Berlin
The city of horrible buildings. And dirt. And lots of drug addicts. And a hell of a lot of hipsters. But also techno! Wait, I don’t like techno…
There’s lots to hate about Berlin. For one, it’s absolutely filthy. Like, really filthy. No, you don’t understand: it’s at least as filthy as London, and probably as disgusting as Paris. It also seems to be constantly under construction. The main drag that leads down from Alexanderplatz to the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, has been under construction since at least the beginning of time, and everywhere you look there’s a bloody crane towering over a less-than-beautiful Plattenbau. Speaking of which, it isn’t exactly the most good-looking city in the world; in fact, I’d say it’s one of the most ugly places you could spend your time. And the people — wow, native Berliners are arseholes. There’s a pub opposite U-Bahnhof Hermannstraße — a fairly typical Kneipe — and my friend Tom and I have started inviting people there simply so they can experience the utter incivility with which the bar staff treat you. It’s almost something of a novelty.
Then there’s the hipsters. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being a bit hipster (though I have taken it as an insult on several occasions when having been called it myself), but that’s not to say it’s something to be proud of. Although the word first referred to jazz afficionados way back in the forties, it now seems entirely appropriate to use it to refer to the leather-jacket wearing, face-like-they-’re-chewing-a-wasp looking, cooler-than-thou acting twentysomethings who wander round the former East Berlin (and Kreuzberg and Neukölln) like they own the fuckin’ joint. Which, to an extent, they do. No, the big problem with this is that they— and, of course, people like myself — are coming to Berlin, bringing up the rent prices, and gentrifying the fuck out of it. Long gone are the days in which young creatives would come and squat an abandoned East Berlin tower block, or you could find yourself a nice one-bed with your own bathroom in the former West for peanuts. Us tourists have been pushing the locals out of their old haunts for ages.
But even with all of this shit — and my, it was a long list, wasn’t it? — there’s still nowhere else I’d rather live. There’s something intangibly compelling about the city, even in all its squalor and noisiness and decay; an indescribable sort of pull that artists, musicians and young people in general have felt since the seventies. The pace of life here is certainly slower than in other European capital cities, especially in comparison to London, even if you can’t hear yourself think at Kottbusser Tor. Germans are far nicer than us Brits give them credit for. Obviously it’s stupid to judge people just based on their nationality, and it’s no different with them: there are wankers, and there are good people. There are twats who stand in front of the train doors when they open, and there are those who curteously hold the door to the bike cellar open. There are people who always switch back into English when you’re trying to practise your German, and there are those who sit patiently while you stumbled through your sentence to the five-verb mess at the end of it. And important for students and young people, it’s cheap. You can find decent two bed flats here for less than eight hundred a month, and public transport is so good (and the city small enough to cycle) that getting around isn’t a problem. A 400ml lager at the local Kneipe can be as cheap as €2.40 if you know where to go, and from the Späti as cheap as 70 cents.
But that’s still not the main reason why Berlin is different from anywhere else I’ve visited, or why it’s so exciting to live here. The club experience represents what makes Berlin truly wonderful. Clubs here are often centred around a courtyard, in which there’s sometimes a stage, but without fail pizza stalls, somewhere to buy tobacco supplies, a bar, and some kind of chillout zone kitted out with sofas and footrests. You can sit around the fire while it gets dark, chatting with your pals, occasionally popping over to the outside bar to top up on (admittedly overpriced) beer. If it weren’t for the fifteen bloody euros you’ve paid to get in, you’d never even really know you were in a club. But take a little wander down one of the corridors that leads to the dancefloor; all of a sudden, it goes from being daylight outside to being so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. There’s pounding industrial techno, nobody is talking, it’s impossible to order a beer because the bartenders can’t hear a word you’re saying or see you standing in front of them yelling. There’s something for everybody in a Berlin night club, and this microcosm of the Berlin experience is a representation of the city as a whole.
And this is the main reason to love Berlin. Here, you can find anything you want, and be anyone you please. It is a city absolutely without judgment, without norms of behaviour or dress, and, in a certain way, without pretention. True, walking through Neukölln, it can feel a bit intimidating being the only normie there without a trenchcoat or a pair of DMs, but even so, you can walk into almost any bar there and feel at home. You’ll never see such a wide variety of outfits on a single street anywhere else: there are people wearing stuff you didn’t think was made to be worn, stuff you wouldn’t be seen dead in, and nobody bats an eyelid. And in the space of half an hour, you can go from the lowest of low culture to the highest of high. Take a trip from Friedrichstraße, just round the corner from some of the most beautiful old buildings in Berlin — the university campus, the churches on Gendarmenmarkt, the operahouse — to Schönleinstraße, an U-Bahnhof in which I have never not seen someone smoking crack, and you get a first-hand, smack-in-the-face representation of what I’m talking about. There’s something here for everyone, and you can be whoever you want to be. Want some of the coolest and greatest art the human race has ever produced? Berlin. Want to go to a gig five nights a week for the rest of your life? Berlin. Want to sit in bar smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking even cheaper lager until the sun comes up? Berlin. Fancy dropping three pills on Thursday night and not seeing the sun come up until Monday morning? Berghain — I mean, Berlin.
Anneliese Bödecker wrote, ‘Berliners are unfriendly and inconsiderate, gruff and self-opinionated. Berlin is repugnant, loud, filthy and grey; there are building sites and traffic jams wherever you walk or stand — yet I feel sorry for anyone who cannot live here!’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.
