The Berlin Blog

The Arab Spring Comes to Berlin

2011-11-11T08:22:00.006-05:00

This Monday I dropped by Occupy Berlin (Asableas are now held daily at 5:00 p.m. on the lawn outside the Reichstag) and discovered a group of representatives from the Arab Spring - "young leaders" from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria invited to spend a week in Berlin by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Read my report on the session and on the current state of Berlin's Occupy on my blog Translationista. The only outward sign that this group of people speaking French on the Reichstag lawn was anything other than a pack of tourists was the bicycle parked beside them with this sign hanging from it. I thought the sign looked familiar; then I remembered where I'd seen it before: in a video featuring the "Asamblea Song," which I have now translated into English.

Occupy Berlin

2011-10-29T13:53:00.081-04:00

I knew there was an Occupy Berlin even before I arrived here two days ago, because I'd seen Dina Rasor's column about it in Truthout and because I'd been greeted at Frankfurt Airport by a map of all the German "Occupies" published in the Oct. 27 issue of Die Zeit. There are lots of them, and Berlin is the biggest (followed by Frankfurt and Hamburg). Based on what I saw today, Occupy Berlin is well on its way to establishing itself as a serious Occupy movement.

Things started out slowly at the first event I attended, which had been announced for 1:00 p.m. on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate. I arrived to find only an older couple holding up a banner calling for a tax on net worth and a young man setting up cardboard signs. This turned out to be Roman Asriel, one of the main initiators of Occupy Berlin and the webmaster of one of the several currently active Occupy Berlin websites. (Other OB websites can be found here, here, here and here.) For a while the demonstration remained modest in size, with half the 50 or so participants forming a "meditation flash mob" while others went on talking around them. Since I spoke up to offer greetings from New York, I was asked to report on how things were looking there at the moment. Then the organizers explained Occupy Berlin to newcomers, announced several upcoming local events, and took questions from the crowd.

Around 2:00 p.m. things became much more lively. A large march of protesters dressed as billionaires and holding signs praising the virtues of greed and consumption arrived at the Brandenburg gate; they were initially stopped on the far side of it by a line of policemen but then (perhaps because the large masses of tourists out enjoying the late-October sunshine were being stopped by the blockade as well), allowed to pass through. They then began a (pre-arranged) shouting match with the original group of 99%ers that ended with a sort of summit: A man holding a wooden mock-up of the Pope (who complained loudly that the police had stopped him and punched a hole in the water bottle he had rigged up to allow his wooden pope to urinate) recited an excellent parody of the Lord's Prayer rewritten as an ode to profit. Then an Angela Merkel lookalike (sort of) gave a speech ("The future belongs to the rich," etc.) Then we all marched peaceably to the front of the Reichstag, where a General Assembly involving several hundred people took place; in Berlin, GAs are referred to by the Spanish word for "assembly," asamblea, in tribute to the demonstrations in Spain.

It was clear from this GA that Occupy Berlin is still in its early stages: The main business of the assembly, after the explanation of the standard OWS hand signals, was inviting people to stand up and say why they had come to the assembly. A number of the things you would expect to hear (about not feeling represented by one's elected officials, etc.) were said; a man from Greece explained why the proposed bailout of his country by the EU would not help anyone, including the Greeks; a small child stood up twice and performed cuteness; someone sang a protest song translated from the Portuguese; a woman from Mexico reported on successes in achieving certain rights for indigenous peoples in her country. Some of this was inspiring. Overall I'd say that some of the sort of organizing that gives a movement its identity has yet to occur in Berlin. But things are definitely moving along. A number of working groups have already been established. A kitchen set up beneath a tree ("Occupy Imbiss") was serving its first meal. There was even a catchy Occupy Berlin song, "Asamblea weltweit," performed to lead off the march.

There are Occupy Berlin spinoffs as well. One of the announcements made today was that a second Berlin-based Occupy movement, Occupy Friedrichshain, is planning to hold a large demonstration at the Oberbaumbrücke and establish a new camp tomorrow (10/30). The neighborhood Friedrichshain is the Williamsburg of Berlin, so I'm not surprised to hear it now has its own Occupy, complete with website. This will be, as far as I know, the fourth attempt to start an Occupy camp in Berlin. Protesters at the inception of the movement on Oct. 15 - a demonstration that attracted huge numbers of Berliners - first attempted to establish a campsite in the shadow of the Reichstag, but were prevented by police, who in the end resorted to physical force to remove the tents being defended by dozens of peaceful protesters. A second camp was established on Oct. 28 on private land at Klosterstrasse 66 not far from Alexanderplatz; as I write this, it is still standing. Protesters today attempted to start a new camp at the Marx-Engels Forum beside Alexanderplatz itself, but were stopped by police. So far it appears that the same strategy working in New York (establish a camp on private property open to the public) seems to be most effective in Berlin as well.

Something I noticed today is that most of the older people I spoke to at the demonstration and assembly turned out to be East Germans, and all three of them let me know fairly soon in the conversation that they were from the East and emphasized that they had learned from experience how much can be achieved by taking peaceably to the streets. (Remember that the Berlin Wall was breached during one of a series of increasingly large protests that had been taking place weekly in Berlin and Leipzig for months.)

Another thing I noticed was that the Berlin police were both more aggressive and more restrained than the NYPD. On the one hand, members of the Polizei were right in our faces the entire time, often standing close enough to the demonstrators to be able to hear most of what was being said privately as well as via human mike; they also conducted aggressive bag searches, unapologetically profiling people (e.g. of the two women I spoke to who got searched, one had waist-long dreadlocks, and the other was Iranian). In the course of these bag searches, the police tried to force people to give up things like blankets (remember, an outdoor meditation session had been announced, so of course people had blankets). There was a great deal of discussion about this, and several of the gray-haired participants got vociferously involved, making it harder for the police to isolate and intimidate some of the younger people they were picking on. I believe they did succeed in taking a yoga mat away from one young man, but the woman with the dreads got to keep her blanket.

But apparently it is possible to talk back to the German police without getting arrested; this is very different than in New York. And in the video that shows the German police pushing their way through a crowd to take down a tent, they don't seem to be arresting the people who get in their way, they just push them firmly, but not violently, to one side - though two policemen do eventually get inappropriately violent with a pair of seated protesters near the end of the video. In short, even though the German police seemed more intimidating to me overall than the NYPD (because they kept getting right up in my business as I was simply standing on the sidewalk), I saw nothing even approaching NYPD-style transgressions like the casual use of pepper-spray, kicking and dragging handcuffed protesters or the nightstick beatings that were captured on video in NYC (not to mention the rubber bullets and tear gas employed last week in Oakland). I was also briefly part of a crowd that marched from the Brandenburg Gate back toward Alexanderplatz - walking right in the middle of the street Unter den Linden and blocking traffic there - without anyone getting arrested. I'd like to see that happen in New York.

Oh, and the demonstrators in pearls and neckties passed out handbills announcing that as of immediately a daily asamblea would be held at 5:00 p.m. in front of the Reichstag. Yep, sounds like a movement that's quickly picking up steam.

9/11 in Berlin

2011-09-10T09:47:00.003-04:00

I think I've mentioned before that Berliners have a long tradition of loving America and Americans. Much of this love can be traced back to the Berlin airlift that began in June 1948 after Josef Stalin announced his intention to bring West Berlin under Soviet control and blocked off all land and water routes into the city, planning to starve the Berliners into submission. Two days later, a fleet of British and American supply planes under the command of American general Lucius D. Clay began flying in food and supplies to Tempelhof airport. The Luftbrücke (air bridge) was to continue for 15 months, and the Rosinenbomber (raisin bombers) have lived on in the public imagination.

This was the historical backdrop to John F. Kennedy's celebrated visit to Berlin, where he declared himself a Berliner on the steps of the Schöneberger Rathaus or Schöneberg town hall. Each borough of Berlin has its own Rathaus, and during the academic year 2001-2002 I spent a great deal of time in the Rathaus of the Schöneberg district where I was living; the amateur string orchestra I played in that year held its weekly rehearsals in one of the upstairs rooms.

It was terrible being so far from home the day of 9/11. A friend in Berlin had heard on the 3:00 p.m. radio news (9:00 a.m. EST) that a terrible accident had taken place in New York and had called me right away, so I was watching live on CNN as the second plane struck the South Tower, and then as the South and then the North towers collapsed. The television image of the South tower vanishing in a plume of dust is the most horrifying thing I have ever seen; I can only imagine the terror of those who witnessed it in person. Hours later, when I was finally able to tear myself away from the television and venture out into the street, I found the city of Berlin in mourning. People in the subway looked as if they'd had a death in the family, and many were wearing little American flags on their clothing. Where did all those little stickpins come from? A day or two later there were new stickpins, showing the American and German flags intertwined. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder declared Germany's "unconditional solidarity" with the United States. And when I showed up to orchestra rehearsal two days later, I found the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg completely blanketed with flowers: hundreds and hundreds of small individual bouquets left by individual Berliners who wanted to express their feelings of sympathy and solidarity. The American embassy was ringed with flowers too.

Three days later, a massive demonstration was held at the Brandenburg Gate, which had been draped with an enormous black banner reading "Wir trauern [we mourn] - our deepest sympathy." Two hundred thousand Berliners showed up for it. The point of the demonstration was to emphasize German solidarity with the United States and pay tribute to a long friendship between nations, but I noticed a new tenor in the placards I saw a number of Berliners holding up. People were starting to remember that America was a major military power and worrying about what a reprisal for the attacks might look like. Might it look like a new world war? German President Johannes Rau officially called on the United States to practice "Besonnenheit," a word that goes back to Herder and Kant and can be translated as "sober-minded reflection." German hearts were bleeding for America - both in the government and on the street - but no one wanted to see the United States go to war. And while initially there was support for U.S. military operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq two years later on obviously flimsy grounds cost the United States much of the love and respect it had enjoyed in Europe, even in Berlin.

Ten years after the tragedy, military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, so it is hard to imagine the day when Berliners thinking of America will once more think first of the airlift and only after of these wars. I hope that day will come.

Threepenny Opera Travels from Berlin to NYC

2011-06-12T14:40:00.007-04:00

Ever since seeing (and reviewing) Robert Wilson's wonderful production of Bertolt Brecht's classic The Threepenny Opera in Berlin back in 2008, I've been waiting for it to travel to New York, and finally it's on its way. The Brooklyn Academy of Music has just announced its Fall 2011 lineup, and the Dreigroschenoper will be on the program between Oct. 4 and Oct. 8, performed by the original cast from the Berliner Ensemble (one of Berlin's very best theaters, founded by Brecht himself) with English surtitles. If you're based in New York, don't miss this one! Season tickets are on sale now, and tix for individual shows can be purchased at the end of the summer. For more information, see the BAM website.

Maria Braun Gets Married All Over Again

2010-11-20T10:55:00.047-05:00

The Schaubühne's Thomas Ostermeier is no slouch when it comes to restaging plays that have been famously staged over and over again (Hamlet, for instance), but what happens when he sets himself the task of staging a work whose author turned it into one of the most iconic monuments of post-war German cinema? Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun is a stunning piece of filmmaking, and the script (also by Fassbinder) is powerful in its own right, telling the story of the eponymous "self-made woman" who rises from wartime squalor to post-war industrial fortune using only her good looks and above all her canny intelligence. Fassbinder's film is pretty much untrumpable. So Ostermeier, in setting himself the task of translating the script to the stage, turned radically away from the film—he says he didn't even look at it when he was planning his own production—to produce a performance that both works on its own terms and puts Fassbinder's story in the context of post-war and contemporary German theater.

