sure was a cover for an illicit massage parlor in the back. There were the legendary rock clubs Trash and SO36, both of which were so grimy you had to make sure you were wearing something you could throw away afterward, in case you had to sit down somewhere inside.

  So yes, technically the Loftschloss was indeed a fabulous loft right in the middle of the most interesting neighborhood in the best city in Germany. However, one kleines Problem: Paul didn’t have the authority to offer me a room in it, and furthermore, what I hadn’t really been offered wasn’t actually a room. What I hadn’t been offered was actually a corner of the living room partitioned off by a heavy black curtain. And what I didn’t realize was that there was actually another partition in the loft: between inhabitants, some of whom wanted another roommate and her three hundred deutsche marks to offset the rent—and, it turned out, the costs of a substantial and probably illegal DIY renovation—and some of whom wanted the living room to retain all four of its corners.

  This was, however, not properly communicated to me (or, at any rate, I didn’t understand it if it was), so when Paul invited me out to “meet the rest of them,” I labored under the deluded assumption that the subsequent three hours of silent glowering was but a fun, informal get-to-know-you event. What it was, however, was an audition—specifically, an audition for Leonie, a formidable urban-planning student and eco-warrior with a crew cut and a permanent scowl, who I quickly gathered was the Loftboss.

  I was to meet the Loftschloss group at a pop-up bar in the basement of an apartment building in Mitte, the kind of place so endemic in postreunification Berlin that it was impossible for the order-loving authorities to keep track. To find it, I had to sneak into a locked courtyard behind some residents, then follow the noise until I found an unmarked door to the Kellerbar, where bottled Beck’s was served through a hole bashed through a wall. It was kind of hard to see, on account of the shoulder-to-shoulder tall people wearing scarves indoors and the cement-thick smoke. If I hadn’t dragged Gertrud with me for moral support, I would have just turned around and run home.

  “Oh, don’t be a coward,” she said. “Go. Look, Paul is right there. He likes you. The others might not, but Leonie doesn’t like anyone.”

  As soon as Paul saw us he disappeared in the direction of the hole in the wall and, true to form, rematerialized with a beer, which he placed into my claws after kissing me briefly on the cheek. (This is a charming affectation in a culture that otherwise abhors physical contact. To this day I’m not sure how most Germans reproduce. I assume it has something to do with very orderly machinery.) “Du, I’ll introduce you to everyone,” he said, and by “introduce” he meant point at them, mumble a name, and not expect them to acknowledge my presence or even look up from their loud arguments about the environmental impact of open-toed sandals.

  The friendliest of the bunch was Johannes, with a shock of bright blond hair that stuck out in electrified curls about six inches in all directions, a broken front tooth, delicate cheekbones, and skintight jeans covered in multicolored patches, in the manner of early-season Punky Brewster. His primary act of friendliness was that he made eye contact when he nodded at me wordlessly, and he thrust his open pack of Lucky Strikes in my general direction. Detlef, from Hamburg, baby face clashing with his black leather jacket, even managed an actual handshake, and his subsequent lack of conversation was of the distinctly benign and classically German variety. Then, however, there was Rolf, petite and handsome, but dark and dour, a Sprockets character come to life who actively sneered when Paul brought me over. “It’s nothing personal,” he said, “but I really don’t want another flatmate. Especially not in the living room.” Nice to meet you, too, man.

  And then the cluster of Loftschlossers parted to reveal the infamous Leonie. “It might be personal,” she said, before coughing theatrically and making a face at my cigarette. Leonie was from Munich, and her apparent iron-fisted rule of her household presented a rather distorted view of the Bavarian character, which is generally regarded as among Germany’s most laid-back. Over the ear-splitting electronic music, she explained that she refused to travel internationally because of the environmental damage, therefore implicitly disapproving of my presence in Germany to begin with.

  “And what are you doing here, anyway?” she asked. “Studying literature?”

  “Ja. My most favorite author is Franz Kafka.”

  “What a cliché.” To her credit, she didn’t go out of her way to tell me Kafka wasn’t German.

  “I also like the Bertolt Brecht,” I said, which was even true, given that I’d just chosen the Brecht seminar and purchased a full stack of his plays.

  “I prefer the writings of Judith Butler.”

  “Never heard of her,” I said.

  Leonie laughed out loud, and then asked me if, since Paul had described me as Jewish, I was a Zionist. Since I’d never heard the German pronunciation (TSEE-on-IST), I didn’t know what she was talking about, and she laughed even harder. I excused myself to go find what passed for a ladies’ room at this establishment, got lost for twenty-five minutes, and possibly ended up relieving myself in the facilities of someone’s private residence, whose door was inauspiciously left unlocked. (Well, auspicious for me. Inauspicious for the poor schmoes who lived there.) My
only other conversation with anyone for the entire evening wasn’t even with a Loftschlosser. It was with a really weird friend of Detlef’s, Moritz, who had spent a year of high school in Connecticut and spoke a disturbingly perfect WASP English that made him resemble a spiky-haired Patrick Bateman in leather pants. This was going great.

  After Rolf’s disconcertingly schoolmarmy girlfriend showed up to spirit him away, and Moritz and Detlef peeled off to go to another party (I hoped no women were dismembered as a result), Paul, Johannes, and Leonie huddled in what appeared to be an intensive confab. One of Gertrud’s gentlemen had also shown up, and they were off canoodling somewhere, so that left me, alone and staring through the smoke at these perplexing strangers, only one of whom seemed even mildly enthusiastic about my joining their “living community,” and the rest of whom seemed at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile. After about fifteen minutes of kibitzing, everyone gathered their coats and packed up their cigarettes and slugged back the last of their beers, and just as they were about to leave, Paul turned to me and gave a quick jerk of his chin in the direction of the door—which, to be fair, is German for “definitive invitation to accompany us to the next questionable guerrilla drinking establishment, and the one after that, and the one after that, too.”

  That evening Paul was wearing a fluorescent turquoise jean jacket, and as I waddled on my short legs behind these considerably taller people, I would sometimes nearly lose sight of them in the muddled dark of Berlin’s rogue tangle of half-constructed streets, if not for the fortunate beacon of Paul’s blinding garment. Four increasingly illegal bars later (one of which, in lieu of a restroom, had a toilet shoved in the janitor’s closet), it was nearing five in the morning, and I was no closer to knowing whether or not I’d be allowed to join the Loftschloss. Paul simply kissed me on each cheek and told me to mach’s gut as I dragged myself onto a night bus, freezing and dejected. I was almost too dejected to notice the stark, austere beauty of those Stalinesque wedding-cake buildings looming in the dull-blue darkness, the menacing disco twinkle of the Fernsehturm as my bus glided by. And I was definitely too dejected to care when a cute guy who looked to be my age bummed a cigarette after I disembarked near Gertrud’s, and also too dejected to enjoy the small victory of telling him I lived gleich um die Ecke, the idiom for “right around the corner” I’d been practicing all week. What good was having all of these adventures if five German strangers I wasn’t sure I liked were ambivalent about letting me squat in their living room? I slept until two the following afternoon.