BERLIN I

Arrival 

Arriving in Berlin has been hard. My trip so far has been a zoetrope of sorts (one of those Victorian-era paper cylinders with slits in the walls and a set of pictures inside that are set into motion by spinning the cylinder). I've only spent 2 or 3 days in most places and the near-continuous motion has imbued the journey with a mild, dizzy wonder and a sweet appreciation for everything I'm passing through but am not really a part of. But now I'm living (for a month) in a city filled with people highly conscious of their history, who are very well educated, informed, and articulate, who are ineffably sexy and effortlessly cool, who easily travel more in a few years that I have in my lifetime, who speak several languages, can discuss contemporary implications of Karl Marx and Albert Einstein at the drop of a hat, and don't seem particularly impressed by any of this. Some days it's more of a struggle than others to scrape together my fragile ego and venture out, but I've had some really wonderful experiences so far, and Wikipedia and Chat GPT are getting a lot of traffic as I gather enough information to join some of these conversations. 

Just a few days after arriving in Berlin I attended the Othering & Belonging Conference, organized by the Othering & Beloning Institute based at UC Berkeley. The people at OBI promote social justice by examining how injustices intersect across a variety of fields from economic and environmental policy to geopolitics to human rights, and seek alternatives. The umbrella tenant of the organization is Belonging (which they contrast with Othering) as a means of "widening the circle of consideration" to value those entities likely to receive injustice if not included. There are many organizations that do this kind of work, but I've been particularly drawn to these guys since I discovered them 5 or so years ago, and felt lucky to have arrived Berlin just in time for their 2023 conference. After two days of presentations, discussion panels, performances, and shared meals, I left feeling like I'd found the integrity, humanity, and trustworthiness I'd been seeking in a global social justice organization. My favorite session from Thursday was a presentation by OBI's Democracy & Belonging Forum leader and professor at the Autonomous University Barcelona, Miriam Juan-Torres (Gonzales). She spoke brilliantly but simply on recognizing fear-based political strategies used by anti-democratic leaders to misdirect popular sentiment toward scapegoats and subsequently garner support for themselves as a safe alternative. On Friday a especially appreciated the conversation between Udi Raz and Yasmeen Daher, mediated by Cecilie Surasky, on the experience of embodying seemingly-polar binaries: being Jewish and growing up in Haifa, a city that is both Israeli and Palestinian to many who live there, on speaking both Hebrew and Arabic, residing outside of one's home country and seeking policial justice as part of a diaspora. The conversation was particularly timely, and notably situated in the context of Germany, where statements potentially interpreted as anti-semitic, even if they are made by Jews, are harshly denounced if not silenced outright. Udi also embodies such a gentile, graceful expression of gender that I made a point of finding her at the the break to say hello and thanks. 

There's a scene in the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring where Griet and Vermeer are standing at the window and he asks her what color the clouds are. Her first response is that they are white. He waits, she looks again. "No, not white...yellow. Blue, and grey. There are colors in the clouds." You may argue that it's an overly-romantic metaphor from a movie rife with patriarchy, but the point is that I appreciate these new, nuanced shades I'm seeing in the world around me. It made more sense that Farah was one of the featured films on the flight from Sri Lanka to Dubai, and when I caught eyes with a woman wearing a keffiyeh around her neck on the U-bahn home last night I nodded and offered her a smile. 

This first week in Berlin I also got to attend some talks hosed by KW, the contemporary art gallery down the block and, met up with a bunch of friends I hadn't seen in a while. Kit and I hugged as they greeted me with "Hey traveler!" We'd seen each other over the summer when they crashed at my place on their own Global Tour Between Projects and Jobs, so it was fun to meet up on their side this time. I saw Kira & Louie not long ago in Seattle as well. They both work with Amazon and have frequent trips back to HQ in Seattle for Prime Day where I manage to distract them for a few hours with dinner. Getting to see Kayle was a huge surprise! Kayle, a chef and restaurant manager, was in Munich for a pastry conference and made the trip to Berlin for the day to catch up. We met in Switzerland 20 years ago when he was a snowboarder and I was teaching dance at  the TASIS American School summer program. If you need a slice of pizza--or a snowboarding buddy--while in Calgary or Banff, check out the savory pies one of the four Una Pizza locations and say hi to Kayle! And last but not least is Joe, who's been a visionary and entrepreneur since I met him at Earthdance just after graduating college. He's been living in Berlin for 6 years and is working with Open AI to teach Chat GPT how to have a conscience. Let's hope fortune favors the bold on his endeavors! I don't have pictures of all these folks because time with friends falls into the part of life I don't usually photograph for a blog, but maybe before I go we'll get some commemorative pics...