To describe Ostermeier's strategy in a nutshell: He cranks up the volume on the Brechtian slant already present in Fassbinder's play. Forget realism. This production uses only five actors (four men and the glorious Brigitte Hobmeier) to fill the play's 25 roles, which means, among other things, men playing various female roles while wearing wigs and speaking in masculine voices; they aren't so much disguised as women as displaying markers of feminine identity. One wig even serves double-duty (one actor wears it as nature intended, the other back-to-front, and they sometimes hand it off mid-scene). Ostermeier makes heavy use of gestural techniques, e.g. having the character of the doctor (whose costume is a woman's coat, too small for him, worn with the front open to the back) stand repeatedly in a characteristic semaphore shrug of helplessness—after all, it's his job to issue women certificates of health so they can engage in prostitution and then return to him for treatment once they've contracted STDs or gotten knocked up. Ostermeier handles his props epic-theater-style as well: All those big mismatched 1950s padded armchairs that turn the stage into a sort of big waiting room (the play is set in the Waiting Room of History) get shoved into many different configurations, signifying an apartment, then a train, a car, a restaurant. And a character driving a car pantomimes not only the steering and shifting but also the windshield wipers.

All the Brechtian gestures in Ostermeier's staging come together at a key juncture in Maria Braun's trajectory: the moment when she has just sealed her first triumphant business deal after her boss has failed and then—in a perhaps even more significant victory—won over her former adversary, the firm's cautious accountant Senkenberg. Both coups bear witness to Maria's extraordinary psychological astuteness; she intuits not only what people want but how to give it to them, or more specifically: how to herself embody their desires. She is, in her own words, "the Mata Hari of the economic miracle." And at this moment in the play it is clear that she is destined for a successful career. Ostermeier marks the moment with a projected slide-show montage of commercially produced objects of desire accompanied by a loud cacophonous din, but not before offering us a brilliant bit of theatrical intertextuality: He has two actors approach the microphones at the front of the stage to accompany Maria's triumphant celebration with a chorus of loud panting. For those familiar with the Berlin theater scene, this is an obvious citation of the opening gambit in Heiner Müller's iconic 1995 staging of Bertolt Brecht's play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui for the Berliner Ensemble. By equating Maria Braun's story with Arturo Ui's, Ostermeier provides a cynically subversive reading of Fassbinder's play that both Brecht and Fassbinder would have heartily approved of: Maria Braun's riding the waves of capitalism to wealth and power in the aftermath of war is just like Arturo Ui's (i.e. Adolf Hitler's) rise to power in the wake of economic crisis. After all, Fassbinder named her "Braun," the official color of the Nazi party—as Maria herself points out when she remarks apropos of her new lover, an African-American GI: "Better black than brown." Better indeed.

Overall, Ostermeier's Maria Braun is less striking and stunning than, say, the Hamlet he staged several years ago. He recycles from that play various techniques that have meanwhile become familiar to us from other stages as well: using video cameras on stage to project the faces of actors on parts of the set, even using their clothing as screens to project snippets of film. In this case, the use of film on stage is counterproductive because it just reminds us of Fassbinder's own (richer) images. Given the heartbreaking explosiveness of Fassbinder's final scene, it is perhaps unfair to carp that Ostermeier's staging of the play ends less with a bang than with a whimper. But where Fassbinder used to powerful effect the hysterically ecstatic voice of a radio announcer proclaiming Germany's victory in the 1954 World Cup, Ostermeier instead emphasizes a different pair of radio addresses, both by post-war Chancellor Konrad Adenauer—in the first, Adenauer declares himself vehemently opposed to the constitution of any sort of German army, and in the second, several years later, he announces his intention to create a new army for a new Germany. As Ostermeier sees it, commerce and militarization are two sides of a single coin. The career of his Maria Braun is merely a continuation of the war by other means.

Photos © Arno Declair and Sara Krulwich

Dance Theater in Berlin: Sasha Waltz

2010-11-07T01:44:00.059-04:00

Sasha Waltz is one of the best-known choreographers in Germany (along with the late Pina Bausch, who was based in Wuppertal). Waltz founded her company Sasha Waltz & Guests in 1993, together with her professional and life partner Jochen Sandig, and ever since has played an instrumental role in bringing dance into the mainstream of Berlin cultural life, which among other things means moving it from the margins of the off-off to the institutions that have long been supporting Berlin’s astonishingly diverse theater offerings. In 1996 Waltz cofounded the Sophiensaele in Mitte, Berlin’s gallery district, to create a forum for dance and experimental theater projects, and in 1999 accepted the position of co-artistic director (along with Sandig, Thomas Ostermeier and Jens Hillje) of the most important theater in the western part of Berlin, the Schaubühne am Lehninger Platz on the Kurfürstendamm. Although Waltz’s position at the Schaubühne officially ended in 2004, she remains affiliated with the theater, which continues to feature a significant number of dance performances and collaborations between choreographers and theater directors.

Waltz's signature production, Körper (Bodies), which premiered at the Schaubühne in 2000 and was reprised there this August, was her breakthrough work; in it, she developed a strategy of not just using the bodies of her dancers to show us a dance but making bodies (and corporality itself) the subject of the work. This was the first piece of hers to travel extensively internationally. It established her as one of the leading voices in German choreography.

Sasha Waltz & Guests combines a fixed company (typically consisting of 25 members) with a large number of guest dancers from all over the world who join the troupe for particular productions. In Berlin they perform most frequently at the Schaubühne and at Radialsystem V, a relatively new arts performance space near Ostbahnhof. The group’s international composition becomes apparent whenever Waltz has her dancers open their mouths and add voice to motion, as happens for example in her “dance theater” work Gezeiten—the title means “tides” but also suggests “times”—which premiered at the Schaubühne in 2005. Gezeiten is a beautiful study of singularity and community in troubled times.

The production is divided into two parts: a relatively peaceful first half in which the dancers appear in small groups for an extended series of pas de deux, pas de trois and pas de quatre; they swirl about and through each other’s bodies, sharing body weight to launch one another aloft and supporting each other in unexpected configurations. Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites alternate with minimalist music composed by Jonathan Bepler. Waltz is concerned with presence defined simultaneously as physical and spiritual, and the tableau of dancers hurling themselves repeatedly onto each other’s bodies seems to be making as much a psychological as an aesthetic statement. She offers allegories of community as well, with dancers walking (in silence) in perfect lines, like human caterpillars, or running to sit upon each other’s knees to build large body sculptures. They twirl red chairs around like giant semaphore signals. She even has all her dancers line up against the back wall, moving their bodies up and down to sketch out graphs of ascending and descending lines. As a culmination of this strategy of using human bodies as building material, she wraps dancers in cloth singly or in pairs to create enormous cocoons that move in ways it seems impossible to attribute to human bodies.

The second half of Gezeiten takes a much darker turn, literally so: it begins with a fade to black and a truly frightening cacophonous din sustained for an unnervingly long time, it sounds as though the theater building itself is collapsing. And soon the dancers are seen running around in what appears to be a sort of war or catastrophe situation. We see a pantomime of ostracism, as one dancer is expelled from the group and then harassed, and soon panic grips the stage as a graveyard of precariously balanced brick crosses topples and smoke pours in through doors in the stage set, floorboards detach and commence an unnerving clattering that underlies the action that follows. Shouts in many languages fill the air as the dancers use their voices as well as their bodies to beat back the chaos they themselves are producing. Waltz’s vision here is theatrical, and yet her attention to the vocabulary of repeated motion is sustained even during the production’s most “dramatic” sequences. Again and again she fills the stage with dancers artfully staggering as though the floor were shifting beneath them—shifting differently for each of them, it seems, for they are both together and alone in their distress.

Waltz’s newest piece, Continu, combining motifs from several recent productions and featuring the orchestral work Arcana by Edgar Varèse, will premiere next week at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

(Körper picture © Bernd Uhlig; Gezeiten pictures courtesy of LG Arts Center; Continu pictures © Sebastian Bolesch.)

Berlin 1989-2009

2009-11-08T14:08:00.020-05:00

So much has changed in Berlin over the past two decades, and so much remains the same. For those who have known the city for many years, its history seems to be written into it like a palimpsest, with its new buildings, streets and stories layered on top of older ones rather than replacing them. This is a view of the city as experienced from the point of view of the East, which is how I first got to know it. My love affair with the city began two years after the Berlin Wall fell—though “fell” is not the right verb to express what happened that night in November 1989. The Wall was not toppled, it was permeated from East to West (having always been permeable in the opposite direction). Those first years of what people called either “unification” or “reunification” depending on their political sensibilities were marked by a sort of bleak euphoria in East Berlin. Euphoria because of the sudden lifting of restrictions, the limitations on what you might be allowed to study, buy or read, or where you might be allowed to travel. Bleak because all of this was tempered by new economic realities. East German bank accounts were cut in half in the conversion to the West German deutschmark. In the cataclysmic transition of East German society from socialism to capitalism, more than half the people who had jobs lost them, and it soon became clear that economic survival would be predicated on the ability to function in the West German system. Since virtually all the GDR’s industry had been state-owned, the collapse of the government meant massive shut-downs of factories, laboratories and businesses. Many teachers were declared unfit to practice their profession because of what now looked like an ideological slant in their training, and many recent university graduates found themselves having to return to school for additional studies before their degrees could be recognized. Some adapted and thrived, others struggled.

It soon became clear that the financially as well as politically dominant West Germany would determine which aspects of “Eastness” would remain and which would be erased. In the early 1990s, one often saw the graffiti “BRD + DDR = BRD”: the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany, a.k.a. West Germany) + the GDR (German Democratic Republic, a.k.a. East Germany) = FRG. The value of the DDR, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, was being calculated as zero. In response, a backlash of nostalgia (or “Ostalgie”—from “Ost”=East) arose in the entire Eastern part of the country, particularly in East Berlin where the border was generally just a neighborhood or two away. This wasn’t nostalgia for those parts of life that the tourists now swarming into the city were charmed by. Where tourists saw street after street of gray façades with their plaster crumbling away to expose the brick and were reminded of streets in black-and-white movies, locals saw neglect and discomfort: it was difficult to keep buildings with damaged walls warm during long, cold Berlin winters. No, the nostalgia was for a way of life that had developed over a period of forty years and, the political unfreedoms notwithstanding, had involved things like the availability of a job of some sort for virtually every citizen, readily accessible childcare and healthcare, and a spirit of camaraderie and innovation in everyday life that derived from the shortage of certain resources. A limited range of clothing was available for purchase, and so women made their own. Many people could not get telephones, so friends dropped by to visit each other often to keep up to date on what was going on in others’ lives. I don’t think anyone who lived in the East would seriously have wished for a return to that system at any point after 1989, but many chafed against the apparent assumption that everything about life in the East had been shabby, substandard or misguided. For many, the glass had been half full.

It is difficult, walking through the streets of New Berlin, not to be constantly reminded of aspects of the city that were effaced bit by bit as the West gradually took hold in the East. It wasn’t so long ago that when you got out of the subway at Potsdamer Platz you found yourself in an enormous field of scrubby grass and biting wind with no buildings anywhere except for the ruins of an old hotel and the knowledge that Hitler’s final bunker had been under that grass somewhere. Now Potsdamer Platz is an architectural playground. Even more recently, the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) was torn down after years of debate —an eyesore of Eastern Bloc architecture with a bronze-colored glass façade planted right smack in the middle of all the fancy Schinkel buildings up and down Unter den Linden, state buildings signifying money and power. The Palast der Republik was hideous, but it embodied an important part of Berlin’s history, and its demolition was regrettable.

Other elisions are far more modest. I cannot walk down Torstrasse in Mitte without remembering when it used to be called Wilhelm Pieck-Strasse after the first president of the GDR and those strange transitional months in 1994 when the street was marked by a pair of signs: one with Pieck’s name struck through with a red diagonal line, and one bearing the street’s old new name, Torstrasse, meaning “Gate Street”—presumably because in centuries past this street had led to one of the old city gates. The same holds true of Clara Zetkin-Strasse, which used to run between the back of the Humboldt-Universität and the Reichstag. Zetkin, a friend of Rosa Luxemburg’s, represented the German Communist Party in parliament for thirteen years during the Weimar Republic. Now the street is again called Dorotheenstrasse, the one remaining monument to Clara Zetkin the shop “Copy Clara” where you can have your xeroxing needs attended to.

The Berlin Wall has now vanished in most spots, replaced by a double row of bricks set into the ground to mark the line it carved into this city’s skin. It's as if it was simply displaced from above the ground to below. The demarcation persists in memory, while the Wall itself is now buried beneath the massive weight of all the new stories written into the space where it once stood.

