No. 10 – Berliner Alltag, or Daily Life in the German Capital
Scenes from my July 5th in Berlin featuring right-populism, lovely pastries, and award-winning subway station design.
8am
Up and help my sister with her bags down to the cobblestones of Mittenwalder Straße. She leaves today after a lovely five day visit for Los Angeles by way of Poznań and London. There are construction trucks unloading for the day in front of my apartment. The Uber whisks her away soundlessly.
9:00am
Unload the laundry from the drying rack and stuff my new load of sheets and towels into the washer, which in accordance with European custom finds itself in the kitchen between the sink and fridge. The kitchen is the best thing about our very good apartment - big in a comfortable way and full of light thanks to the window at one end with which we can lüften. I let Steely Dan blast from the bathroom as I finish getting ready and out the door.
9:30am
Below I grab a kleines schwarzes Filterkaffee and a Berliner Pfannkuchen from the bakery, which is like a palmier studded with raisins. The Allman Brothers’ “Rambling Man” plays as I walk to the train, which seems fitting, though I note that American songwriters have lost the ear for simply listing southern cities along major highway routes like New Orleans and Memphis - this always sounds good. The Berliners I think do not appreciate people eating and drinking on the subway, unless it’s after 10 and you’re having a Wegbier, so I scarf the pastry whole before the U7 arrives to Gneisenaustrasse station.
10:00am
A recent magazine article I read covered the prettiest stations on the U-Bahn network, and I am lucky enough to frequent two of them: Dahlem-Dorf, where the Freie Universität is, and Fehrbelliner Platz, where I switch from the U7 to the U3. Fehrbelliner is noted for the pop art signage which adorn its walls, all dots, curves and purples. Attempting to change to the U3, I ran into a rare scheduling problem where two trains had bunched together, as a result of which the platform headed south toward Krumme Lanke was much more crowded than usual - most people, like me, heading for the FU at Dahlem-Dorf.
I have struggled with entertaining myself on the (brief and quick) train rides, unable to choose between crosswording, reading, journaling, or scrolling on my phone. Many people like just watching TikTok and the experience of looking over another’s shoulder as they scroll mindlessly past the Rogan-clips-and-Subway-Surfers videos is jarring, to say the least. My philological aspirations have led me to pick up two books so far here: Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900 and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen Ging Gegangen, both of which are naturally excellent but neither of which succeed in holding my attention, not in the morning when my German skills have not yet fully ramped up nor in the evening after a day of staring at essentially Greek statistics papers.
(The Erpenbeck was glowingly reviewed upon its release and touches on the 2015 migration crisis, as well as being a decent Berlin novel. What I’ve read of the Benjamin is essentially inscrutable – the second chapter opens with a scene of the main character watching Paul Kruger, the Boer leader, give a speech at the Siegessäule, in response to which someone near him whispers “that was a man who led a war”. Not knowing anything about the Boer Wars prompted 30 minutes of further Wikipedia searches.)
Today I have decided to bring my Switch and play Zelda, which is not made easy by the crush by is still a decent way to spend 15 minutes. I and two thousand others exit Dahlem-Dorf in all its thatched roof glory and walk into campus.
11:00am
Being hopelessly addicted to Twitter, I like to stay abreast of the news when I travel, and so had the doomscroller’s treat of a lifetime when on our first Saturday in Berlin Evgeny Prigozhin invaded Russia (all the more shocking that it started about the time I got out of bed and was all done before I got back from dinner that night!). A brief scan of today’s Berliner Zeitung reveals that the story of the week is the continued ascendance of the right-populist party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), who have just won a mayoralty in a tiny town in Thuringia, this only coming a few days after they won their first Landrat (something like being elected judge of Harris County TX, or a supervisor in LA/SF).
Thuringia is among the smallest and poorest of the proper Länder in Germany, the equivalents to our states in America (by proper I omit the Stadtstaaten – Bremen, Berlin, Hamburg), which makes sense insofar as it was formerly part of East Germany. By now, the failure of the former East German economies to catch up to the performance of the West German states is famous, but it is perhaps for the first time today that these differences are coming back to bite the Bundesrepublik writ large.
The op-ed writer in today’s Zeitung opens the door for the normalization of the AfD into everyday German politics, a thought previously unpublishable – as he notes, many of Germany’s neighbors (Italy, Finland, Sweden) have right-populist parties in government and fascism hasn’t (re-)arrived yet. More astutely, he points out that a decade of fear mongering on the part of the traditional ruling parties in Germany – the AfD essentially emerged in response to Angela Merkel’s “wir schaffen das” moment amid the 2015 migration crisis – has only strengthened the populists, turning them in voters’ minds from a flank protest movement into a behemoth that could take down the federal republic itself! This decade in the wilderness has led the AfD today not only to tremendous popularity – their place in the polls has been rising uninterrupted for weeks now – but also to the outright position of wanting to dissolve the European Union, Germany’s modern empire.
