Tribes of Berlin
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 24: Participation Society
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Brigid Delaney
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Brigid Delaney's biography and other articles by this writer
The early days in a new city always feel similar to snorkeling, or taking hallucinogenics, or lucid dreaming – where nothing is fixed in place or context, where people and objects drift by as if disconnected from reality, where there are no memories.
And so it was for my first day in Berlin: men in lederhosen with fierce beards, bells as heavy as bricks hanging from their necks, were herding goats through the Brandenburg Gate. Ravers on a makeshift stage at Potsdamer Platz pumped out techno and smoke – protesting for the legalisation of marijuana. Those who weren't dancing rested like dogs in the afternoon sun – heavy-eyed, stoned.
That night, down the old swathe of socialism, Karl-Marx-Allee (formerly Stalinallee), on miles and miles of trestle tables steins of beer and bratwurst were sold. Hordes of double-demined, bleached blonde groups sung joyfully and drunk beer – men and women looking indistinguishable from '80s band Europe who provided the soundtrack from the last days of the Cold War: ‘The Final Countdown'.
One day – one city. But there is nothing homogenous about these locals. Berlin is a city of tribes.
For a newcomer, you can find your tribe via the internet or in a club or through friends of friends, or connect through film nights, poetry readings, events advertised online on Toytown or in monthly expatriate magazine Exberliner. Pick your tribe: the artists, the American expats, the fashion people, the web-geeks, the burnt-out academics, the English teachers, the language students (who themselves are divided into castes and tribes depending on their school), the history buffoons who tour concentration camps, the nudists, the ravers, the people writing books (first novels about boy meets girl, set in Berlin), the DJs, the embassy crowd, the drag queens and the installation artists.
There are support groups in Berlin for mothers of neo-Nazis, and other groups for mothers of drug addicts. At night, they roam the gritty Kottbusser Tor, a U-Bahn station notorious for drug dealing, and menace the dealers in a way that only mothers can. Then there are the politicals: the anarchists, socialists, communists and collectivists. Each month posters go up around Berlin advertising the next protest. Sometimes anarchists came to Prenzlauerberg to protest against the yuppies. The lead singer from radio-friendly ‘alternative' band Travis moved into the neighbourhood – seen as a sure symptom of decline. In black paint on the wall opposite my building: ‘Fuck off yuppies.' This was the old East Berlin, where bits of the Wall, ugly and grey, still rise out of the earth like rotten teeth. In the old no-man's land, the death strip, still nothing grows, even twenty years later.Berlin is a city so hip that the locals wear mullets with an insouciance that says ‘I look cool even with the White Snake hair' – yet still there is no denying Berlin is haunted.
IN SUMMER NIGHTS WHEN I AM NOT OUT ON THE STREET (at a beer garden in Mitte, dancing at Ankerklause, playing ping-pong in the park, on my bike, cruising, cruising) I am online: browsing, perusing, surfing. Craig's List is good – want a job, flat, new/old couch, lover, $5 haircut, German lessons, ride to Stuttgart – this is your site. I got all three of my Berlin sublets through Craig's List – and each owner seemed so idiosyncratic and distinct that only the most perverse ruler of the cosmos could engineer that I would live in their houses in my time in Berlin.
First is the Park Avenue princess who denuded her flat (nineteenth century in the old East) of furniture before I arrived, yet left her library of books which encompassed the works of Primo Levi and picture books of pornography, Hannah Arendt and the history of horse fisting. Pasted around the walls were magazine tear-outs of topless models, yet there were no plates in the kitchen. Did she eat? She told me that her tribe in Berlin ‘was kinda Bloomsbury, you know, like the group' and I wondered if she said that because they were all fucking each other – or they fancied themselves as intellectuals. Maybe both.
Next sublet contact was a dead ringer for Keira Knightley: an artist and former girlfriend of a famous singer, whose light-filled, art-filled flat on a canal was the personification of the Berlin dream – cheap, gorgeous apartment opposite some hippie caravan collective where African drumming and chanting woke me in the late morning.