When Grandparents Fall in Love

2009-08-30T19:13:00.020-04:00

The East Berlin setting of German director Andreas Dresen’s 2008 film Cloud 9 doesn't particularly jump out at you. What we mostly see of it is the view from the window of the apartment that the film’s protagonist, 60-something-year-old Inge, shares with her partner of 30 years, showing the S-bahn tracks that come to stand for the ever-sameness of a marriage that has been stuck on the same track for years. Inge’s partner Werner is so obsessed with trains and train travel that he still listens to his old vinyl records that preserve the sounds various models of locomotive make when they pull into various East German train stations. He has Inge join him on recreational train rides (“The landscapes along the train tracks are much better than the ones along the highway”) and entertains his granddaughters by showing them his catalogues of locomotive models. At the same time, the tracks we see again and again out the window provide an image for Inge’s restlessness and her desire to experience something new—feelings that take her almost as much by surprise as they do her grown daughter and husband. Inge’s decision to leave Werner for an even older (but livelier) man with whom she falls suddenly, madly in love after she alters a pair of trousers for him raises so many issues that after the movie a considerable subset of the audience remained standing outside the theater because everyone wanted to know whether everyone else thought she had done the right thing. Everyone seemed fascinated by the issues surrounding Inge’s choice. (Dresen’s heavy use of nudity and explicit sex, on the other hand, appeared utterly uncontroversial.) So of course: people at any age can fall in love and fall into bed with one another, but what does it mean to abandon one’s partner of 30 years on the brink of old age in search of a greater happiness? In my favorite scene of the movie, Inge tells her husband a dirty joke her lover has told her after an incident of impotence. (“How do 80-year-olds screw? She does a handstand, and he drops it in from above.”) She snorts with laughter as she relates the joke and then for long minutes afterward shakes with elated, irrepressible laughter. Her new love, as Werner will remark later with a certain bitterness, has made her seem young again.

Dresen, who grew up in East Germany, uses the film’s East Berlin backdrop to lend depth to both the characters and the story. Almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Werner is still listening to DDR train sound recordings as his evening’s entertainment—a sound that mirrors the one we hear in the film’s opening shot, a close-up of the foot of Inge’s sewing machine moving over the fabric of the trousers that are about to change her life, producing stitch after stitch as regular and unchanging as railroad ties. They read the Berliner Zeitung over breakfast—the newspaper of choice for East Berliners of a certain age, as opposed to the West Berlin papers Berliner Morgenpost and Der Tagesspiegel. Inge’s lover Karl also takes her on an outing coded as East German: skinny-dipping in the lakes on the outskirts of Berlin, reached by bicycle. (Indeed, the more or less universal acceptance of nude bathing in East Germany produced some conflicts after 1989 when certain popular beaches such as those on the Baltic coast became accessible to West Germans, who showed up attired in bathing suits only to find the beach covered with happy nudists.) But while Karl is vital and active—we see him riding his bicycle and coaching younger cyclists—Werner is not. Apparently his only physical activity is rolling an abs-exerciser joylessly back and forth on the carpet as Inge cheers him on, and he spends hours smoking in his study, pursuing the monotonous labor of retirement. (Inge, meanwhile, who takes in sewing, does this work at a cramped table in the corner of their bedroom.) Werner is petrified, and his stuck-in-the-pastness is underscored by his ongoing obsession with his pre-1989 hobby as though nothing significant had changed in the world since then. Speaking of his wheelchair-bound father whom Inge and he visit in a Prenzlauer Berg nursing home (and who appears to be mentally as well as physically in decline), Werner says: “If I ever get like that, take me out in the woods and shoot me.”—but in fact he is already frozen enough that it manifests as physical rigidity. One audience member discussing the film afterward remarked: “He’s just like the Tin Man.” There’s a sense that in choosing the physically vital Karl over Werner, Inge has chosen motion and life.

Dresen’s film is a moving study of love at a certain age and the difficulties and responsibilities that accompany it. Fabulous acting, beautifully observed and filmed scenes, and with lots of skillfully incorporated gaps in the storytelling that remind us that—much as we might think we know the characters whose story we are watching—we are viewing their lives from the outside.

Hamlet at the Schaubühne

2009-03-30T09:18:00.010-04:00

When it comes to the problem of how to stage lines so famous every schoolchild knows them by heart, Thomas Ostermeier’s new production of Hamlet at the Schaubühne Berlin takes the bull by the horns: “To be or not to be” (Sein oder Nicht-sein) are the first words spoken in the play. This is the same cut-to-the-money-shot strategy recently used as an opening gambit in Michael Thalheimer’s staging of Faust I for the Deutsches Theater, and it’s a good way to deal with the “classics angst” that has turned the staging of these key plays in the repertoire into daredevil variations in search of the ultimate trump. Ostermaier’s Hamlet, though, does turn out to be rather trump-filled, particularly during the first hour of the performance, which consists of one tour-de-force set piece after another. Afterward, the tension subsides somewhat, making for an evening that is good rather than great overall, but the six actors involved all turn out magnificent performances (particularly Lars Eidinger in the title role).

Ostermeier’s Hamlet relies heavily on the video-cam technique pioneered in Germany by Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne, but Ostermeier uses the camera quite differently. Whereas Castorf is interested in hidden spaces (the actors often perform in closed boxes on stage, their performance visible only by means of the live video feed projected on large screens onstage), Ostermeier shows us the mechanisms by which people and things are made larger than life. He projects his images onto a curtain made of shiny gold chains while we simultaneously look through it to see the live action on the stage, which is set up with a long banquet table. Judith Rosmair wearing dark glasses as Gertrude looks like what she is: a woman in dark glasses; but the projected black-and-white video feed in which her hugely magnified face is grainily projected turns her into a starlet caught in the cross-hairs of the paparazzi. And so the play’s initial image of Hamlet reciting his famous monologue with his face blown up so large that just his eyes and nose fit on the screen appears a self-reflexive gesture, a comment on the hugeness of the lines themselves, which have become familiar enough to be emptied out of meaning. At climactic moments of the play, the live video feed is intercut with other images, with e.g. the image of a skull flickering in and out of the live footage of Hamlet’s face (perhaps in compensation for the fact that the Yorick scene has been omitted).

The meaning Ostermeier offers us as recompense comes in the form of dirt: the entire stage is covered in a thick layer of earth, and the first real scene of the play is a burial pantomime in which a frantic gravedigger scuffles about at cartoonish speed to get a coffin singlehandedly lowered into its grave (with lots of slapstick pratfalls) as the play’s main protagonists look on in the rain produced by a hose held aloft. The scene lasts a painfully long time and is stunningly expressive. The gravedigger starts shoveling in the dirt before remembering that the first handfuls belong to the mourners—whereupon he hops into the grave to scoop it all out again. When a languishing Gertrude drops the delicate little mourners’ trowel into the grave along with the bit of earth it holds, the gravedigger offers the other mourners a full-sized shovel instead. Characters keep returning to this dirt throughout the performance, though not in the food-fight way that would have likely ensued if it had been Christoph Marthaler doing the directing. Ostermeier’s dirt has a solemnity, a gravity to it. Characters don’t throw it around, they eat it (Hamlet in particular). The first metaphorical use of the dirt comes early on, when Claudius is chiding bereft Hamlet for his ostensibly untoward despondency after his father’s death: Claudius embraces his unresponsive nephew, and the instant he releases him,
Hamlet topples like a felled tree, face-first into the pile of dirt covering his father’s grave. This descent into dirt is what Ostermeier keeps bringing us back to—the reality of death and loss—and compared to this Claudius’s politic speech is just wind blowing by.

The actors in this production spend a lot of time face-down in things, mostly food, and generally when they show their faces afterward, they look like ghouls arisen from the dead. This Denmark is a ghost town. And although Hamlet tells Horatio (and us) quite clearly that he’s planning to feign madness, it’s hard to see this madness as make-believe. Eidinger’s performance is full of Tourette’s-like verbal tics and is utterly unsettling. When he strips down to act out the play The Mousetrap for king and queen—Hamlet and Horatio are the only performers in this staging—we see that the doughiness of his body is due to the fact that he’s wearing a heavily padded undergarment beneath his clothes. After playing the role of the queen wearing only black lace panties and thigh-high stockings, he climbs back into his fat-boy suit, asking one of the other actors to zip him up. One of the strongest scenes in the entire production is the pas de deux between Hamlet and Ophelia when Polonius forces their encounter. The scene shifts back and forth so quickly between tenderness and violence it’s truly frightening, and eventually he half-buries her.

Toward the middle of the play the pace starts to slow down, and I found myself wondering, as I watched Claudius (brilliantly played by Urs Jucker) contemplating aloud the vileness of his own fratricide, whether this entire scene couldn’t have been cut outright
with no great loss of effect. Ostermeier has created an action-packed Hamlet in which psychological processes are so effectively translated into physical ones that the actual recitation of monologues seems almost irrelevant. Cutting out a startlingly large number of scenes is a strategy that worked beautifully for Ostermeier in his staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2006 (a co-production with choreographer Constanza Macras), and he would have done well to trim Shakespeare’s play more rigorously this time as well. Though two and a half hours is not at all long for a performance of Hamlet, given the density and compression of this staging, making it leaner by half an hour would have served the production well.

Faust in Love

2009-03-07T17:42:00.016-05:00

Theater director Michael Thalheimer of Berlin’s Deutsches Theater seems to have found his niche over the past decade: he specializes in plays about the degradation, abuse and abandonment of women. It’s a great subject. His brilliant staging of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (2001) depicted the life of this young woman—which is systematically destroyed by a pair of hit men: a powerful prince who has the hots for her, and her father—as a triangular cage. Wedekind’s Lulu in Thalheimer's 2004 production, which came to BAM in 2007, was rife with sexual violence performed before the blank screen of a wall in the middle of the stage (see fellow director David Levine's interview with Thalheimer). And now his Faust, Part I—currently showing as part of the Berliner Festspiele—whittles down Goethe’s complex tale of Faust’s search for knowledge and earthly pleasures to his bid to get into the pants of dour schoolgirl Margarete. Mephistopheles plays the pimp, and by the end of the play little Grete is left a bloody mess, her mouth a big red smear, her eyes all bruise.

Not that the play’s considerable metaphysical freight is left by the wayside. Thalheimer is a great lover of words, and most of the play is packed with Faust-Mephisto dialogues on everything under the sun. Actors under Thalheimer’s direction, regardless of the play in question, tend to develop a palette of verbal mannerisms, you can’t help thinking of them performing their texts much as musicians perform. Tempos change, voices are pitched high or so low they almost disintegrate (in the case of Sven Lehmann’s Mephisto) into pure resonance. And the story does still focus on Faust’s quest to grasp and master the universe of worldly life. In love with Grete, he may be above all in love with the idea of exercising his will by possessing the object of his desires. Grete in this staging stands in for everything Faust hopes to grasp.

The play begins in silence: the house lights suddenly go out, and the stage lights up, showing us Faust in profile (played by Ingo Hülsmann). He stands there immobile for an unnervingly long time, the only sound the faint grating noise produced by the revolving stage behind him whose circular wall of wide black slats as high as the stage itself continues to move inexorably clockwise throughout the first part of the play as Faust is joined by Mephistopheles and their conversations begin. Eventually lights appear backstage, illuminating the space between the vertical slats and soon blinding the audience at every interstice. After an extended period of constant noise and light, it comes as a relief when a gap finally appears in the slats, baring most of the stage and revealing Grete’s tiny metal bed standing alone at the center, beneath a big luminous cross mysteriously created by the alignment of the slats. This brief interlude of respite (during which Grete, played by Regine Zimmermann, speaks of happiness and peace) is the one upbeat moment amidst the dreariness. Soon enough Faust has entered Grete’s life and she sits on her bed (in left-facing profile like Faust before her) reeling off the verses of the famous song “Grete at the Spinning Wheel,” in which she repeats over and over the words “Meine Ruhe ist hin,” (my peace is gone). There’s no spinning wheel on stage; none is needed; all its symbolic weight is already carried by the black revolving barrel of the stage (literally a wheel, spinning) that’s grated on our nerves for the play’s first half, eventually making this viewer woozy.

