Berlin Notebook. Joshua Weiner
and West, and certainly not between left and right, but between musicians and their audience. Teen fans slam against fans dating from the Mauerfall, and devotees from the band’s earliest days welcome the physical contact from the pit’s periphery. Everyone sings along, wet with each other’s sweat and the sporadic fountain of beer from an over-jostled bottle. The music ends promptly at 10. This well-known club for alternative music and culture, that had started as a squat in 1990, has had its unruliness trained back by gentrification: new neighbors insisting on the German institution of the 10 pm curfew (I think of the scolding notice in the laundryroom of my building: “No Washing After 22.00 Uhr”).
Cooling off outside the club, Eric, a young man who had introduced himself earlier, approaches me. Hey, American guy, I want to ask you something. Wide eyes and a wide smile play on the most animated expressive German face I have ever seen. He could’ve been an actor (maybe he is one). Hey, let me ask you: is war the last opinion? What? He repeats the question. I repeat the question, not quite sure what he is asking. Is war the last opinion? Is he asking me if war is the last word in an argument between nations? Or if history, in order to be written, requires war, and victors in war to tell their side of a story? Whatever. Given the context, I get the drift; there can only be one answer.
No, I say sincerely. The back of his hand gently thumps my chest. Everywhere I go, he says, around the world, in Europe, in South America, I ask this of Americans, “is war the last opinion.” They all say “yes.” You are the first American to say “no.” Well, I say, I think you’re hanging out with the wrong people; I’m not the only American who would say that. Yeah, but what kind of country do you live in? There’s no democracy there. Everything is controlled by money. Your democracy is controlled by money. You can’t even vote for who you want to, you can only vote for the names on the card. That’s not true, I say, but I couldn’t deny that the political system was appearing more like a plutocracy, what with Trump still leading the run for the Republican nomination and billionaires funding super-PACS to protect their interests. Is Trump your next president, he asks. He has a crazy smile on his face. I can’t tell if he is being friendly and ironical, or menacing.
No, I say, but right now he is our Berlusconi. What about the refugees, I say, exercising my prerogative non-sequitur, I’m trying to write about what people think here, and nobody’s asking people like you. Oh, Mann, he says, I should take you to my parents, in Saxony, in Dresden. My father is an engineer. When the wall came down, he lost everything. Reunification ruined him. Now he’s spent 25 years paying into the new system. And the refugees, they want to come here and take. And he says, “That’s my money, they want to rob me!” Hey, American guy, we are going to a very alternative party, you must come. But I have only my bike here, I say. You’ll get it later, come with us. A taxi pulls up. This is our taxi, he says. I get in with him and four other friends.
I can’t make out in what direction we are heading; I have gotten turned around too many times in pursuit of my two-wheeled anti-nationalist protestors. Maybe we’re heading south into Kreuzberg’s more derelict bar scene. The mood in the taxi is frothy, though the German chatter jumping between my five party Virgils is too fast for me to follow. Eventually we pull into an apartment lot. The door opens. Ann Jangle and Cami Scoundrel, the musicians from South Africa, are standing there with drinks in hand. We’re leaving, Ann says, this party sucks. The others de-cab, and Ann and Cami get in. I stay seated. I have no idea where we are, at least I’m in a taxi. The door closes and Ann punts an address to the driver and we take off.
Hey, I say, you guys were fantastic tonight. You speak English, Ann says, oh thank god, where are you from? Washington DC, I say. Oh, man, I’d love to play there, says Ann. Well you should, I say, you were great. Where are we going? To a bar in Kreuzberg, she says. A flurry of chitchat gets us acquainted and I explain why I’m there. Where are the refugees? Oh, man, they’re everywhere, says Ann. But where? Just look around you, human misery is everywhere in this city. Go to Warschauerstrasse or Hallesches Tor, (two metro stops in East Berlin), you’ll find them. (I would go the next day, but I never saw any refugees there, only grimy career bums, young bushy beards with dreads hanging or roped back, playing guitars, drinking beer, and hanging out on narrow strips of trashy grass with happy well-behaved dogs.) You’ll find them, says Ann, the situation. Cami has to leave in two days because of her passport situation, she adds. Borders. There shouldn’t be any borders. You shouldn’t need some piece of paper to go where you want, where you need to go. (A world without borders. It sounds like an anarchist theme, but I’d hear it over and again, more centrally au courant in Berlin now—and of course the existence of the EU is predicated, to begin with, on loosening control of the borders.)
