Stadt + Rand

A few weeks back, prompted by an invitation from Katy Derbyshire over at the excellent blog love german books, I attended a reading at a charming establishment called Katz & Maus put on by an English-language publisher of small format books, Readux. The reading was fantastic, and while I was there, I picked up a couple of Berlin-specific titles to check out. I only just got around to reading my first the other day and, well, I highly recommend it.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus' essay "City of Rumor: The Compulsion to Write About Berlin" struck a nerve with me simply because it seemed like he had found me out. As I read his essay, I noticed, as in a mirror image, a series of impulses I have felt as an academic writer in Berlin. With a self-aware sense of his own relative privilege that is coupled by an inate suspicion of his own inadequacy, he describes the experience of being in Berlin for any time long enough that it can no longer be considered a vacation. In particular, Lewis-Kraus makes some rather astute observations about the disparity between one's impressions of what Berlin will be like and the actuality, the listlessness that comes with the privilege of any stay for which one does not have the burden of a regular work or school routine, and the simultaneous energy boon and energy drain of Berlin's all-night, DIY, anything goes artistic, creative, and party scene. He describes, as well, the sort of depression which seems endemic to newcomers here...I myself wrote about it a few entries back, in that Berlin lends itself to a hopefulness that for many is difficult to maintain once actually here. Contained within all of this is a rather poignant investigation of the process of writing itself, and in particular how an environment teeming with creative potential can actually overwhelm one to the point of inaction. 

This essay (story? whatever one might call it...) is really a lovely little read, and I can definitely see the appeal of these short format books that Readux puts out...I read it all within the span of enjoying a coffee and some quiche at a cafe in Kreuzberg, where I'd jumped in to avoid the drizzle and been greeted by a barista who, immediately upon noticing my accent, switched to speaking English at me, despite my attempts to continue in German. It was what I needed to read at that exact moment, and it was nice to be able to finish it all in that short little span of time.

Here are but a few of my favorite little bits from the piece:

"You've probably gone to Berlin in part because of its reputation for world-historical fun. If you've found yourself there in some bounded way--on a fellowship before graduate school, say--the fun serves just fine. But if your move is an open-ended affair, the fun takes its course, and then, to avoid that obscure sense of having failed at being somewhere, you need an exit strategy. Some exit strategies allow you to stay: falling in love with a German, say, or going to German graduate school. Other exit visas allow you to leave. Falling in love with someone in Paris. Getting a job in London. You need some finding that retroactively validates the whole experiment. Because you've set yourself up, is the thing. As a writer, I hoped I might find that justification in telling a story that looped the whole thing together in a reasonable way....I have found, however, that I cannot shake the urge to write more about Berlin, to revise what I have already written about Berlin, and furthermore to disclaim in advance as insufficiently definitive anything I might conceivably write about Berlin in the future." (pp 5-6)

"The chapter about Berlin, like the lives of many of the people I knew in Berlin, had no such constraint--no relevant chronology, no narrative necessity. When I sat down to write about Berlin for the first time, all I could do was make a list of anecdotes, the ones that lingered with me for some reason, in no particular order. I wrote them out as a series of disordered episodes--the time we followed the votive candles to the rave in the toolshed in the middle of the park, the time our friend held a real art opening outside a fake art opening--and saw little use or accuracy in connecting them. After all, they had only ever felt associatively connected in the first place. They had, of course, happened in one particular order, though as far as I could tell, they might very well have happened in any other order, or no order at all." (pp 10)

"With no real work to speak of, love, or at least sex, took on unreasonable burdens. Structured productive time was creatively supplanted by structured consumptive time. We repressively desublimated. In the absence of actual poetry, we took very seriously the receding prospect of becoming the poets of our own lives." (pp 12)

"But the first time I came back to Berlin as a visitor, less than a year after having left what passed for an actual life there behind, all I could see were the remainders. What I'd left out, what I'd misrepresented. My protean, anecdotal version of events there may have felt static and conflicted, nothing like the neat story I'd come to tell in the book, but I'd lost something in giving up that sketchy, makeshift approach to a sketchy, makeshift place. For I did not go to Berlin as a naif and I did not emerge from it a cynic. I did not begin in exhiliration and end in despond. There was no arc that moved from one state to another. There were just both states, always." (pp 21)