The repetition theme reaches its climax when Margarete asks Faust whether he believes in God. Unwilling to answer yes or no, he engages in a long beating-about-the-bush speech that is as exasperating to us as it must to poor Grete. By this point Faust’s use of discourse has come to appear the opposite of kindness and truth. Unhappy with his response, she asks him again, and he repeats the monologue verbatim, with different gestures. Is he really repeating all this garbage? She asks again, and he repeats his response—six times in all. Eventually she gives in, having at last heard enough. And the slats of the background shift enough to set the cross askew.

My favorite part of the production is the stunning performance of Mephisto by Sven Lehmann, who turns the devil into a plump lascivious boor who lifts his sweater to scratch his belly and pantomimes the most astonishing little onanistic dances: prodigiously lecherous cavorting. He appears to be the only character in the play who’s having any fun. Even Faust, his desires quenched, is kept busy learning the lesson that fulfilled desire just gives way to other itches that require scratching.
At times the production’s insistence on monotony produces boredom, and for this reason I find the staging finally less successful than, say, that of Emilia Galotti, which proceeds at a well-nigh military clip. This Faust does drag a bit, but it shows us a psychological, Nietzschean Faust that most certainly affirms (in case you had any doubts) the play’s place in the modern canon.

Seeing The Reader

2009-02-06T23:13:00.012-05:00

Some bits of Stephen Daldry’s film The Reader are set in Berlin, which is how I'll justify writing about it here. (Achtung: spoiler alert!)

I’m sure you know the story: A fifteen-year old boy named Michael Berg is seduced by a streetcar conductor, Hannah Schmitz, with whom he has a passionate summer affair. One special feature of their relationship is that she has him read books to her every time they meet. Years later (the Holocaust having happened in the meantime offscreen) he witnesses her trial in Nuremberg when he is a law student, and after she is sentenced to prison for her part in the deaths of 300 Jews when she was a guard at Auschwitz, he starts reading books into a tape recorder and sending them to her. During her years in prison she finally learns to read and write. Berg is asked by prison officials to help her when she is to be released, and he reluctantly agrees, but just before her release she kills herself in her cell.

I found the film terribly disappointing, but was interested to see that it disappoints in ways quite different than the bestselling novel by Bernhard Schlink on which it was based.

The main weakness of Schlink’s novel is that his descriptions are consistently so weak (or irrelevant), his characters so little fleshed-out that the book winds up seeming like a few big ideas clunking down the stairs. The storyline itself, though, is fascinating material, so I was very much looking forward to seeing how it would play out on film.

The film, however, is plagued by issues just as serious, though it does manage to correct some of the book’s flaws. The lush imagery of the film and the excellent performances by Kate Winslet (Hannah) and David Kross (Michael as a boy) fill the world with a nicely shot vocabulary of gesture and image that makes us believe in the characters and their lives. There are other improvements as well. Schlink would have us believe, for example, that the first book that Hannah sits down to read once she has painstakingly attained literacy is Elie Wiesel’s Night. I really don’t think so. The film handles her quest for literacy much more plausibly, treating it not as some abstract way to make amends for her crimes (after all, she does seem to feel she was just following orders and had no other choice), but as an attempt to recreate in fantasy the time in her past when she was loved and had her lover read to her: using Michael’s tape as a guide, she spells her way through Chekhov’s “Lady with the Lapdog,” a story he read aloud to her as a boy (and which touchingly reflects their own relationship). The Odyssey is another thematically relevant choice, especially the opening passage referring to the “twists and turns” of the hero’s life that is read several times in the course of the film. (They read Robert Fagles's 1996 translation, which has been pasted into an old-looking cover; never mind that the choice of translation is anachronistic; after all, they're "really" supposed to be reading it in German - in the Johann Heinrich Voss translation, perhaps?)

The movie handily provides some shots of young Hannah avoiding reading: refusing to look at a book Michael hands her, asking him to order lunch for both of them so she doesn’t have to read the menu (though unless I misheard he orders a BLT – what? In Germany? I hope I misheard). These shots then are used in flashback to show us Michael’s thought process when he realizes during her trial that she is not only illiterate but is so ashamed of the fact that she would rather accept a disproportionately long jail sentence than admit it.

And the large number of prison-library books in her cell is used to powerful effect in the film when she stacks them up high atop her table to make a platform she will use to kill herself. It’s as if the knowledge she has gained from reading has now enabled her to make the decision to take her own life, but there is nothing heavy-handed about the use of this image. I was also touched by the careful way she takes off her shoes before she dies – she doesn’t bother to unlace them, but she does place them neatly side-by-side on the floor.

In all these ways, the film outshines the novel on which it was based. But then it fails in quite different ways, primarily because of the script. The sections of the film that show Michael and Hannah in 1939 don’t contain much talking unless you count the reading-aloud. But the parts featuring middle-aged Michael (played by Ralph Fiennes) are all talk, and the dialogue grates and jars with one sententious, heavy-handed line after another. I don’t know what David Hare (who wrote the script) was thinking. Fiennes winds up having to speak the bulk of these lines, and he just can’t pull them off. It can’t be easy to be playing a character who’s supposed to be painfully repressed—as he casually announces to his 20ish daughter over dinner, causing her to burst into sudden tears of relief, pain and understanding [?]—and at the same time be asked to utter all these cockamamie lines. Maybe an actor of Donald Sutherland’s caliber could have made it work, but Fiennes serves up his homilies like he’s getting paid for it.

The script’s weakness is also seen during the law-school sequences, particularly in a seminar when a fellow-student of Michael’s is so outraged by the hypocrisy of the Nuremberg trials that he begins to shout. His rant makes no sense - in a context where it needs to. First he says how ridiculous it is that a handful of low-level officials are being tried with great pomp and circumstance when most of the rest of the German population is guilty as well. Then he says he wants to shoot Hannah and the other guards. Or does he mean shoot all the Germans? In the context of the scene, it seems that he is supposed to be serving as a foil to Michael’s wordless brooding (25-year-old Berg displays indecision worthy of a Hamlet). But his speech remains incoherent, and so the scene remains unilluminating, though at least the law professor is brilliantly played by Bruno Ganz.

Speaking of whom—since he’s a real German, as is David Kross—it’s quite odd that all the actors in the film speak English with German accents (real or simulated) passim except for Fiennes, who just sounds like a Brit. Did someone decide the inconsistency just doesn’t matter? It does.

Perhaps the worst dialogue of all is in the scene when Michael goes to visit an Auschwitz survivor who testified at Hannah’s trial after the war. He brings her a little tin of money—Hannah’s savings, which she asked be given to this woman. The relative paltriness of the bequest (seven thousand marks and change) is set off by the luxuriousness of the woman’s New York apartment. But then the two begin an inane dialogue studded with a few profundities (“Nothing comes out of Auschwitz”) and the scene quickly starts making no sense at all.

The film ends with a gesture that could have worked stunningly if Michael's daughter were anything but a cipher, but we know virtually nothing about her. So it doesn’t quite make sense that when he drags her out to a village cemetery in the rain (a village where he took Hannah on a bicycle outing one happy day) to show her Hannah’s grave, she actually appears delighted that he has brought her all this way to visit the grave of someone she’s never heard of, in the rain no less. And then we hear Berg’s voice beginning to tell his daughter his story as they walk away—and the storytelling is a lovely gesture (and counterpoint to all the stories of other people he’s read aloud all his life), but the film hasn’t created the psychological context to support it, so it winds up just feeling random. What’s more, the dates on the gravestone read 1922-1988, which would make Hannah just 17 years old in 1939 when she and Berg first meet (we see the date inscribed in the copy of The Odyssey he was reading that year in school). So suddenly she’s just two years his senior? Uh, no.

Ach. This material could have made such a good story. What a shame that neither novel nor film turned out better than this.

Cooking Polish food in Berlin

2008-12-29T11:31:00.001-05:00

I'm feeling hungry this morning; here's a little excerpt from my novel-in-progress.

Today I found a new piece of the Valentina puzzle, tucked away inside my mother’s copy of The Jewish Cookbook which Ria gave me to take to Berlin with me “so you can cook something that tastes like home.” It’s a recipe for cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat, raisins and rice, written in blue ink in Valentina’s loopy handwriting on a large index card. There are several cross-outs in the ingredients list, as though she were writing from memory and kept changing her mind. I remember Mom making this dish for us when I was little, but didn’t know it was Valentina’s recipe. The index card is creased and stained, you can see where oil spattered across its surface from a bubbling saucepan. Mom would wrap each leaf around its filling and then stick a toothpick into it to hold it together before nestling the little bundle carefully in the pot. Then she would bake the stuffed leaves in the oven in a bath of tomato puree and broth.

“Are you making Polish food?” Oscar asked the moment he got in the door. It was the smell of cabbage. Its sweet, oily, green odor floated through all the rooms of the apartment and slipped under the door to fill the hallway as well. Poland had come to visit, and all the neighbors must have known it.

He liked it though, and finished two plates of the pale little packages, their filling just visible through their translucent cooked skins. Their taste was pure comfort, the tang of the raisins combining beautifully with the faintly bitter sweetness of the cabbage and the earthy warmth of the meat. I felt triumphant. I had recreated a bit of my own childhood right here in our kitchen, and perhaps it was Valentina’s childhood as well. After dinner I sat down with the recipe and practiced writing like Valentina. I found one of Oscar’s old fountain pens with blue ink in it, and rehearsed the sweeping characters, the billowy swoop of the h as if it were leaping up into the sky I was just learning to call Himmel, the m like a row of Galician hillocks. If I could learn to write like her, maybe I would know what it felt like to be her. I turned the radio to a station that played dance tunes for old people and practiced moving the pen to the rhythms of the music.

Was ist ein Literaturhaus?

2008-12-01T22:30:00.080-05:00

"House of Literature" has a vaguely Eastern Bloc ring to it, but in fact "literature houses" are an important part of the cultural landscape throughout Germany and particularly Berlin, which wound up with three of them after unification and now has four. So what is a Literaturhaus? Generally it's a staffed building devoted to literature, offering a regular reading series (or a number of them) that is open to the public, and it usually offers other sorts of services as well: many Literaturhäuser host writers-in-residence, some house the editorial offices of literary magazines, some administer literary prizes, and some even have cafés.

Here's a rundown of the Literaturhäuser currently to be found in Berlin:

1. The LCB (Literarisches Colloquium Berlin), is located in the Wannsee district on the shores of the lake of that name, just down the block from the American Academy in Berlin. The LCB is housed in an elegant old lakeside villa with a beautifully tiled "winter garden" terrace from which one can admire the view down the steeply sloping back gardens down to the lake. It was founded in 1963 by the late Walter Höllerer, whose wife, portrait photographer Renate von Mangold, still photographs visiting authors, making for an impressive display in the downstairs rooms. A large auditorium room is the site of several public readings per week (including the occasional one in English), and a number of radio shows on literature are recorded here, usually before an audience. A small bar dispenses wine, beer and juice after readings. The LCB also hosts several workshop series for young authors and for literary translators (translating both into and out of German), and regularly houses a half dozen writers in residence at a time. Its staff publishes the literary magazine Sprache im technischen Zeitalter (language in the age of technology). The LCB is located at Am Sandwerder 5, a short walk from the Wannsee S-bahn station. Don't miss their garden parties!

2. The Literaturhaus Berlin, much loved for its great cafe, is located at Fasanenstrasse 23 in Charlottenburg just off the Kurfürstendamm. It was founded in 1986 and features the most active programming of any of the Berlin literature houses, often offering a different reading every night of the week. The Literaturhaus also houses a gallery space in which it frequently hosts literature-themed exhibitions, some of which are prepared in conjunction with the German Literature Archive in Marbach. Its bookstore Kohlhaas & Company (named after the title character of a great Kleist story) specializes in quality literature, including titles commissioned by the Literaturhaus for publication in its own series.