I bought a new pair of vegan leather boots because getting soaked by fall rain in running shoes is not sustainable through the end of November, and found a long corduroy coat that friends agree looks "like Berlin and like me." Newly equipped for the grey fall weather (literally no sun in 5+ days now) I'm thinking about the days ahead being filled with museum visits, ubiquitous all-hours public transit, runs by the Spree, cooking dinners in my studio kitchen with a stove but no oven, a neoclassical grunge pop concert, reading in bookshops, saunas, hot yoga, maybe a dance club or two, and getting to spend time in a city far from home with people who make it feel more familiar by the day. 

BERLIN II

The Holocaust Memoria, Berlin Wall, and Distillations of Spirit

Denkmal für die Ermordeten Juden Europas. No punches were pulled in the naming of this place. It is literally the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It consists of 2, 711 concrete "stelae" arranged in a grid pattern over sloping ground just a block south of the Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate). The stelae are roughly the same rectangular size but because they vary in height, as does the level of the land, they are sometimes knee-high, sometimes at the waist, and sometimes overhead like a forest of canopyless trees as you travel among them. The grid pattern means there's always a line of sight back to the city, but it still feels distinct--and like  a graveyard. 

Below the field of stelae is a concrete museum describing the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, which was the Third Reich's formal title for the plan to kill any and all Jews within German-occupied Europe. Over 90% of Polish Jews were murdered and about 2/3 of European Jews, which totals to somewhere between 4.5-6 million people. That's the population of a  city the size of Singapore, Toronto, or Dallas. There's a room in the museum called the Room of Names, in which the names of 3 million Jews are being read one at a time. To get through all of them will take about 7 years. Most of the camps where people were killed, like Auschwitz (6 hrs SE of Berlin by car)  were located in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. There's a map below that shows locations of Holocaust-related infrastructure and Prague is just visible on the western edge. The Holocaust Memorial also includes tributes to lesser-known groups of people who were executed in Nazi Germany for their non-normative lifestyles: The nomadic Sinti & Romani people of Eastern Europe, and homosexuals. 

Today in Berlin there's a strong sense of German-Jewish solidarity. In proximity to the conflict unfolding in Gaza, Deutsch Bank posters at tram stops broadcast support of Israel. There's a feeling that any statement that doesn't align with Jewish support, more specifically the support of Israeli Jews, could be construed as anti-semitic. This means Palestinian Jews are being slighted, and any support for Palestine, including peaceful demonstrations, are being tightly controlled if not prevented. Udi Raz, who I met at the Othering and Belonging Conference a few weeks ago, has spoken publicly at demonstrations in Berlin and was interviewed by the New York Times regarding the silencing of non-Israeli Jewish voices and the need for freedom of speech and demonstration in Berlin (@ugiraza on Instagram). Udi was born in Haifa, Israel, but speaks and demonstrates on behalf of Palestinian representation. I assume this is because Israel will, for historic and contemporary political and economic reasons, inherently be represented in determining the fate of Israel/Palestine, the West Bank, and Gaza, and Udi wishes to expand the circle of concern to include the people of Palestine. I just saw this morning that there will be a demonstration for Solidarity with Palestine next Saturday, Nov. 25th at the Anhalter Bahnhof, with the word "approved" at the bottom of the post. I'm glad these voices are being heard, and hope that it means representation for the Jewish Palestinian community in movement toward a cease-fire and the negotiation of stable infrastructure and governments across the land from the River to the Sea. 

Die Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer.  The Berlin Wall memorial is 10 minutes walk from my flat at Autuststraße 61 so it's more of a neighbor than a destination and I visited several times. It was built  in 1961 by the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany, and they weren't Democratic at all, they were Socialist) to separate the portion of Berlin they felt they could control and/or align with the Soviets from West Berlin. Conditions were better in West Berlin and the GDR built the wall to keep people from leaving the East. The location of the wall was determined largely by the configuration of the Allied Occupation of Berlin post WWII (1945). After the German surrender, four of the Allies  (USA, France, England, and Soviet Union) occupied and controlled the country of Germany in a quadrant-like fashion, and a similar divide happened with the city of Berlin. The wall was built roughly along the same border that divided the portion of Berlin controlled by England, France, and the United States in 1945, from what had been controlled by the Soviets.