Lastly there was the spicy tea-drinking, punk rocking Romanian-born Egyptologist who answered the door with a swollen face (fall off a bike) and serious beard (solidarity with his Muslim brothers). He had soft porn taped to the back of his toilet door and the shower stall was in the tiny kitchen, so you could theoretically fry an egg on the stove whilst showering. ‘It's old East,' he said, as if that explained its oddness. That I could afford to sublet these apartments while filing only the occasional travel story or op-ed back to Fairfax showed that in some parts of the world you can live by your pen.
As for work in Berlin, there are never any job ads on Craig's List that promise serious employment. ‘Bloggers wanted' reads an ad up since last June. I browse the personals but I do not answer any ads. Too scared, I suppose.
One friend K put up an ad for a lover and met two different men through the site. I met her the day after she rendezvoused with a Serb who wore green Converse. She looks dizzy and is grinning: ‘still fuck drunk,' she explains. Neither lover lasts long, but no matter – this is Berlin, a city of transients.
For friendship she also goes online – finding a mixer on a site called Toytown (for ‘Germany's English-speaking crowd') that connects the native English speakers with the locals. She invites me along and we get quietly drunk on the couches while around us young Germans, Brits, Australians, Russians and Americans negotiate not the awkwardness of our different nationalities and languages, but the bumpier ride from virtual to real contact. You can flirt and be bold online in the banter and bounce of a real-time feed. In person you are just – well, you.
But a few more drinks and people loosen up. Could this be the birth of a new tribe we are witnessing? We wondered what it would be: a Russian/American/Australian tribe based on a love of Rilke perhaps?
KREUZBERG, AND AN ENGLISH FRIEND NEW TO THE CITY, and I are walking along a canal. We had been to a bar writers were said to frequent and had that lovely time where how you feel and where you are collide. Here we were drinking red wine and talking about books and writing – and all around us were people doing the same. The spine of a Goethe splayed on the table, someone talking about Kafka at the bar, while those at tables alone were not really alone: they had their pens and their notebooks and by candlelight, they appeared to be writing. So heightened was our mood that we carried on, certain Berlin and the night would provide.
Down a side street the bar has a glowing light above the door and a small sign. It looks cool, hidden; the secret ‘insiders' Berlin of which we feel we are now part. We ring the buzzer and a woman opens the door in a gold dress slit to the navel. She looks at us blankly and leads us up the stairs, where sitting desolately around a horse-shoe shaped bar are dozens of men, alone, naked and drinking beer. Actually, they aren't all naked – some are wearing leather straps across their navels that join to a pouch over the groin and another strap that disappears between their buttock cheeks. Some look profoundly depressed, others simply melancholy. The woman moves towards us to relieve us of our coats and jackets while we, like actors in a David Lynch movie, go towards the bar, tittering nervously, ‘I think I'd like a beer, wouldn't you? I wonder if they speak English.'
I wish I could say we stay, get to know this tribe a little better, but just before we place our order (in terrible, nervous German) we look at one another and wordlessly decide to leave. For all our libertine talk in the previous bar, we are bourgeois to the core. The woman in the slit dress gives us a look that Berliners do well – contempt. A look that says, ‘pussies'.
There is a tribe for everyone in Berlin – and even if you don't really fit in, the door will open to you – and you can stay if you like, if you are game.
SUDDENLY IT IS WINTER: YOU CAN SEE YOUR BREATH hanging out the front of your face like a speech bubble and the nights are longer. Luke and I are walking through the West Berlin suburb of Schöneberg past some lively bars. ‘Skins' bars,' explained Luke. ‘It's Skins Festival this weekend.'
While I try to digest all the possible things the festival could be celebrating (tattoo art, beauty products, a medical conference ... ?), he explains it is for the sizeable German community of gay skinheads. Luke even knows one guy who is a member of all the minorities: ‘he's a German-Turkish, gay, Jewish, skinhead Nazi.'
Wow, he's fucked up, we agree.
Later I met a German guy who is introduced to me as the country's most renowned fetish photographer. He is in Berlin for an exhibition of his work. I sit next to him at dinner: he is vegetarian and doesn't drink. He speaks openly and plainly about his profession: ‘Sometimes we go to warehouse, empty of course and they, they bring their own things, and I just try to capture the moment.'
I have a terrible sensation during the dinner: one of acute melancholy – that we have only one life, and mine is not set on that course – that pleasure and pain in a chilly warehouse in Berlin will be someone else's experience, and I will hear about it second hand at a dinner party.