3. The literaturWERKstatt berlin was founded in 1991 and initially housed in the building that was formerly the site of the Literaturhaus Pankow am Majakowskiring in the Pankow district of East Berlin. Like many East German cultural institutions, the Literaturhaus Pankow was derailed by the loss of its GDR government funding after 1989, but the new literaturWERKstatt soon became an established part of the city's literary scene. The name literaturWERKstatt is full of puns - Werk is a (literary) work, a Werkstatt is a workshop, and a Literaturwerk-Statt is a site (Statt or Stätte) where the/a work of literature is accomplished, with a pinch of irony thrown in, since the preposition "statt" also means "instead of," as in "literature instead of works." Right from the start, this Literaturhaus distinguished itself as a home for hip new cutting-edge work and innovation, a point driven home by its relocation, in 2004, to an über-hip site in the trendy Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood. The Kulturbrauerei (culture brewery) at Knaackstraße 97 really is a former brewery whose grounds have been renovated to house a number of cultural institutions. The literaturWERKstatt offers readings, contests, open mike events, poetry festivals and more. Of all the Literaturhäuser in Berlin, this is the one that best succeeds in creating a party atmosphere around literature to appeal to a younger audience.

4. The Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus is the smallest of the Berlin Literaturhäuser but still offers a varied program. It was established in 1992 in the apartment house at Chausseestrasse 125 in Berlin-Mitte where Bertolt Brecht lived until his death in 1956 (he's buried in the cemetery next door); before 1989, the building had been known as the Brecht-Zentrum Berlin, institutionally supported by the GDR Ministry of Culture. In the early 1990s, the Literaturforum featured a program defined by its relevance to Brecht's work, but it's since branched out to offer a wide range of readings and screenings of contemporary literature and theater. The restaurant in the basement, with additional tables in the garden courtyard during the warmer months of the year, serves up Viennese specialities that are said to be based on the recipes of Brecht's second wife, legendary stage actress Helene Weigel.

Goethe the Redeemer

2008-10-27T23:46:00.016-04:00

I happen to be spending the month in Marfa, Texas, a town said to be named after a minor character in The Brothers Karamazov, and in my borrowed house (thank you, Lannan Foundation!) I find a six-volume edition of Goethe’s works published in Berlin in 1949. This hardback edition, printed on cheap paper that is already turning brown and crumbling, is an early product of the newly founded post-war publishing house Aufbau-Verlag, which was eventually to become the largest and most influential publisher of literature in East Germany. The publishing house (whose name translates as “building” as in “rebuilding”) continued to play a prominent role in the German literary scene after 1989, but went bankrupt earlier this year under circumstances whose complexity would require a blog entry of their own to report; it’s now been sold and will resume operations next week.

From its beginnings (and until 1989 at least) Aufbau was associated with a communist and then socialist worldview, having been a product of the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural association for the democratic renewal of Germany) established in June 1945 by the Soviet Military Administration. And so, amid the ruins of the bombed-out city of Berlin, the powers that had vanquished Germany now dictated that literary culture should be reborn there as part of the city’s and country’s new identity as a humanistic, democratic society. To this end, the Soviet military provided Aufbau with an operating budget as well as printing supplies, which by this time were difficult to come by.

Some of the first books published by Aufbau were written by authors who been forced to flee Nazi Germany, including Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Oskar Maria Graf, Lion Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers and Wieland Herzfelde. Readers were hungry for the literature of this new era. Seghers’s novel Das siebte Kreuz (The seventh cross) sold over 100,000 copies, and a book by Alexander Abusch about the wrong turn taken by German society sold 130,000.

The Goethe edition, Goethes Werke in Auswahl (selected works), printed in the old Fraktur typeface, edited by Paul Wiegler and with a moving foreword by Abusch, marked the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. The Marfa copy bears the gift inscription "To his dear children on Christmas 1949. Their Papa"; did one of these children
eventually emigrate to Texas? Abusch’s foreword argues passionately for why Goethe was the author Germans urgently needed to be reading, because of the constitutive humanism of his work. The German middle class went astray in the middle of the 19th century, Abusch writes, becoming indentured to a capitalism whose logical consequence was imperialism. Goethe’s “Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut” (Man should be noble, helpful and good) had given way to Nietzsche’s Herrenmoral (morality of the masters). The intent of the Volks-Goethe (Goethe for the people) collected in these volumes was to infuse the nascent German post-war society with a love not only for one’s neighbor, but also for foreigners and strangers—a love markedly lacking during the reign of National Socialism. It was time for Goethe’s Weltliteratur (world literature - a key concept in his work) to serve as a signpost for a new morality.

Robert Wilson does The Threepenny Opera

2008-09-06T14:23:00.003-04:00

When Robert Wilson stages a play, you immediately know it’s him: harsh lighting, garish colors, fairgrounds sensibility. As often as not, his characters wind up looking like sideshow freaks; this approach can fall flat, but sometimes it shows us something about a play we hadn’t before noticed, as was the case with his 2000 staging of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck with the Betty Nansen Theater of Copenhagen, which traveled first to the Berliner Ensemble and then internationally, including a stop at BAM. The production also features a stunning original soundtrack of songs by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Certainly it was obvious all along that Büchner’s play was showing us how society and its villainous forces (in this case, amoral scientific experimentation and a concupiscent, power-drunk military) can push a fragile soul over the edge. But Wilson’s flashy, Broadway-lit production really brought this point home, even more so than Werner Herzog’s film, in which Klaus Kinski’s deranged portrait of the title character emphasized his own personal grappling with demons. One is all about interiority; the other, internalization. Herzog’s Woyzeck is a muttering, murderous nut; in Wilson’s version, it’s our fault he’s that way.

Now Wilson has taken on Bertolt Brecht’s signature musical The Threepenny Opera, and has done so at the very same theater which premiered Brecht’s own production of the play in 1928. Until Christmas 1995, the Berliner Ensemble was known as the artistic home of Heiner Müller, who staged many memorable productions there, including many Brecht plays; since 1999 it has been run by Claus Peymann, formerly of Vienna’s Burgtheater, who operates in a quite different theatrical tradition (his signature playwright is Thomas Bernhard). So when Wilson stages a play at the BE, it marks a temporary return to the theater’s traditional Brechtian-Müllerian mode.

What does Wilson do with Brecht? For one thing, his heavily powdered and painted characters all wind up looking like creatures straight out of Otto Dix, an effect heightened by the fact that the lighting often makes them look two-dimensional—the final scene winds up looking like a diorama of faces cut out of news- papers. (This photo courtesy of Colya Kärcher.) Many also wear costumes that give them distinctive silhouettes (Mrs. Peachum’s heavy hip padding, Polly’s triangular dress), and are performed according to the principles of Brecht’s gestic theater, with exaggerated gestures indicating emotion rather than expressing felt emotion. When Mrs. Peachum is supposed to look astonished, actress Traute Hoess opens her lipsticked mouth into an enormous O and frames it with hands splayed to either side. Christina Drechsler’s Polly, the dopey bride of gangster Macheath, speaks in a mincing little-girl voice punctuated by a silly little “boo!” Mac himself (Stefan Kurt) is oddly andro-gynous with his lipstick, lacquered hair and the corset beneath his suit jacket—he winds up looking like a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Joel Gray as the Emcee in Cabaret, a fair-enough point of reference (as is Otto Dix) for this late-Weimar play. The only character whose interpretation flat-out confused me is Jürgen Holtz’s Peachum, whom Wilson has dressed up with a stoop and yarmulke as a caricature of the money-grubbing Jewish merchant (like the pawnbroker who sells Woyzeck his knife). Certainly this is a stock comic character that would have gotten a laugh in Brecht’s own time, but in a post-WWII cultural context it jars. Perhaps Wilson means to draw our attention to the way in which socially acceptable stereotypes like these, even among the left, both in Germany and elsewhere, helped pave the way for the ascendance of National Socialism. If so, it’s a valid point, but since the production signals it with only a single costume choice and provides no specific point of view from which this figure is being perceived, it's hard to see exactly what Wilson is looking to achieve here.

In the world of Die Dreigroschenoper, you never get away from “It’s the economy, stupid!” The opening scene in Peachum’s shop is regularly punctuated by the cartoon sound effect of jangling coins which is repeated throughout the play, even in odd contexts, as when the jailor Macheath’s just bribed not to handcuff him drops the rope signifying the cuffs. Money is shown to be the principal motivation for most of the characters in the play, with the notable exception of Polly, who, we're shown, is just a ninny.

In general, Wilson’s version of Brecht’s play is heavy on the ideas and light on emotion; this is certainly in keeping with Brecht’s own stated intentions, though we’ve since learned that his plays appear at their best when pure epic theater is cut with psychological complexity, as in Martin Wuttke’s brilliant portrayal of Arturo Ui under Heiner Müller’s direction. But at moments a bit of character psychology does in fact slip in, particularly in my favorite scene in this production, the moment of Mac’s return to the bordello after escaping from prison, where he sings the Zuhälterballade (Ballad of the Pimp) in a duet with Jenny, the whore who betrayed him to the police, brilliantly played by Angela Winkler. While it’s clear in the context of the play she turned him in for the money, the song offers a psychological explanation (it details his abusive treatment of her under the guise of nostalgia), and Kurt and Winkler bring such depth of feeling to their performance of this powerful pas de deux that the play does start to feel as though it truly is about human beings—which goes a long way toward giving life to a production that exults in its own artifice. berlin hotels

Bookstore of my dreams

2008-08-27T11:44:00.001-04:00

The bookstore landscape in Berlin has changed a lot over the past decade, with a number of smaller local shops closing unless they cater to a specific neighborhood clientele, most often children. By far the city's most happening bookstore is the massive Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus (culture department store) on Friedrichstraße just a block from the S-bahn/U-bahn station. Dussmann is huge (75,000 sq. ft. according to its website) and stays open delightfully late—10 a.m. to midnight every day but Sunday. This massive bookstore sports remainder tables, CDs, foreign-language books, gift trinkets, and all the chain-y charm of a Barnes & Noble. What it doesn't have is a particularly good selection of literary books. If what you want is poetry, fiction beyond the mainstream, and a good selection of books on philosophy, sociology and other "academic" fields, the best place to go is clearly the Autorenbuchhandlung at Carmerstraße 10 just off Savignyplatz. They have the largest selection of poetry I've seen anywhere in Berlin—shelves and shelves of it—and the staff is well-read and happy to chat books with you.

Silliest Holocaust memorial; loveliest

2008-08-26T08:45:00.000-04:00

Peter Eisenman’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe was preceded by over a decade of controversy. From the beginning it was clear that whatever got built on the tract of land reserved for the purpose just a block away from the Brandenburg Gate would become the highest-profile memorial in the country. (Originally a less prominent site had been chosen, but the government was soon shamed into upgrading the location by accusations that it wished to tuck the memorial away out of sight.) Many artists and architects competed for the honor of designing the memorial, but in the end so many different interest groups and political factions had a say in choosing the final design that it came as no surprise that the winning model was bland, a compromise. No one I know ever liked the sound of Eisenman’s proposal; but it was only when it was standing there as a fact on the ground that it became clear how utterly awful a plan it was. Basically, this block of dark-gray rectangular poured-concrete “Stelen” or pillars arranged on a grid crisscrossed by walkways is just a big fake-stone playground where you inevitably wind up playing hide-and-seek with people you’ve never seen before. Eisenman’s idea was that visitors to the memorial would get lost among its tall pillars and suffer the feelings of isolation and cut-off-ness
experienced by those interned in concentration camps. He wanted, he said in an interview in 2005 when the memorial was unveiled, for people “to have a feeling of being in the present and an experience that they had never had before. And one that was different and slightly unsettling.” Nothing of the sort is the case. Walking among these pillars, you are surrounded by the multilingual chatter of other visitors, and the constant danger of bumping head-on into someone else (there are intersections every meter or two) makes people walk with comical caution, peeping around each corner as they arrive. At least on a sunny day, it’s all a bit jolly, and anyone who manages to remember those who died in Bergen-Belson or Auschwitz while playing peek-a-boo like this does so only by an impressive act of will. In fact, it’s so difficult to preserve an air of solemnity while navigating this labyrinth that the government created a Besucherordnung—visiting regulations—to govern people’s behavior: no running, no singing, no climbing, as a somber plaque set into the ground instructs us. Last time I visited, the policemen guarding the memorial were making no attempt to enforce these rules. Just imagine what that would look like: German policemen attempting to impose discipline on frolicking children at a Holocaust memorial.