The memorial itself documents the disruption caused along the rift where the wall was built: A church was demolished, a home was bisected and a very pregnant woman jumped from the 3rd story window the night the police came to avoid being restrained in the East. People fled with whatever possessions they could carry in bags or on their backs. The wall is 96 miles long, 13 feet high, and only about 8 inches thick, made of rebar and concrete. In many places there are two walls; one inner, one outer, with a no mans' land and guard towers in between. Passage was possible, and it was much easier to cross from West to East.  Traveling from East to West required an application, GDR-authorized approval papers, and patience. A friend told me a story of her husband's uncle having to wait indefinitely in a car at Checkpoint Charlie. He'd packed food and kept an empty bottle in the car in case he had to pee. There was no leaving the line if you wanted to make it through. 

The wall stood as a barricade for nearly 30, years and became an icon of the Cold War.  On November 9, 1989, the wall fell as Mikhail Gorbachev reformed the economic and political systems of the Soviet Union toward greater public participation, economic conditions in East Berlin worsened, and GDR attempts to temper protests of increasing magnitude within East Berlin failed. 

One of the most famous paintings on the Berlin Wall is God Help Me Survive this Deadly Love or the Fraternal Kiss, which was painted by Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel on the eastern side of the wall in 1990--after it fell. The mural is a painting of the photograph taken of General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev and socialist East German leader Erich Honecker kissing in 1979, on the 30th anniversary of the founding of the GDR. The painting can be interpreted as a warning against post-Cold War German alliances with Soviet communism, and has also been used to sell all things Berlin, from currywurst to sweatshirts. In 2016, spinoffs of the mural depicting Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as well as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson appeared as political statements. 

Walking along the path through the memorial one evening I came across an unexpectedly familiar statue, and it took me a minute to recognize where I'd seen it before, but then it came to me--Hiroshima. This statue, of a man and a woman kneeling in an arched embrace, is at the Hiroshima Peace Park Memorial as well. I did some investigating and learned that the statue, originally called Reunion, was created to show husband and wife meeting again after she crossed Europe on foot to find him at the end of WWII. It's since been adopted, re-named Reconciliation, and placed at several memorials of global tragedy including Hiroshima, the Berlin Wall, Coventry Cathedral in England (which was largely destroyed during WWII), and given in desktop-form as the Coventry Prize for Peace and Reconciliation. 

As it stands the Berlin Wall Memorial is one part crumbling artifact and one part artwork. A line of thin bronze polls stand demarcating where the wall was demolished. Poetically, they're set wide enough that a person can walk right through, so I did. With a little wonder and a laugh, I passed right through the place where a wall stood for the first 9 years of my life, that'd I'd only heard about on the news, and that had seemed unmeasurably far away. I have to imagine it meant a infinitely more to the people of Berlin, after 30 years of separation, to do the same. 

Intermixed with all that history, I also saw a movie at a beautiful old theater in one of Berlin's many secret interior squares, wandered the streets at night when all the lights are on and the stone and concrete become brilliant with color, saw a concert, went to the sauna, took dance classes, went to yoga, visited an art gallery that used to be a distillery, had brunch under a giant artificial tree at the House of Small Wonder, decided Sophienstraße is my favorite street in Berlin, traveled daily on the U-Bahn (where I heard Richard Strauss' "Vienna Blood Waltz" playing when I arrived to Strausberger Platz station!) and saw the Stolpersteins (10cm brass plates among the sidewalk stones that show the life dates and mark where persecuted or exterminated Jews used to live) of the city polished and decorated with roses on November 9th (the night before my birthday) in remembrance of Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht was another terrible anti-Jewish atrocity, but it made the night really lovely to see people take such care in polishing the stones and to walk along city sidewalks everywhere decorated with roses and lanterns. 

BERLIN III

Birthday 43

I haven't stayed up all night it a while. There were a couple years of my life, after first becoming a nurse, when I worked the night shift in the ICU for 6 weeks at a time but that was about 15 years ago and I can't recall having done it intentionally since. In a city known for its nightlife, it seemed a fitting odyssey to witness the passage of all the hours between being 42 and 43. I sent an invitation to friends and family near and far to send songs, poems, images, and videos they wanted to share as a moment of being together across the distance. I took these gifts with me and experienced them throughout the night. Here's the story of my birthday journey as a gift in return. 

