When I was in the sixth grade, the Berlin Wall came down. I can’t remember a single news event in my lifetime that made me feel as joyful. The Berlin Wall was constructed to stop the flood of emigrants from East Germany in 1961. Approximately 2.5 million people, or a sixth of the East German population, left the country prior to the overnight border closure. I remember having seen a news feature—possibly during the 1988 Olympics?—about the Berlin Wall and how people who wanted to cross from East to West Berlin were shot. And a year later, after a flood of news stories talking about how border controls were melting in the Eastern Bloc and how East Germans were making their way to Austria, one November night the border controls at the Berlin Wall were rescinded. Imagine something that seemed so deadly, powerful, and permanent just vanishing!
A few months later, several kids from my school and I participated in a public phone call with students from a school in Germany to highlight the possibilities of global communication and connection. The call was sponsored by MCI, a telecom giant who was building their new world headquarters a mile from my school. Because their headquarters was a construction site, they dubbed the event the Wall to Wall Call, thus becoming my first exposure to deeply thoughtless corporate psychobabble. Strangely they paired us with 16 year olds on the call—what on earth were a bunch of 10 and 11 year olds going to talk about with people in a very different stage of life? But I exchanged a few pen pal letters with one of the young women I spoke with on the call. I remember being surprised at her unwillingness to demonize East Germany and that she saw the good in it. As a young American raised in the Reagan era, I had not yet developed an appreciation of either the moral complexities of the Cold War or, more importantly, a recognition that she might be gaining more freedoms but she was losing her entire country. East Germany might have been a prison state doomed to oblivion, but it was also her home.
I had friends who traveled to Berlin right after the wall came down, and they brought me a chip off the wall. There was a smooth side from the original facade and a rough side, and since the smooth side had spray paint on it, they assured me it was part of the original graffiti.
It was in that context that I later decided to take German starting in eighth grade, a decision that I stuck with all the way through high school. I didn’t have the same emotional connection to Spanish- or French-speaking countries, and there was no way I was going to spend my time learning Latin when I could never use it. I think my decision at 13 was more instinctive? But of course it would have been with that much of a backstory.
I never made it to Germany while I was studying the language. My parents refused to even entertain the idea of letting me go abroad as a teenager on a high school summer exchange trip that a lot of my friends went on, and in college they were dead set against me even paying my own way to study abroad there for a semester, so I dropped the idea. Symbolically, Germany became in my mind the country of a hopeful future that was always out of my grasp, and that I wanted to reach.
Even though I’ve been to the German-speaking world many times, it’s mostly been to Switzerland for work, and I only ever made it to Germany for the first time many years after forgetting almost all my German. My trip to Berlin this week was the first time I’ve been there, and only the second time I’ve spent meaningful time in Germany proper. Maybe I’ve just been too embarrassed with myself to go back after, on my first day trying to speak German, I confidently walked into my hotel and asked reception, “Guten tag. ¿Cómo estás?”
Berlin is not like other European capitals. Berlin wasn’t really the capital of anything until the 1700s when it was made the capital of the Prussian kingdom, a region that eventually stretched throughout northern Germany and northern Poland. It did not become the capital of modern Germany until the 1870s when the nation roughly as we know it today came into existence. So it lacks the grandeur of London and Paris, the old world charm of Amsterdam, or the ancient magnificence of Rome. In the 1890’s Mark Twain described it (favorably, to be clear) as the Chicago of Europe because of its orderly design, tidiness, and flatness, the last of which makes for cities that can be easily transited. Because it was largely destroyed in World War II, its construction both in the former West and East Berlins is remarkably uniform—6 story apartment buildings on top of each other without decorative flourish. While East Berlin is mostly postwar glum Communist construction with little greenery interspersed among buildings, West Berlin has a similar lack of architectural aesthetics despite being more generally green. There’s a difference between the two Berlins, but not a big difference.
Except for Hamburg and perhaps Hanover, Germany’s other population centers—and the rest of Western Europe—are far from Berlin. The Ruhr valley is a 5 hour train ride away, and Munich is even further. Even Prague, the closest major international city, is 4 hours away. Because West Berlin was an island surrounded by East Germany with limited connections to the West until the 1990s, it never developed as a travel hub after WWII. Even though Berlin has a new airport, it still has few direct connections to non-hub cities except via discount airlines such as Ryanair, and I can promise you you don’t want to fly with them unless you have to. Also Berlin’s airport evokes the charm of a shiny new Supermax prison, so you don’t feel exactly welcomed on arrival. But the connectivity issues mean that, more than in a city like San Francisco where you can drive to a spectacular coastline or forests or mountains quickly, you are dependent on the city for your social life, your entertainment, your aesthetics, your sense of place.
A travel planner who is at a similar stage in life helped me put the architecture of my trip together and has traveled all over the world. He does not like Berlin and advised me to spend less than the week than I originally planned. I didn’t believe him that there was a lot not to like about Berlin. Everyone I know who’s been had a fabulous time here. My relatives who have been ADORE it there.
My hope was that I would discover a city that I would vibe with, that I could connect with, and more deeply, that I could maybe someday live in. Some American friends I had dinner with early on in my stay explained the potential of Berlin—you can live affordably, and you have the social freedom to become whatever you want to be. They described an expat friend who had moved to Berlin and found it affordable enough to become an artist despite no prior formal training or major experience. The allure of living with a higher quality of life is strong—if I told you my rent and what I don’t get for it, those of you outside SF or NY would not believe me.