There was some grumbling when the plan for Eisenman’s memorial was unveiled that his design was a rip-off of the “Garden of Exile” that stands in the back courtyard of the Jewish Museum in Berlin designed by Daniel Libeskind. These accusations are quite correct, the borrowing is obvious. And the original is infinitely more effective as a memorial. Liebeskind’s field of pillars is far more difficult to navigate than Eisenman’s: they’re taller, the foliage planted at their tops blocks out a fair bit of the sunlight (it’s a shrub chosen because it resembles olive branches but is hardy enough to weather a Berlin winter); it feels subterranean; and since you don’t have a clear view of the horizon from within the maze, the fact that the ground beneath your feet keeps slanting in unpredictable directions creates dizziness, disorientation. It can get hard to keep your balance, and by this effect Libeskind is asking us to imagine the disorientation of Jews who, fleeing the Nazis, went into exile, where they had to struggle to make lives for themselves while mourning the loss of their lost homes and worlds, loved ones and language.

Meanwhile, one of the most beautiful memorials I’ve ever seen can be found on Berlin’s Bebelplatz, next to the Staatsoper and across the avenue Unter den Linden from the Humboldt University. This 2005 memorial created by Israeli artist Micha Ullman to bear witness to the infamous book burning orchestrated there by Joseph Goebbels in 1933 consists of a subterranean library buried beneath the square and visible through a thick pane of plexiglass. The many empty white shelves gleam at night and are half-obscured during the daytime by the reflections on the viewing window. A plaque sunk into the pavement nearby bears a quote from the great 19th century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, whose books were banned in 1835: “This was merely a prelude. Where books are burned, in the end human beings will be burned as well.”

Alicja Kwade at Hamburger Bahnhof

2008-08-23T20:01:00.000-04:00

The Hamburger Bahnhof, a 19th century train station that has been brought back to life as Museum for Contemporary Art, is one of the most interesting places to see art in Berlin. Its permanent collection boasts rooms of beautiful work by Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd and Andy Warhol, and its temporary exhibits tend to be memorable. The floor of the main hall of the museum houses two large sculptures by Kiefer, one a patchwork airplane made of lead sheets with large sprigs of dried poppy pods fastened atop its wings (the title “Mohn und Gedächtnis” [Poppy and Memory] is taken from Paul Celan); the other, Volkszählung (Census) takes the shape of an enormous freestanding library, some fifteen feet tall, whose huge books, made of lead, are pocked with hundreds of dried peas in reference to the bean counters (“Erbsenzähler”) responsible for the project of counting human beings that reduces them to numbers and thus, in Kiefer’s universe, makes them readily dispensible. The lead library is huge, you feel tiny standing amid its weighty volumes.
Currently the Hamburger Bahnhof is showing the work of a fascinating young sculptor who lives in Berlin, Alicja Kwade (born in Poland in 1979), winner of the 2008 Piepenbrock Förderpreis für Skulptur. Kwade specializes in turning ordinary materials and objects into beautiful, precious images. Her show features several “precious stones” made of non-precious materials, such as an outsized “diamond” made of coal which, the label informs us, dates back over 300,000,000 years; after all, diamonds are made of carbon too. A huge stone diamond the size of an armchair fills the center of a space at the far end of the exhibition defined by a quartet of speakers endlessly playing what sound like engagement scenes from a medley of movies. And she has also created a work called “Berliner Bordsteinjuwelen” (Berlin Curbside Jewels), an assortment of 100 stones found on the Berlin streets that have been polished and cut to resemble gemstones.
One of my favorite pieces in the show is a cone-shaped heap of what appears to be sand on the floor ornamented with some green sprinkles and crushed dried flowers. The cone shape mirrors the shape of the cut "gemstones" found elsewhere in the show; it's like a diamond buried in the floor. The work’s label, which offers the title “412 Empty Liters Until the Start,” also provides the surprising information that the work is made of 555 kilograms of champagne bottles including the labels. So on the one hand this work is made of valuable material (champagne); but wait, no, it's just the empty bottles; but then the green sprinkles atop the sand sparkle like precious stones; and what happened to all that champagne anyhow?
The show also features a reflective silver tray lying shattered on the ground as if it were a mirror, and several mysterious
clocks, including a sort of cuckoo clock with a convex mirror where its face should be and a series of audibly clicking antique clocks covered with mirroring metal with doors obscuring their faces, lined up like a row of toasters.
Kwade has made another punning piece out of coal, playing on the fact that “Kohle” is German slang for money: She covered a set of 666 coal briquettes with gold leaf and stacked them up like bars of gold. Of course, coal too can be precious, especially if one lives in an apartment in which a coal-burning stove is the only source of heat (there were still lots of these left in East Berlin in particular as recently as 15 years ago, though they are becoming increasingly rare); burning gold bars would hardly keep one warm in winter.
My favorite piece in the show, “Hier und dort blind und machtlos (Parallelwelt 1)” (here and there blind and powerless [parallel world 1]), consists of a row of eight
desk lamps arranged two by two with double-sided mirrors between them. No matter what angle you look from, you have the illusion that you are seeing the lamp furthest from you through transparent glass. The light from the lamps appears to be a sphere of light trapped between the two lamp shades as if between the halves of a bivalve’s shell. The project is beautifully simple, and yet oddly mysterious.

Got D-marks? Get euros!

2008-08-22T21:27:00.002-04:00

It’s been over six years now since the German mark was replaced by the Euro. The year of the currency reform, you could walk into any bank with your stash and walk out with a handful of shiny new euro coins and brightly colored banknotes. That’s all over now, but it turns out there are still a lot of German marks lying around in private households, and people don’t always know what to do with them. A survey this spring carried out by the Association of German Banks suggested that one out of three Germans misses the mark and would prefer to be using it instead of the euro, which in the popular imagination is widely associated with inflation and price gouging. The C&A department store chain—pretty much the equivalent of Sears in the U.S.—has responded to this nostalgia by offering to allow customers to pay in marks at any of their stores in Germany. But for those ready to face the fact that the euro is in all likelihood here to stay, there’s a relatively simple solution: the Deutsche Bundesbank, which has branch offices in all larger German towns, will convert D-marks to euros weekdays between the hours of 8:30 and 12:00. You might have to stand in line a bit. When recently I visited the rather elegant Deutsche Bundesbank building in Berlin, I found over a dozen people crammed into a waiting area in front of a row of four doors, each of which had a red light shining beside it. A rumor was circulating among the people waiting here, emanating in particular from an elderly gentleman with a large suitcase who appeared to be a regular, that the machine that counts the cash is prone to breakdowns because the money people bring in to have counted and exchanged is "too dusty." Be that as it may, we stood there for a good half hour without anyone from the bank coming out to tell us what was going on even after I waxed impatient enough to start pressing the button on the call box helpfully located right in the center of the waiting area (no response). But eventually the red lights changed to green, and each of us bid farewell to his little stash.

The Deep-Storage Archives

2008-08-08T16:31:00.001-04:00

Recently I came across some little texts I wrote while living in Berlin during the academic year 2001-2002—far before I'd ever heard of a blog or blogging. But these little texts clearly are proto-blogs, and so I've decided to import them, post-dating them to January 2002, the approximate date of their composition. Thus you can find them at the bottom of this blog. I'm pleased to be expanding this body of texts in both directions at once. Let boys & girls with these old songs have holiday / If they feel like it (sez John Berryman, speaking of his own youthful sonnets).
As you will no doubt recall as if it were yesterday, January 1, 2002 is the date when the DM (Deutschmark, German Mark) went out of circulation and the Euro came in. This moment is duly recorded in these old texts.
I wrote these little essays while living in a furnished sublet on Kulmerstraße in Schöneberg, just two blocks west of the Yorck-Straße S-Bahn station. Kulmerstraße in those days (and probably still now) was a modest little street with a Turkish men's club at either end. This meant that at any hour of the day or night you would find little groups of men standing around outside smoking cigarettes, which kept the street quite safe. Directly across the street from the apartment was Café Savarin, believed by many Berliners to have the best cake in town. After watching enormous stacks of cake boxes being carted out of the place each morning for delivery to various restaurants, I'm inclined to believe it. In any case, their cakes really were delicious: I pretty much ate my way through their entire confectionary repertoire in the course of the year. Now, I hear, the café has become a haven for the smokers now excluded from most cafés and restaurants in Germany. I wonder whether the cake tastes smoky. If anyone passes by that way, check it out and let me know.

Walking and Blogging

2008-07-27T11:10:00.000-04:00

Polish-Canadian artist Kinga Araya, who's been living in Berlin, has just completed her latest project: walking the entire 160-kilometer course of the former Berlin Wall to commemorate her own defection from Poland (which took place on foot) twenty years ago while on an art students' field trip to Poland. Araya's art often concerns itself with walking and its many modes and implications. Sometimes she straps on a prosthetic leg (for her performance piece "Grounded", 1999); sometimes she dances in shoes made of ice ("Cold Feet", 2003). In a different mode, I particularly like her 2004 series of self-portraits, "Domestic Exiles", in which she responds photographically to the work of Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Simone Weil, Judith Butler, Martin Jay and Edward Said.
A very basic account of Kinga Araya's Berlin Wall project can be found on her Blogger site Performing Exile; I'm looking forward to the appearance of the full documentation on her main website.

Obama's Love Parade

2008-07-25T23:07:00.000-04:00

By most reports the turnout for Barack Obama's speech yesterday was 200,000 people, packing the broad avenue in front of the Siegessäule (Victory Column). This is the same stretch of asphalt that was often the site of the huge annual open-air techno party called Love Parade. And as this Reuters photo suggests, there was plenty of love to go around:

The Tagesschau daily news website posted a poll today asking whether people thought all the fuss surrounding Obama's visit was justified; more than two out of three who responded said no, the implication being that most Germans found his speech uncontroversial if not inspirational. Reporter Corinna Emundts declared that "The senator from Illinois came, spoke and conquered" (tagesschau.de), and Michael Schlieben, writing for Die Zeit, calls Obama "a modern hero who meets with approval everywhere from the taz [strongly left-leaning] to the FAZ [conservative]. Not that there weren't other responses. Stefan Kornelius snarks in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that four years after winning an election would have been better timing for a "mass spectacle" of these proportions - though he does also point out that Obama succeeded in making the point, for the benefit of Americans at home, that it might indeed be possible for people in other countries to love the United States again, the past decades' warmongering notwithstanding. The Obama supporters trolling the crowd passed out not Obama banners but American flags, which did indeed get waved - something that would have been unthinkable in Berlin even half a year ago.

In Germany, the notion 'mass spectacle' calls to mind, even now, the Nuremberg rallies and the crowds who flocked to cheer their charismatic Führer. One friend from Berlin wrote to me yesterday that the sight of all those hands ecstatically raised to hold digicams aloft reminded her of the old films of crowds making the Nazi salute. This isn't so much a comment on Obama and his speech as a basic discomfort with the very concept 'charismatic politician.' Looking at old films, it may be hard for us to understand how it was that Hitler was able to summon the charisma to galvanize large crowds, but clearly that was his specialty. It would be hard to imagine a less Hitler-like figure than Barack Obama, but some Germans seem to be made nervous by the very fact that they like him so much.

By the way, it turns out that Obama had a German great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

Obama ante portas

2008-07-24T14:20:00.000-04:00

Barack Obama's scheduled appearance in Berlin later today got me thinking about the history of Berliners as audiences for and commentators on Americans, American culture and American politics.

Berliners have a special feeling for America and Americans that can be explained only by going back to 1948-1949, the year of the “Luftbrücke” or “air bridge.” After the Soviet Union cut off supplies to West Berlin in an attempt to force the city to become part of the Eastern Bloc, the American government flew in a steady stream of food on airplanes affectionately referred to by locals as “raisin bombers.” The Airlift lives on in the hearts and minds of Berliners. So does John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, held at the Schöneberg district town hall to reiterate America’s support for a democratic West Germany after the construction of the Berlin wall. A few days after September 11, the broad steps leading up to this very building had vanished beneath a sea of flowers—not wreaths deposited symbolically by some government agency, but many thousands of small individual bouquets brought by neighbors who wished to express their sorrow over the tragedy that had befallen their American friends.