This last quote in particular, the sense of both states, always, simultaneously, strikes a real chord for me as someone who has devoted her time, energy and body to this city in an attempt to understand the culture, and yet who has often felt nonetheless rebuffed by Berlin. Feeling neither like an outsider nor an insider, neither accepted nor rejected, neither loved nor despised by this city, but rather feeling all of those things, all the time, all at once...I suspect that feeling is a lot of what's behind this compulsion to write about Berlin, to attempt to get the city down on paper so one has a shot, a chance, no matter how fleeting, of getting a grip on it.

A few shots from Wedding, Berlin (as of yet, unretouched):

22 September 2014

36 Days in Berlin (An essay on feeling alone while abroad)

I have been in Berlin for 36 days, and I have been happy for 15 of them.

Well, that’s not fair. In actuality, only five of these days are days on which I know, with absolute assuredness, that I experienced an abject depression that caused me to feel unhomed from my own body—a feeling made all the more debilitating by my crushing guilt at having the audacity to be anything but ecstatic in the city that I have long associated with some of my best memories, and to which I had travelled in all of my most wistfully achievable daydreams. No one can be depressed in Berlin, I think, cognizant as I am of the absurdity.

On my happy days, I blissfully wander the streets of Berlin, allowing myself to soak in its filthy-but-passionate energy and to drift in and out of its ambient waves of sound. I spent two of them swimming nude at Schlachtensee, already regretting that it could not be summer forever, that the water was already getting too cold for anything but a cursory dip as I floated near the surface where the sun still sat. In a few of them, I whisked visiting friends from place to place and taught them about the Berlin I had fallen in love with twice before already—in the autumn of 2006, when it was the first foreign city in which I'd ever lived, and in summer of 2013, when it was the first foreign city to which I’d ever returned. Though not a native, I had done the necessary time to at least regard Berlin as a familiar acquaintance and introducing this city to others felt less like an exercise in nostalgia and more like spotting my past self and waving hello as I passed her on the sidewalk.

On many of the happy days, and even many of those in-between ones, I reconnect with people from my past who themselves have also felt the magnetic pull of Berlin, who have answered the siren song of DIY art and hipster flea markets and graffitied dance clubs in old warehouses with an enthusiastic “ja, gerne!” These friends have already woven themselves into Berlin’s cigarette-perfumed fabric, and I am eternally grateful to them for bringing me along, so I try my best to smile and get excited, even on days when I am already struggling. I trust all of their suggestions for cool clubs, hip events, beers that are worth trying, and, following their motions to the letter, experience temporarily the ebullient fervor of a Berlin that they have already managed to tame.

The remaining days, those that aren’t marked by either extreme of the depression/joy spectrum are mainly notable for the fact that I experience both simultaneously, in an unfathomable pendulum of emotions that leaves me bewildered and at sea. Most days here, I set myself adrift across the landscape of Berlin and swoon over its contingent eccentricities, all the while lamenting the dark smoke that slowly fills my mind. It is in these moments in which I feel displaced, unwanted, in a word: foreign. Some days, overwhelmed by both the ache in my body (from walking everywhere and spending late nights drinking beer) and the ache in my heart (from isolation, from missing those I love, from not knowing what to do with myself anymore), I sit in bed for hours at a time and watch over-dubbed versions of American TV shows, promising myself that I am improving my German in the process.

Thinking back on other times I’ve lived abroad, it seems clear that none of this is new. My six weeks in Russia in summer of 2011, punctuated as they are by the development of a handful of pure friendships and the fond memories I have of my encounters with Russian art and theatre, remains one of the darkest periods of my life to date. I had always assumed that that was simply the result of the huge upheaval I had undergone in the weeks leading up to it (a major break-up, becoming homeless as a result of said break-up, financial distress, the end of my first year of grad school) and that Russia had simply been the beautiful gilded cage in which I’d endured my requisite mourning. Coming to Berlin and feeling that way again, despite a beautiful life at home, it suddenly seems that it must be me that is the problem, that I must be to blame for my own misery.