The Berlin TV tower is 368 meters tall and stands in the middle of Alexanderplatz, which is a large shopping/dining plaza and a major hub in the Berlin public transit network. I'm up here because Berlin is real flat---I mean, I'm kind of shocked that the Spree flows at all the land is so level--so there's no better way to get some perspective on the city. In all directions roads spoke out beneath the tower and the glow of city lights crossfades with the setting sun. Berlin has about the same footprint as New York but only 1/3 the population. There are no sky scrapers; just an endless organic iteration of 6-story buildings wrapped around courtyards following long lines out to the horizon. It's peaceful. It's full of tourists. I read about some landmarks, complete the 360-degree circuit twice for good measure, and head down. I feel exhausted, which isn't out of the ordinary when the sun goes down, but staring down a voluntary all-nighter I start to wonder how much of this plan I'll make it through and start to calculate how bad I'd feel if I bailed and took a nap...but dinner is next and I made a reservation so there's no going home now.

Night Kitchen is cool, so I had to book a seat for one early in the dinner service over a week ago. The spacious wooden bar wraps around a large, open kitchen and tables fill the dark but warmly-lit Baroque-industrial space to its pink, fleur-de-lis papered walls. The bartender fills me in on the Israeli-Mediterranean menu and I order the house special 5-course dinner and a cardamom gin mule. It's Friday night, and as it the Jewish custom on Shabbat, we begin with challah bread. It comes with something like tahini and zaatar in olive oil. Everything is delicious. I meet the couple next to me, who are also traveling, and we talk with each new dish about all the flavors and where we've been and where we're going. The food is earthy, fragrant, and and warmly-spiced with accents of lemon, mint, dill, pomegranate, and vinegar. Fried cauliflower over black lentils, roasted beets over labneh, stewed eggplant with crunchy chickpeas, mushrooms with polenta, and rectangle of dense chocolate mousse topped with sweet miso and a perfect heart-shaped strawberry for dessert. An unanticipated but unequivocally lovely two and a half hours later I text my friends and apology for running late, say goodnight to my dinner companions and the bartender, pay the check, and hop on the U-Bahn for Kreuzberg. 

I meet Kit and Joe for an avant-garde music experience at a small performance space not far from where each of them lives. They hang out in the part of town not far from Tempelhofer Field, an airport-turned-green space where you can run, or bike, or fly a kite, or even rollerblade (yes, they're back) down the runway. It's where the Berlin Airlift took place in 1948-49 to provide Berlin and greater Germany with basic supplies like food and fuel during the Soviet cold war blockade. Kreuzberg is inhabited by artist-intellectuals who vibe on the community of housemates and conduct international meetings on laptops from the local park. Think genius-style hippies with less pot and better hair. So this music should be rad--but--it's not! It's kind of the worst in a non melodic, minimalist, noise-experiment kind of way, and after a huge dinner it's honestly beyond me to keep from nodding off in the back row (there are only 4) as I feel grateful for missing the first half each time I re-surface to consciousness. Thankfully it's brief and a few minutes later we're at a wine bar down the block discussing my strategy for getting into Berghain once they open at midnight. 

Berghain. So Berghain is one of the most famous dance clubs in the world, and is also known for things more debaucherous and hedonistic than dancing to techno all night long, so I'm curious, and a little nervous, and also, after 45 minutes of freezing in the 3am cold waiting in line, starting to question what kind of decision I made in coming here. The door policy is notoriously inscrutable and fairly strict, and I wonder if the oversized, shiny black plastic jacket I'm wearing is really something I can pull off. I memorized the DJ list for both dance floors for the night and even listened to a new album one of them released in case I need to feign some kind of loyalty (though honestly, the album was stellar). The chater dies down as we get closer to the door and I rehearse my little speech regarding my favorite DJs (in German) in my head. The it's my turn. There are three or four staff milling around the door and one of them turns and looks at me casually. There are no queastions. There's nothing but a sort of bored gaze in my direction until I figure I need to say something before it gets weird. "Eins," I offer. One. The guy nods. That's it--I'm in!