The Berliners love us like brothers and sisters: They not only wish for us to prosper and flourish but feel pained by our flaws. Germany has its own problems with racial violence and xenophobia, not to mention the legacy of murderous anti-Semitism that is a source of trauma and grief for most Germans today. But Berliners are simply shocked at the existence of racism in America, particularly given their positive experience of the American military as a multi-racial institution in the years following WWII. African-American soldiers liberated concentration camps and were among the “friendly” occupiers of West Berlin, a far cry from the grim military presence in the city’s Soviet sector.

This sisterly-brotherly love was very much in evidence before the Brandenburg Gate on September 14, 2001, when 200,000 Berliners gathered to express their support for the United States in its hour of need. The Gate itself and the stage mounted before it were draped in banners printed with condolences and reaffirmations of Gerhard Schröder’s initial response to the catastrophe: a promise of “unconditional solidarity.” But now—as the first drumbeats of war were being sounded in Washington three days after 9/11—the message was augmented by a second one, a call for “Besonnenheit” or sober-minded reflection. This word, spoken by German Federal President Johannes Rau, was echoed by hundreds of hand-made signs held aloft by Berliners wishing to convey a more complex message: America, our hearts bleed for you, but please don’t go to war!

The Berliners I know see in Barack Obama’s dramatic success as a presidential candidate a hopeful sign that our country is turning over a new leaf, even at a moment that finds us embroiled in what most Germans are quick to condemn as a tragically misguided military intervention in Iraq. Finally, we seem on the point of choosing something that will make our brothers and sisters in Berlin proud of us: an American presidential candidate who stands for an end to militarism and racial injustice.

By choosing to speak not just to German politicians but to the people of Berlin, Obama is wisely tapping into a deep current of German-American goodwill and fellow-feeling: the same sort of grassroots appeal that has served him so well on American soil.

Kleistpark

2002-01-11T22:55:00.000-05:00

[A text from the deep-storage archives]
A crowd is gathered near the front steps of the city administrative building at Kleistpark, a revolving light dyes the scene blue in flashes, it looks like a demonstration of sorts, something about the war in Afghanistan and the German soldiers who are to be sent as part of a UN troop. At one edge of the crowd stands a group of policemen, gathered around what appears to a life sized Santa Claus sculpture holding a branch in one hand. But then someone shouts "Ruhe, wir drehen!" [quiet, we’re shooting], the Nicholas figure begins to move, the policemen to apprehend him. A lady in a fur coat standing beside the police van into which St. Nick is about to be loaded begins a speech to the old man standing next to her, audible only to her and the microphone. People with briefcases push through the policemen to enter the office building, the rest of us disappear into the park with our bags of groceries.

The Turkish Market

2002-01-10T23:07:00.000-05:00

[A text from the deep-storage archives]

The slanting pallets of fruit and vegetables are ranged around the edge of the sidewalk all along the perimeter of the shop, it is freezing cold and people are pushing past on their way to the bus stop, walking their dogs, pushing baby strollers, smoking. It is so cold one wonders whether the oranges haven't become sorbet. But the market is secretly an interior: When I walk past on the sidewalk, one of the vociferous salesmen immediately begins addressing me, not only a pitch ("Bitte schön, bitte schön") but already a conversation. To step under the range of the awning—which is extended only in rainy weather, but even on sunny days exists as a potential delineator of space—is to come inside. He weighs my persimmon and tells me "Pay over there," pointing to the end of the alley of foodstuffs as though the cash register were located not where it is (inside the shop proper, separated from this street space by a door kept ajar in all weathers) but within this same space that is neither inside nor out. Inside, the young man behind the deli counter feeds me sample olives off his slotted spoon, each time grinning over at someone beyond my range of vision as if this feeding of olives is somehow illicit—because I am a woman? because he is encouraging me to eat during the daylight hours of Ramadan? Most of the bags of prepackaged food are labeled only in Turkish—an outsider is an outsider, fremd bleibt fremd.

Ordnung muss sein

2002-01-09T14:59:00.000-05:00

[A text from the deep-storage archives]

My apartment building doesn't have a superintendent, but when I moved in my landlady told me to watch out for the guy who thinks he's the Hausmeister. But I can't figure out which one of my neighbors she meant: so far, three of them have stopped me on the staircase to comment on my behavior. First it was the old woman who tends the patch of gray bushes in the courtyard that passes as a garden. She asked me to stop putting my garbage in the wrong dumpster. At first I thought she was concerned that I didn't understand the building's recycling rules, but then it turned out that the tenants from the left-hand wing of the building are supposed to put their trash in the left-hand dumpster, etc. "I've seen you use the wrong dumpster several times!" I continue to use the wrong dumpster, in the hope that she's watching me out the window. Then there was the old man with the very straight back who stopped me on the stairs to ask my name, apartment number, landlady, length of stay. I pass him in the hall at least once a week, and he never smiles. Just today another one of the building's old men passed me as I was unlocking the courtyard door to bring out the trash. Coming back in, I was careful to double-lock the door behind me because I could sense him still standing there half a flight up, listening for the key and then there he was, all cardigan and houseslippers, wanting to know why I always slam the door behind me when I go in and out. "Because it's fun!" I tell him, "Have a nice day!" The door to the courtyard is kept double locked at all times, the door to the street only at night (after 8 p.m., according to the home-made sign affixed to the door)—so you can't get out of the building without a key. If there's a fire, all the superintendants will go up in smoke.

The Cobbler

2002-01-08T16:25:00.000-05:00

[A text from the deep-storage archives]

There's a shoe repair business on the ground floor of the building next door. The shop window is partly obscured by a faded banner reading "Sonderangebot" and filled with shelves of dusty, unwanted objects: decades-old shoes, a child's backpack, cheap plastic toys. I have a simple repair job that needs doing, replacing a buckle on a bag, and decide to give the cobbler a try. He's a middle-aged Russian with a heavy accent who sits all day in his shop watching television. Rarely are there customers. The large TV set stands in front of the window, which is why his face is usually turned toward the street when I glance in on my way past. Often, other men from the neighborhood congregate in his shop for a chat—he's got plenty of chairs and, apparently, the means to make tea. The TV shows soap operas and disco music. He does an awful job on the repair, punching asymmetrical holes for the buckle and inadvertently slicing through part of one strap, but nonetheless demands DM 50 for his services. When I protest, we get into a long conversation, in the course of which he admits that he isn't a cobbler at all, he was trained as a hairdresser but wound up somehow acquiring a shoe repair business. Slowly, clumsily, he repairs the damage. Every time I pass him in the street, he grins at me and asks after the buckle.

Money and Contempt

2002-01-07T17:03:00.001-05:00

[from the deep-storage archives]

Coins of less than 10 Pfennig in value never used to exist. One collected them unwillingly in one’s pockets, unloading them as quickly as possible in some container designated for the purpose in one’s apartment—or if possible in the apartments of one’s friends (dinner guests were always dumping out handfuls of 1-Pfennig coins on the sly). Using these coins to make a purchase in a shop was invariably seen as an insult to the salesperson. Once the writer of these lines was punished in a small grocery store in Prenzlauer Berg for returning her deposit bottles without buying new milk or water (being in the process of moving): the lady at the cash register took her time assembling the sum of 1,20 DM out of 1, 2 and 5 Pfennig coins. (A more quick-witted customer might have asked: “Haben Sie’s nicht kleiner?”) Enter the Euro. The erstwhile Groschen, a coin of small but by no means negligible worth (half a call on a pay phone in many places), has been replaced by the 5 Cent piece, a coin which is virtually nonexistent. (In 10 years, will children understand the expression “Der Groschen ist gefallen?”) If one tips, say, the attendant in a public restroom a Euro-dime plus two 5 Cent coins, it seems somehow stingy compared to the three Groschen one might otherwise have left for her, though in fact the Euro tip is worth 33% more. So now will these 5 Cent coins find their way into the same old jam jars half-full of old Pfennige no one ever remembered to bring back to the bank? The amount of money people are willing to throw away has just doubled. And who dares to tip a waitress an irregular sum? If a Milchkaffee costing 4,50 DM was once 5,00 including tip, its successor, at € 2,50 (€ 3,00 with tip by the new math) costs 17% more. (At least the 4 DM falafels at my local Imbiß have remained stable in price: “Zwei Teuro, bitte.”) So will the Euro bankrupt the Germans? My friend who drives a taxi says half his customers have responded to the change by not tipping at all (in other words, they interpret the in fact slightly jacked-up prices as already including a tip). So who likes the Euro? My local kiosk owner! When I handed him a 1 € coin the other night for a carton of milk (formerly 1,70 DM), he asked, “Ist das ein deutscher Euro oder etwa ein französischer?” Figuring something was up, I asked him whether he might happen to have a French euro coin on him. And there it was in his vest pocket, shiny and refreshingly free of the stylized Adler: the beginning of a collection.

How To Get a Seat at the Staatsbibliothek, Haus 2 (Potsdamer Straße)

2002-01-06T22:05:00.000-05:00

[A text from the deep-storage archives]

This is more of a problem than you might think, particularly near the end of the semester when students are writing papers, high schoolers facing their graduating exams are tearing out their hair in little whispering groups of three and four, medical students are reading picture books and tomorrow’s lawyers are pouring over the Grundgesetz in fat red volumes. The StaBi is a maze, a labyrinthine anthill, an anti-aleph—from no point in its interior is it possible to see all other points (even for angels). Hence the streams of increasingly desperate, randomly cruising readers in search of an empty seat, more and more of them as the day wears on. The hierarchy of seats is best observed in the morning hours. The first to fill up are the banks of seats along the large plate-glass windows facing Potsdamer Straße that let in the sunlight and rainclouds, followed by the single desks on the various upper balconies that also offer a window view. Only some of these desks are fitted with sockets for plugging in laptops—the experienced cruiser can size up the electric capabilities of a seat without breaking stride. And what about the seats that are located near the window but face away from it? These are worth less than the others, but more than the seats near the center of the reading room beneath the banks of fluourescent lights. One corner of the window wall is a jungle: tier after tier of potted plants, including fiddle figs. How to get a seat: come early, by 10:30 in the morning, unless you crave a window seat, in which case it’s 9:30. On crowded days, there will be no seats at all left by 11:00, and sometimes the nervous employees will decide the reading room is dangerously overcrowded and begin refusing entrance to new arrivals by mid-afternoon. Barring this, one can invariably find a place in the map reading room: just think of a reason why you absolutely have to consult one of their excellent atlases, or a map of Magdeburg, or Bordeaux, or Madagascar…

In the Museum of Natural History

2002-01-05T22:00:00.000-05:00

[A text from the deep-storage archives]The dinosaur skeletons lord it over a room with high ceilings and a mirror placed underneath so you can admire their ribs from the inside. In the back rooms of the museum where one isn’t ordinarily allowed to go are the exhibits for scientific study. For instance the birds. The collection begun over two hundred years ago by Alexander von Humboldt has now grown to contain a good 8000 specimens, many of them in the intriguing form “Balg”—stuffed skin. The original technique of mounting the stuffed birds on wooden stands in lifelike poses was abandoned in the course of the nineteenth century because the perching, posing, pecking birds took up too much storage space. A “Balg,” by contrast can be stored flat, wedged onto a shelf or stacked in a drawer. The “Balg” birds all have identical poses: literally stiffs, they are stretched flat with legs and beaks extended and can easily be lifted up either a stick mounted in the anus or by the beak. This way it's easy to study the feather structure, a guide explains. There are also birds preserved in baths of alcohol, pale chicks curled into a shroud of their own bleached feathers. The bird collection includes Alexander von Humboldt’s own pet parrot, mounted on a platform in a jaunty pose, though he is balding in spots from the strain of too many cameos in traveling exhbitions. His name has been forgotten, but not his favorite sentence, pronounced (legend has it) whenever coffee was served: “Viel Zucker und Milch bitte!”