To this point, the AfD have yet to really prove their mettle, but it should be taken as a sign of the times that the slimmest electoral successes seen this week have coaxed the German political class into accepting their legitimate place in the federal firmament as a fait accompli. Yet another sign of the times is the media presence of the party founder Gauland, a cranky octogenarian from Chemnitz (previously, and I’m not joking, called Karl-Marx-Stadt), who is spending today denying that he has any aspirations to become Federal Chancellor.
It all feels a bit 18th Brumaire, all the odder because while European economies are obviously lagging the post-COVID triumph back in the states, Berlin at least does not give off the stench of economic stagnation (from Munich, Mary reports that she can’t walk 20 feet without bumping into a construction site). There are probably too few jobs and apartments are getting too expensive, but mobility-induced demand for housing is a positive sign, and best of all it seems like the heating-and-energy consequences of the war in Ukraine have been mostly sidestepped. Other political discussion centers on something called the Heizungsgesetz, which seems to be kind of a Green New Deal-style package requiring conversion of existing buildings’ HVAC units to conform to greener standards. Maybe their heads are in the sand but Kanzler Olaf Scholz’s coalition do not betray the fear of say Rishi Sunak’s Tories in Britain, where most in the economic commentariat have taken to openly referring to their country as an emerging market. And yet the AfD grows nonetheless.
2:00pm
We go to lunch at one of the student cafeterias on campus, which they call the Mensa, this one serving Japanese food and known to be of generally higher quality which justifies the 20min walk we take from the Zuse Institute over that way. We spend the meal mostly talking about the fact that the food is better. On our walk back we stop by a student run cafe and have an afternoon coffee, taking advantage of the chance to play with a dog who lives there. One of the other researchers and I play chess while two others coach us on – I win without really having understood how I did so.
5:00pm
My coworkers and I take the train out of Dahlem-Dorf into Schöneberg, disembarking at Hohenzollern Platz, which still retains the literally imperial regalia of the house which led Brandenburg, then Brandenburg-Prussia, then the Norddeutscher Bund, then the Deutsches Reich, for so long. On their insistence I have joined them to get an ear piercing. The salon is incredibly well-lit, mirrored from wall to wall and upholstered all over in white leather. The tech kindly stabs a stud into my earlobe and I walk back out, glimmering.
Briefly I am terrified that I have made a major error, but a set of dumplings and good reviews basically convinces me it’s all good, and so I step back out into the afternoon sun and sit in a park with a fountain adjoining the Evangelisches Kirche am Hohenzollernplatz, considered the capital work of German expressionist architecture.
7:00pm
Done with meetings at Hohenzollern Platz I ride a city bike from east Charlottenburg via Hohenstaufen Straße all along Schöneberg, through an urbanscape not unreminiscent of Noho and Soho along Houston St. Eventually I reach Kreuzberg again and run up home to put my sheets and towels out that I may have a dry place to sleep tonight. I work a bit more and call my mom, who asks me to buy Murphy more dog treats after his rather harrowing 4th of July. So done, I bite into a peach and find an earwig waiting for me. This made me want other food, so I walk out to Bergmann Straße and take a roast chicken and beer at the Milagro Lounge. The clarity of mind given by a dinnertime Pilsner in this city is scarce to be found elsewhere.
11:00pm
Desperate to show off my new bling I plan to meet some friends at Club der Visionäre which lies like many of the other discotheques on the shores of the Spree as it travels east out of the downtown core. This club also lies on the edge of Treptower Park, which is idyllic and well-manicured and also has a tremendous Soviet monument, there to commemorate the heroism of the 1945 invasion of Berlin. The bike ride to there takes me from Bergmann Straße up into Kreuzberg and then Neukölln, its many Middle Eastern restaurants bursting into the street even at 11pm. I navigate along the Paul-Lincke-Ufer and through some darkly woods, disembarking right before the Spree.
The bar is open-air and sits along last bit of the channel out into the Spree – for a Wednesday I would call it crowded, but I think that’s just Berlin. I meet my friends and have a couple Berliners. A Greek guy comes over and, as recompense for the use of our lighter, rattles off a list of six islands we must visit. Feeling then like I’d lived a properly full day, I bid adieu and drift back towards the homeliness of Kreuzberg, unhang my last bits of laundry, and sleep.