The bar is a simmering warm Kreuzberg scene, crowded, edgy, friendly. Everyone seems to know each other but to come from radically different sectors of society. At one table, a beefy goth guy in studded leather, make up, spiked hair and a metal bolt shooting out of his chin is talking to a thin dapper cat in a cardigan and tie. Girls on the lam from American sororities rub shoulders at the bar with broad, thick-handed guys in durable work shirts. At least in the bar it seems to be a world without borders. I ask Ann and Cami where they are living. “Nowhere,” is the answer. Where are they sleeping? In the flats of friends, or on a park bench. On a park bench? Yeah, says Cami, I woke up on one this morning. Were you guys paid for the performance tonight? Yeah, says Ann, fifty bucks. Fifty bucks for both of you? Yeah, and I sold a few cd’s, but we’ve already spent that. She hands me a Mexicali shot. What’s this, I say. It’s for your health. We clink and bottom up.
Ann turns to play a dice game with a huge guy at the bar who looks like he has just walked off a Fassbinder set, Expressionism itself sitting at a bar, killing time as civilization wanes into darkness. I ask Cami about her life and her music, what inspired her in each, and she tells me about Cape Town and the music she loves, such as Fuzigish (the ska punk band from Gauteng) and the slam poets, Kyle Louw and Roche du Plessis, as well as her grandfather, who emigrated with such resourceful determination to South Africa from Lithuania. Are you sure you guys have a place to stay tonight, I say, you shouldn’t be sleeping on park benches (I am showing my age and sheltered lack of experience). Another round and Ann and Cami are reciting their poems to me, egging me on to do the same.
I have now been drinking slowly but steadily for eight hours. Some things simply are not possible at that point, at least for me, and one of them is calling up any of my poems to memory (a real poet’s memory, of course, would only be turned on by drinking ... Will there ever be a time, I think, when you won’t feel like a poser). Cami pats me on the head and looks me in the eye. I see a lot of white, she says. I’m being told my age. At some point the two of them disappear down a staircase. My offer of shelter no doubt having looked like a proposition, they have properly ditched me. I sit and study the bartender as he tries with some difficulty to light short candles set in glass that he then haphazardly slides along the bar. Berliners love candles, a fetching impulse in a dark city. A sign on corrugated cardboard cut from a box is sloppily taped to the wall. “How to Survive Kreuzberg,” it reads. Clocking in at 3 am, one suggestion stands out, “Don’t open a map.”
Eric of the bright eyes and broad smile has walked in, but I can’t bear another political entanglement, I’m fried. I go to say goodbye. You going? He gives me an enormous bear hug. I will look you up on Facebook, he shouts across the two-inch chasm between us. A taxi and a bike ride later, I walk into my Scheunenviertel flat and stand at the window for a while, staring blankly at the shadowed bulk of the new CIA in Berlin.
WHERE WERE THE REFUGEES?
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Severe hangover. Head throb pushes me out of bed. I move through the morning routine and get out the door to find a strong Schwarzer Kaffee at Karaca, my local joint on Chauseestrasse. The guys who own and run the place, four or five of them, are always hanging out and kibitzing. The café is like a business-cum-frat house for them; it draws people in. I get my coffee zum Mitnehmen (to go), and welcome the fresh air. Beautiful fall morning in Berlin to look for a shop that can remove my head and replace it with a pumpkin. Passing the Brecht Hause, I duck into the adjacent park to find a bench and mentally lick my brain.
Within about 30 seconds I realize I’ve wandered into a cemetery. Empty of