The challenge, of course, is that the awesomeness of Berlin is not easily accessible to someone visiting for a few days. Or as a friend put it, “It’s about people and experiences. It’s not touristy! You have to go to bars and openings and parties and meet and engage.”
My first night in Berlin, I went out and had an experience. I waited in line outside of a gay dance club, SchwuZ, for 2 hours. A friend was there and he told me it was super inclusive and that I could wear whatever I wanted! It was really warm that night and I wore a tank top and shorts, and as it turns out that was a smart move given the heat inside. The club welcomed *everyone.* There were several individuals in wheelchairs, and they’re club regulars—on less crowded nights they’re known to all get together on the dance floor. The club had 3 dance floors, so if you didn’t like the music or DJ in one, you moved to the next. I hung out with my friend for a while and then I just danced when he left, and felt free and easy. We don’t have accessible gay clubs quite like that in SF—they’re mostly dive bars that don’t do much to create a good experience, or it’s a ticketed party that you have to be in the know about and that is usually much more crowded and sweaty than SchwuZ, where the experience of waiting in line actually made the experience inside less crowded and far more enjoyable.
Contrast that with the most famous club in Berlin, Berghain, which is considered a techno Mecca. It is an exclusive place and entry is determined by the bouncer when you get to the front of the line. So you can wait for hours and not get in. They’ve been accused of racial profiling, some nights only letting Germans in. It’s said you’re better off wearing all black, not smiling, etc. And I ask, who the hell wants to go to a club like that? I don’t care how fun or amazing the experience is, I don’t want to have an experience just because I meet some asshole bouncer’s criteria for acceptability especially when I want to wear vibrant colors and smile.
And this contrast raises the question: if a city’s greatness isn’t really that accessible to everyone, can it be considered a great city at all?
My problem in Berlin was that my one “experience”—dancing until 5 am—wore me out for the next couple of days. And I tried to do too many things during the day that, because of the heat and lack of climate control (hello German frugality + energy shortage), wore me out too much to go out at night. Exploring underground scenes isn’t something I’m into if I don’t have a lot of energy for it.
There were other limitations and interruptions too to my experience of Berlin too. My local experience was interrupted by very welcome social engagements with American friends who happened to be in town. The aesthetics of Berlin—the unrelenting apartment buildings, the oversized state architecture on Unter den Linden and Museum Island—were soul-crushing to me. The food, unlike Italy or even Denmark, was decidedly ordinary. The Berlin Wall, something I thought I’d be moved by, felt like it was just an ugly wall. And plus, I am 6 weeks into a long trip and my energy was flagging.
Even my day trips out of the city, though lovely, weren’t something that was going to be part of my life if I were to ever move there. Sans Souci, the royal summer palace of the 18th century Prussian King Frederick the Great, was stunningly and uniquely beautiful in its mix of royal quality, informality, and eccentricity. Dresden, the old capital of Saxony that was destroyed by extreme Allied bombing in World War II and subsequently rebuilt, was charming in a limited way but not somewhere I’d want to visit on a regular basis.
So Berlin, I don’t know if it was you or me, or bad timing, but I just didn’t vibe with you. And in reflecting on it, my expectations of connecting with Berlin were largely founded in my adolescent love of the Germany that existed in my own head from the Wall to Wall Call and the later sense of disappointment I had in not going. Of course disappointment was inevitable. But my feelings are more than just disappointment. I know I don’t want to be in a place where you have to build social capital and local experience for a while before you can really enjoy it. I don’t want to be with aesthetics that don’t inspire me. And I don’t want to live on an island so seemingly disconnected from other places, where your city is the only show in town.
And I don’t have to be disappointed anymore that I didn’t ever follow through on mastering conversational German or traveling to Germany at a young age. Leaving the Berlin airport, the one I already described as architecturally oppressive, one of the agents at the security checkpoint got mad at me for not going out of my way to put away one of my bins while I was still waiting on my items to come through. Airport security assholery is universal, but this was a uniquely bizarre request that emblematic of how I feel about my time in Berlin—I was irritated, I felt penned in, and the amount of cultural learning I’d have to go through to find out whether the irritation and sense of confinement were just steps on an amazing journey didn’t seem like they’d be worth the effort.
While I was in Berlin, I knew I needed a different kind of experience besides those that I’d had in Europe before I went home. A different culture. A different world. One that might be messier but more musical, rhythmic, relaxed, joyful. And my planned destination, Iceland, wasn’t going to do it for me. It’s going to be cold and rainy there this week. In parallel, I reflected that has been my longest trip outside of the US by a long way now. The previous winner was a medical mission trip I took many years ago to Venezuela. The locals I met there were some of the most easygoing, relaxed, joyful people I’d ever met, people who could make me laugh despite the language barrier. And to my regret, I haven’t been to South America since. While Venezuela is sadly no longer a viable travel destination, I knew at least that it was time to come back to the New World to finish this trip’s work of self re-creation.
The weather is going to be brilliant in Rio this week—sunny and mild. Time to see if I can fall in love with a very different kind of place. See you there. 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷
Steve Simko 