Good morning, beloved -
I’m writing to you today from a place on Earth I happen to be particularly fond of, Berlin’s splendidly 1970s Tegel Airport. I actually count myself lucky to be passing through again as a passenger. The last time I swung through these parts, four or five years back, a new, “state of the art” airport was theoretically months away from opening, Tegel was on the chopping block, and I spent a good hour documenting the ubergroovy glory of its hexagonal concrete terraces, in the fear that they might well be torn down before I had a chance to see them again.
Of course I needn’t have worried. The new airport turned out to be a titanic technological clusterfuck — one so profound that I’ve heard that it challenged Germany’s image of itself as the veritable home of operational competence — and, well, weird little Tegel is still here and still serving travelers.
So that’s all to the good. But Berlin itself is always a slightly uncomfortable place for me. The divided city exerted a disproportionate influence on my adolescent imaginary, and I’ve struggled to come to terms with it as a reality (and especially as a social reality) ever since. Berlin was kind of the Last Place: engulfed by the Communist East, carved up, its neighborhoods viciously cleaved from one another. Berlin was the city of checkpoints, watch towers and death strips, and in that sense felt like a prefiguration or rehearsal for the dystopian totalscape I felt sure American cities would evolve into. It was the place where Hitler ruled and died, and not at all coincidentally a field of ruins — indeed, a city where more than a few sites bombed to rubble in 1945 remained that way well into the 1980s.
Berlin loomed almost as large in the collective cultural imaginary. It was the city of Isherwood and his Sally Bowles; of Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and David Bowie and Hansa by the Wall; of “Holidays in the Sun” and painfully live Psychic TV albums. A little later on, it was the setting of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close!, films that may well make for uncomfortable viewing now, but once read as deliciously cosmopolitan slices of Mitteleuropan weltschmerz, with glimpses of rebel Kreuzberg in the background. The Berlin I believed in then was the home of SO36 and Kunsthaus Tacheles, cheap Ecstasy and the Love Parade. And it was the setting, and largely the subject, of U2’s twin early Nineties albums, Achtung Baby! and Zooropa — though it will drain my cred account to near zero, I continue to insist that these two records are not merely far and away the best work of the band’s career, but remain among the best available guides to the speed-jittery optimism of that particular moment in time.
And I don’t feel like I took the measure of any of this on my first trip here in 1989, or for that matter on any of my trips since. I’m always here as something little more than a tourist — wrapping my lips around the words and placenames, knowing all too well what they signify and entirely unable to convey that I do. Maybe the closest I’ve ever come to the place in itself was the long good night my friend Phi-Hong and I drank two-euro beers well into the wee hours at an anarchosyndicalist divebar on Torstraße, and watched the regulars play game after game after game of dominoes — for whatever obscure reason, those hours felt closer to the marrow of the place than any of the other great nights I’ve spent there.
But otherwise I’ve always felt I’ve slipped or skipped across the city’s surface like a stone hucked onto a frozen lake. And so it’s probably 100% appropriate that they’re calling my flight — that I’m going to board my plane and fly home to London and think other things, and once again fail to find Berlin on its own terms. If I were the kind of person who did that kind of thing, I might even shrug and say “So it goes.”
Be kind to yourself, and take care of the ones around you,
ag
txl
This is Dispatch from London No. 31 of Sunday, 21 June 2015, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