a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Monday, February 07, 2005 One-Month Report
This place depressed me when I first moved in. It's cramped, drab, a little bare; the walls are East-German macadam and the view out the window is gray. The streets that seem foreign and charming when you visit (because of this patch of cobblestones, or that Wilhelminian church) seemed immediately -- I mean right away, while I still waited in the wet with my luggage for a friend to show up with the key -- mundane and oppressive. They felt like Old Europe in the worst sense: lacquered in history, finished. American streets always seemed a little slapdash and neglected, with unmended potholes or scars from the gas company, and I realized as soon as I landed that American unfinishedness was something liked and agreed with. It implies energy. If your streets feel temporary and utilitarian because your neighborhood, for example, butts up against the foggy temperamental Pacific -- if your city seems less than grand compared to the nature around it -- don't move. You're in the right place. That was my first impression. I hadn't boarded a plane out of distaste for America. I hadn't moved here because of George Bush. I also wasn't over the moon with reverence for Europe, German politics, or the so-called Berlin scene. Saul Bellow felt the same way about Paris when he moved there in 1948: I would not be boxing with Ezra Pound, as Hemingway had done, nor writing in bistros while waiters brought oysters and wine ... The Jazz Age Paris of American legend had no charms for me, and I had my reservations also about the Paris of Henry James.So what the fuck was I doing? Germans everywhere wanted to escape this potato-growing weather and go live in the place I had just abandoned. I'd given up an unfinished city and a beautiful group of friends, a position as a critic, a lyrical affair, an audience for my novel, two cats, a well-equipped kitchen, and a stereo system. Was I insane? A new friend here said, "You used to live near the beach? Aha." My ex-Communist bachelor pad felt like a stern demotion, and all it took was a live version of Thunder Road coming around on the laptop to remind me of all the youthful American energy I'd left behind. But after the collapse of my marriage -- something I couldn't control and still don't understand -- the home with the kitchen and cats no longer truly existed. In a way I had no home. Instead of living like a divorcé in a cheap Mission studio I wanted to learn from a place connected with toughness, hartnäckigkeit, sardonic humor, survival. Berlin, I have to say, hasn't let me down. The city doesn't feed your eyes with sunlight or dazzling views. But it does have massive, mazy, Prussian libraries, and more bookstores than I can count, and strong coffee that goes by the simple name of Milchkaffee (instead of something Italian); shops for woodwind instruments, shops for cigars, shops for bells; ordinary people who can describe what Poland was like before 1989; sophisticated women in boots; an assortment of unusual bars; tourists from Byelorussia; cinemas like you wouldn't believe, more museums than I can get to, simple earthy greasy food, stinking cheeses, and not just Cuban cigars in the corner restaurant but also Cuban rum in the local pool hall and an Irish drinking whiskey I could never find in America. You'll say this is all a distraction. Maybe so. But it's also a great cleansing agent. Berlin is a dark and sometimes appalling town, but it has a sensuality and a northern gloom that Bellow noticed in Paris, too -- "a spiritual force that acts not only on building materials, on walls and roof-tops, but also on your character, your opinions and judgments. It is a powerful astringent." 
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
8:23 PM
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 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
The Underground Grammarian  current Berlin blog page  |