Looking objectively, though, I suspect that this is the experience of any world traveller, particularly any who travel alone and especially those who will be staying in their destination for any length of time too significant to be called a vacation. Looking objectively, I know that this is inevitable, that it is rooted in homesickness and culture shock and the requisite emotional chaos that accompanies any and all major life changes. I know also that I feel alone because I am alone, and alone isn’t always the worst thing to be, even if my extrovert tendencies generally make it hard for me to endure it for any longer than a few hours at a time. And even then, I’m not really alone because I do have friends I see, and I do have people who love me, and in this internet age, I am never more than a FaceTime away from some emotional support. I know all of this objectively, and yet it remains exceedingly difficult to turn off the script in my head. This third time in Berlin, this isolation, I feel as if I am constantly travelling out of my own consciousness to look at myself in silent judgment, to shake my head and tsk tsk tsk the ways I’m squandering my opportunity. Who else gets to spend 4 months on their own projects? I ask myself, dumbfounded and a bit disgusted. Why aren’t you grateful? You could be so much more grateful. When I feel this way, the only answer I can give this outer self is a shrug.

This blog will chronicle four months of research conducted in Berlin from August 2014-December 2014. The topic of research, here, at the outset, is still rather amorphous -- as a researcher, I leave myself open to new possibilities at each turn, so it feels reductive to try and summarize a project, the final shape of which I do not yet know.

I am a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. German is my primary literature of study, though I also work in American literature and, in a more limited capacity, in Russian literature. The period of focus for my work is the late 20th century and the contemporary. My work finds its starting point in the paradigmatic shift created by the end of World War II and the various ways culture and everyday life altered in the seismic shift that followed, and it extends into the present day.

To this point in my studies, my work on American culture and literature has focused on the concept of the suburbs as postmodern space, the ambiguous definitions and images attached to the concept of "suburbia" and the various texts (literature, film, music, television, etc.) that serve to shape, uphold, and revisit that concept. I have further focused on the concept of self and subject, particularly as they relate to identity, and the way identity is shaped in part by the space one inhabits. Thus, my work can be considered spatial, first and foremost, for space itself is the constant in all my endeavors. Going into Berlin, this will be the starting point for my research, but I am also interested in expanding the scope of my focus in a meaningful way. As an urban space, Berlin is multi-faceted and nuanced, in particularly because its history cannot be divorced from the spatial. The Berlin Wall, which stood from 1961-1989, is the most significant contemporary example of this, but Berlin was divided well before that, into the four occupation zones dictated by the Potsdam Agreement. In the nearly 25 years since the wall came down, many of these divisions are physically invisible but culturally opaque. 

Further, Berliners demonstrate a devotion to their particular neighborhoods within the city space in a way that emphasizes the differences between them, despite the overarching ideologies that unite what it means to live in Berlin. This contributes to a sort of identity for each neighborhood itself, a phenomenon not unique to Berlin but which finds its example par excellence there.

My research in Berlin, thus, will be an attempt to examine these spaces, and to peel apart what it means to live in a particular neighborhood, in a particular way, and in particular, in Berlin. It leads me to a series of seemingly grand questions, such as, but not limited to:

What does it mean to be urban?

What does it mean to be suburban?

What does community mean and how is it established?

How do people live in these communities? What is their everyday life? And how do those lived experiences differ between neighborhoods, communities, etc?

What is a neighborhood? And related, what does it mean to be a neighbor?

What do these types of spaces look like in Berlin compared with other cities in Germany? Compared with the United States? Compared with cities around the world?

What is specific to Berlin, spatially, and which aspects of Berlin’s unique character are merely adaptations of more universal interactions with space?

I do not expect to be able to answer all these questions, but I expect to find something new, waiting to be explored, in the opportunities that searching for these answers provides. On a personal note, the fact that I have this opportunity, to focus on research in a rather unrestricted way, is something I will never cease to see as both a privilege and honor not extended to most, even within academia, and I feel a personal duty to develop a project that will reflect the huge amount of faith that has been placed in my abilities as a researcher and writer. I will not squander it.