Through the door, up a couple of steps, to the left there’s a check-in area where you get a pat-down and they put little rounds stickers over the camera lenses on your phone. You’re welcome to use your phone inside Berghain but you can’t take photos. (All the images of Berghain were scraped off the internet.) There are no mirrors. The time for self-reflection is after you leave…

Berghain is open most of the weekend, through until 10 or so on Monday morning. You can go in the middle of the day on Sunday. Some people call it going to church. The main dance floor does bear an uncanny resemblance to St. Mark's Episcopal cathedral in Seattle, complete with glass wall separating the dancefloor from the bar. I dance on a platform just above the crowd, right near the DJ booth, for two hours non-stop awash in the rhythm of the music and the play of the lights. It's exhilarating and a little exhausting. A man and a woman dressed in fishnet bodysuits overlaid with bondage gear come up: "You're like a martial artist dancing!" and "I love your arms." Thank you sleeveless black tank top and ninja graffiti on the wall near the Rosenthaler Straße U-Bahn.  As 7am nears I buy a bottle of water from the bar and sip on it as I take a final tour of the space. The lights change from blue and white to yellow and pale orange, and I head outside. The light is still dim,  but there's birdsong. I can see a hint sunrise. Time to go back to the Berlin Wall. 

I'd intended to stop home during the night to light 43 candles and write for a few minutes before going out to Berghain, but that turned out to feel to final and reflective for the middle of the night so I skipped it. The Universe must have wanted me to have this birthday wish, though, because as I crossed the Berlin Wall memorial (listening to David Hasselhoff's "Looking for Freedom" - 1989) I noticed trays of sand filled with taper candles lining the wall of the Ackerstraße checkpoint. I imagine they were part of a Kristallnacht remembrance the night before, as they'd all gone out except for large candle in a glass with a lid. I took it off. One by one I re-lit 43 of the tapers, each of them hissing as the damp wick touched the flame and started to burn again. I didn't make any wishes. I didn't blow them out. I let them burn as I turned East toward the sunrise and headed home. 

Berlin IV

Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha, and, the Best Part of Berlin was Prague

This is the part of writing about Berlin for things that don't fit on the tour. These are a collection of photos from moments in between places, from walking home at odd hours of the night, from going back to Prague, twice, because I met someone I needed to go back for, who showed me the Czech Republic in a way I couldn't have otherwise seen, and who is really just a kind and lovely person. Every word I write feels so small and mundane. Just skip through if this is boring... maybe I can do a better job describing some of this if you ask me about it later. These are just a few details I don't want to forget. 

My address is Auguststraße 61, 10117, Berlin. There's a bamboo forest outside my door and the gallery of windows in my flat looks out over the forest courtyard. I'm sitting at a large wooden table. The boards are a little uneven. There are three dried roses, one red, two white, in the vase. 

My neighbor is learning to play the clarinet. They're not bad; they play simple scales ascending and descending the notes. On Sundays the churches bucket Berlin with the endless ringing of bells. Sometimes the on-demand hot water heater in the bathroom gets stuck trying to ignite. It hums a little then ticks, like an engine that won't turn over. I figured out how to turn it off after it woke me up one night somewhere around 2am. I wonder if I sit under it and meditate, could I break the cycle of Samsara?  But I never get to it and it's easier to just turn it off. 

Nothing captures this--not this place, this life. Sometimes there are no words. Yesterday I came across the Heart Sutra, or The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom, which was familiar from meditation with my teachers in Seattle. It was written on a bathroom wall so it took me a minute to recognize in that contex, but it describes how ultimately all phenomena are emptiness, which, when I try to think about it, does something to my mind kind of like what happens to the water heater when it gets stuck. But it's often used as a mantra, and you just say it again and again and try not to pull it apart so much as to just be with it and see what happens. Translated to English it goes: Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond, Enlightenment hail! It used to feel cold and unfamiliar. I think we're becoming friends now. There's something really beautiful about the peace and emptiness of simple, still contentment, just like there's something really beautiful about the fullness and chaos of life in motion. 

I arrived in Berlin a month ago. Tomorrow is my last day here. I didn't come with a plan--I just had a place to live, a conference to attend, a few classes to take, some friends to visit, a rail pass, my phone, a laptop, and time. I don't think I could have planned or arranged anything better than what grew out of that combination of a little structure and safety and a lot of availability. I feel simultaneously like I don't know how to leave, and, even though I don't have a plan in place to come back, nothing will be abandoned; it's simply time to go. My neighbor is still practicing the scales...I have to pack my bag...It's been good here.