Life in Berlin

 “Berlin is not the place you go to if you are looking for romance. It is not quaint, it is not pretty in the most obvious, touristy ways. What Berlin is, is this: a place where you can see many (if not all) of the 20th century’s worst horrific historical scars; it is a city that seems to take pride in resisting the urge to sweep its dark past under the rug of gentrification; it is where people go to if they are looking for a taste of the past and a vision of the future.”

–Juliana Alvim 

Berlin is a terribly interesting place to be. It feels like a city with a soul–one that has multiple time periods and cultures folding in upon itself. You can see remnants of a divided Germany, of one destroyed by war, one wounded by National Socialism, one powerhouse of Prussia. You also hear so many languages and interact with people from all over the world with varying ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. 

We live in Gesundbrunnen, which is just north of the city center of Berlin. We’ve enjoyed the area so far with its plethora of Turkish bakeries, dozens of döner shops, several grocery stores, and large park (Humboldthain).

Our apartment is on the second floor of an Altbau (pre-war building) and it has a ton of space. The floors creak when you walk on them. Dallin mentioned it feels a little bit like A Quiet Place as we try to creep around the house without making noise when Teddy is sleeping. Maybe it’s worth marking which ones make noise? Our shower doesn’t have a curtain, which means you have to sit or stand to wash yourself to avoid spraying water outside the tub. I’ve gotten used to it, but it doesn’t keep me from dreaming about a standing shower with better pressure and warmer water.

I usually teach my students about garbage separation (Mülltrennung) with this catchy techno song. I’ve withheld from singing it every day as we separate our garbage into its correct bin based on what it is made from. It’s good to be back.

Every day in the mid-afternoon, I crash and fall asleep while Teddy naps. One day, I needed a nap at 7:30am (Teddy’s been waking up pretty early here). I have probably consumed 30 bars of chocolate and visited the baklava shop around the corner around 9 times. I’ve had some beautiful runs exploring new trails and finding favorite places.

You could say that I am thriving.

We’ve already had a couple visitors. My mom stayed one day with us and she took our obligatory “we’re in Berlin picture” that I posted last week. 

My friend Morgan visited Berlin with some friends and spent a day with us. We went shopping at the Kaufhof (a five-story department store at Alexanderplatz)and I tricked Morgan into buying more chocolate than she had planned to buy (which as far as I know was none). One of my favorite things in Germany is fancy ice cream bowls (including Spaghettieis), so Morgan and I went to a place with just a single review on Google (“sehr lecker” from one year ago) with the intent of adding a second review after we ate ice cream there.

Unfortunately, it was not good. I want to say it was average at best, but as the days have passed my memory has placed it in the “actively bad” category. The vanilla ice cream was not good, the bits of white chocolate were flavorless (was it actually little pieces of paper?!), the raspberry sauce was actually bad jam? 

We chose not to write a review.

Fortunately, Dallin and I had excellent Spaghettieis at a different time and in a different place.

When my mom was here, we also walked around the Holocaust memorial. It’s an interesting memorial because there isn’t really any information embedded in the memorial itself. There is a little museum underground, but for the most part, it’s a bit abstract. In some ways, that makes sense because the Holocaust is so unfathomable. Some scholars have critiqued this memorial for being more of a German space than a Jewish space (who is really being honored or remembered here?). There’s been emerging research as to how visitors react to particular memorials, such as this one. Relational to this is how Holocaust memorials have turned up in digital media. Some have critiqued the pairing of selfies in somber memorials (such as the project Yolocaust) while others have tried to portray a more nuanced developing tourist memory culture and what freedoms people should have in interacting with memorials.

Dallin and I took Teddy to some East Germany sites this week as well. The East Side Gallery is known as the longest outdoor art gallery, but it’s also the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall. There’s been a lot of development in this area, so some have expressed concerns about gentrification of the area at the expense of the wall as a monument (parts have been torn down to make way for new housing). East Side Gallery is set up mostly as an art exhibit, in that it doesn’t include very much information about the Berlin Wall itself aside from the years. Not very many visitors know how many people died trying to cross the wall between 1960 and 1989–but apparently neither does the internet? I had previously read it was 80 people, but I’ve seen numbers like 140, 327 (this one includes the whole East German border and pre-wall years as well), and 80 on different legit websites, which is a bit confusing. The majority of sites agree on a number around 140, so that’s the one I’d go with.

We checked out Check Point Charlie and the Black Box museum on another day. There’s a temporary panorama exhibit there as well, which we didn’t visit, but I think it’s a really interesting idea and experience. The artist (Yadegar Asisi) has tried to recreate a glimpse into the Kreuzberg area during the 1980s. How better to transport your viewers into a historical period than visually? 

And thus we come to the end of May.