Ancient History: Berlin Notes 1995-1996

1996-08-01T15:54:00.008-04:00

[from the deep-storage archives]

I've just come from a reading in a cafe located in the rear courtyard of a large, deserted-looking building, just south of the Friedrichstrasse train station, whose lower half is encased in scaffolding. The street, Clara-Zetkin-Strasse, named by East German officials in memory of a resistance fighter killed by the National Socialists, is to have its name changed back again to Dorotheenstrasse, the name of a princess, as it was called before the war. Xeroxed notices posted along the street encourage passers-by to attend a demonstration protesting the name change, but that was over a week ago and most of the posters are torn and rain-smeared. A policeman patrols the far side of the street, in front of the old Hotel Metropol, a mammoth structure which appears to be in the process of being rebuilt from the ground up: the bottom two floors have been stripped to their concrete-beam supporting frames, while the upper stories are battered but intact. A number of other buildings nearby await renovation, some with ornate stone scrollwork about their high entryways that suggest they once housed government ministries.

The reading, held in a bright, high-ceilinged room lined with an exhibition of paintings, was so crowded that dozens of extra chairs had to be brought in from other parts of the building, and even so not everyone sat. The lights failed just as the proprietor began his introduction, and a man stood up out of the audience, identified himself as an electrician and began to dissemble part of the fuse box. When this failed, candles were brought in, and the young poet we'd come to hear began to read a poem in Japanese. Clearly it was a poem, her voice rose and fell in a rhythmic cadence, certain sounds repeated over and over, and when she was finished she looked up, smiled at her audience, and told us we'd hear the translation later. Only when I was walking down Clara-Zetkin-Strasse an hour later did I realize she'd tricked us, hadn't read the German text of the poem after all.

I walk home to Käthe-Kollwitz-Platz, a good three miles away, because the streetcars are out of service for the night, as indicated by a sign posted near the stop. Following the route north, I come upon two workers polishing the tracks with large machines that send up huge sprays of yellow sparks like Roman candles. Many people are on the street, walking in twos and threes, mingling their laughter with the voices and radio music of the city's open windows.

*

The Amerika Gedenkbibliothek is the unlikely repository for a rather large collection of secondary materials on Kleist, bequeathed by Georg Minde-Pouet, who led the Kleist-Gesellschaft under the National Socialists. (Some of his unsavory letters from the period have been published, leaving no doubt as to his political orientation.) The basement of this otherwise poorly-stocked neighborhood library is a chilly, underlit space cramped with shelves, its only seating a row of small desks along a glass wall facing an unkempt courtyard. The desks are roomy for one, too small for the two library users who usually share them. Old people from the neighborhood wander in to read the newspaper. I sit rifling through envelope after envelope of Minde-Pouet's notes on Kleist's letters, for the most part scribbled comments in Suetterlin script on scraps of paper: his attempts to track down the many persons, events and places referred to in passing in Kleist's often maddeningly cryptic correspondence. For the most part he discovered dead ends, though the occasional envelope contains a postcard from the great-grandchild of someone or other who remembers a family legend according to which...

The bathrooms at the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek are located at the foot of a narrow little staircase on whose subterranean landing sometimes sat one or two young men with AGB badges marked "attendant." One day I ask one of them what he's doing there, since he is clearly not a janitor (the typical condition of the AGB bathrooms suggests there is none). He replies that his is an ABM job (Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahme, a good German word amounting to "make-work"), and that he, Heiko, is required to sit there in front of the bathroom for a certain number of hours per week so as to continue to receive welfare benefits. He is reading a book about health hazards associated with various forms of heating, and explains to me why my dusty radiators at home increase my risk of lung cancer. His ABM colleague shows up for work with a stack of comic books and a walkman, but Heiko is always reading something or other. He says he doesn't want to go back to a real job because he's had such bad experiences with working conditions and harassing supervisors.

*

An attempt to buy a monthly pass for the Berlin public transit system:

The ticket window at the East Berlin subway station Dmitroffstrasse (now called Eberswalderstrasse) is closed and covered over with posters like the rest of the wall, with no indication of where tickets were now being sold. I wait in line at the kiosk opposite the steps leading down from the platform, but the old man behind the counter says only, "Of course I don't sell tickets" and has already turned to the next customer before I can ask anything else. I ask at a discount vegetable shop down the block, where the saleswomen sends me to a tobacco shop two blocks away. Here I request the bus pass from a middle-aged woman, plump and uncomfortable in her too-tight clothes, who immediately demands to know what sort of pass I've held before. I've never had one before, I tell her, I've just moved to Berlin. Then there's nothing I can do for you, she says. First you have to go to a major train station and fill out a form and submit a current photograph. Then you can come back here and get your card. But there are cards you don't need photos for, I protest. A major train station, she said, go to Alexanderplatz. On the way home I pass another tobacco shop, go in, and ask the elderly man behind the counter what sort of bus passes he has. He pulls out an "environment pass" the size of a credit card, no photo required, and sells it to me over the counter.

*

One day the Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse is gone. The street signs still stand, but each bears a careful diagonal of red tape connoting its invalidity, and each signpost has now sprouted an additional white rectangle, mounted above the first, bearing the name Torstrasse, Gate Street, a harmless replacement for the name of one of the GDR's first leaders. A subtler change: the tiny rectangles bearing the numbers of the addresses to be found on each block have been removed from their metal frames beneath each obsolete sign and transferred to the one above, leaving below each Pieck-Strasse a stripe of framed empty space. But the streetcar still follows the old Pieck-Strasse to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, where, from the six-story ruins of a corner building, stripped to a skeleton of brick and steel, someone has hung a huge banner bearing a quote from Walter Benjamin: "Example - Architecture - City - Distraction."

*

Encounter with an anti-Semite: I buy a pair of vintage Swiss Army trousers in a tiny shop in Kreuzberg and start chatting with the owner while the shop's seamstress hems them. He's a friendly, liberal-sounding man in his early thirties and talks to me about how displeased he is with the way Germany has tightened its immigration laws. Then he moves on to America, a country which in his opinion is going down the tubes because the Jews run everything, the newspapers, the schools, indeed the entire government. "I beg your pardon?" I say, and thus begins a long and heated discussion that soon drives all other potential customers present from his shop. The strangest thing about the man's argument is that he vehemently denies being anti-Semitic. There are lots of different people in the world, he says, and plenty of room for all of them, you just have to be careful not to give too much power to people in whose nature it lies to take over everything if you let them. When I tell him that these are precisely the stereotypes that made the Third Reich possible, something clicks in his head and he asks me if I'm Jewish.

*

I translate a handful of stories by the Japanese author Yoko Tawada, who read in the Clara-Zetkin-Strasse cafe. She writes in German as well as Japanese, her principle theme the experience of moving between cultures, of feeling and being foreign. Describing a phone booth lit up at night on a dark street, she writes:

Sometimes the phone booth resembled a transparent tree occupied by a tree spirit. The Japanese fairy tale 'The Bamboo Princess' begins with an old man seeing a luminous bamboo trunk and chopping it down. Inside he discovers a newborn baby girl that he raises together with his wife. The tale ends with the girl, who has become a grown woman, flying back to where she really comes from: the moon.

Tawada's images often serve as hinges that allow her to move between different cultural iconographies. The phone booth she is describing stood at the corner of a park in Tokyo near the house where she grew up, but she invokes it now in a context of specifically European enclosures that allow the tale "The Bamboo Princess" to be imported into a Western present. The writer travels in both space and time.

The nocturnal phone booth might also have been a spaceship that has just landed in the park. The moon men have sent a moon girl to Earth to inform them about our life. The girl is just making her first report. What would she say about the park? Would she have much to report so soon after her arrival?

The foreign writer: a moon girl making her report.

*

Käthe-Kollwitz-Platz is a grass- and playground-covered triangle surrounded by cafes: 1900, Rosenstuebchen, Westphal. Once artist hangouts, they are now swamped with tourists—not only Americans, but also West Berliners, for whom Prenzlauer Berg has become what Kreuzberg was for decades: a relatively exotic place to have a beer. Ask a local his reaction to the influx of West Berliners and you will hear: "It's good they come, but not all at once." "You aren't among friends anymore, who are these people?" and "Just another form of exploitation." The bars around the water tower just a block south expanded to accommodate the influx, but now they, too, have been given chic new interiors and overflow with Wessies. When residents complained of the noise from the sidewalk cafes, the city passed an ordinance requiring cafes to fold up their outdoor tables at ten o'clock, but now patrons purchase their beer indoors and go out to sit on the curb or the low wall beneath the water tower; the noise levels are unchanged.

*

The graffiti in the area has several leitmotifs. "Nazis out" is common, a translation of the neo-Nazi slogan "foreigners out"—and is sometimes accompanied by the graphic of a swastika dangling from a hangman's scaffold. Then one often sees "we mourn W. Grams" or "Wolfgang Grams - never forget!" Grams, a member of the radical left-wing terrorist organization Red Army Faction (which officially swore off violence in 1992), was presumably murdered in 1993 at the train station in Bad Kleinen by half a dozen secret service agents whose assignment had been to apprehend him. For weeks afterward, newspapers were full of confused reports, contradictory information. Of the six agents present, none could say how Grams was killed and by whom. The government then issued a statement declaring the death a suicide, which no one believed even then. The third bit of recurrent graffiti reads: "bei Raeumung 18.00 Kolle," a cryptic message for insiders: Kolle being Kollwitz-Platz, and the "clearing-out" in question referring to police eviction of house-squatters. Since there is an apartment shortage in Berlin, and since many East Berlin apartment buildings, most in bad repair, stood empty for years, there is a huge community of squatters, not all young, not all from the drug scene, inhabiting them. Many have sought legalization of their residences, some with success. But if the police launch an attack, there will at least be a demonstration, on Käthe-Kollwitz-Platz at six.

*

I wonder whether I shouldn't write my dissertation on the German postal system. An entire chapter could be devoted to the demise of the celebrated "Postsack," which has been replaced by an elusive creature called "Sendung zum ermässigten Entgelt im besonderen Beutel." Postal clerks nowadays have to look this one up in their guide to products and services, but don't encourage them to peruse their manuals too thoroughly, or they might discover that they are actually breaking the law if they surrender up to you one of the German postal system's mailbags to pack your book boxes in. This information is included in a tome one generally does not lay eyes on unless one finds oneself on the last leg of a four-hour book-schlepping trek from one East Berlin P.O. to the next which lands one in the supervisor's back office somewhere in the wasteland behind the Rotes Rathaus. This German postal service Bible contains a page-long list of specifications to be followed in the construction of an acceptable postal sack, to be furnished by the client (you). There is also a list of instructions, somewhat shorter, for the address tag. Many a postal clerk, out of ignorance or kindness (but don't count on it), can nevertheless be persuaded to make you a gift of a genuine official postal sack. The supervisor at Alexanderplatz eventually, after a good half hour of our studying the rules together, came up with an Italian mailbag for me (not Bundespost property). Meanwhile other disgruntled customers are banging away at his door. One old man, just as ancient and crotchety as the supervisor himself, complains that he's been waiting for twenty minutes already. "You can wait another twenty as far as I care!" cries my heroic protector. Book boxes can also be mailed individually, for four marks a kilogram, but each box is rounded up to the nearest kilo.

*

I move into an apartment in Neukölln, a working-class neighborhood south of Kreuzberg in the West. It's Sunday morning, and the need for caffeine drives me to one of the bars down the street (the Hobby Horse), which my landlady, herself a cabinet-maker, disdainfully refers to as a "prole's hangout." The place is clean, cheerful and surprisingly crowded; everyone there looks to be around sixty, and everyone is drinking beer, even the women. (One or two are drinking coffee and beer.) The only single man at the bar (drinking beer and schnapps, clearly not his first of the morning) comes to sit beside me, a glass in each hand. Have I just been to vote? he wants to know. It's local elections day, and there are polls set up in the high school across the street. I tell him I'm not allowed to vote, being a foreigner, and a moment later half the people in the bar are involved in an open discussion of why there's no point to voting, since it won't change anything anyhow. The man tells me he worked for many years at Tempelhof Airport, which is only a mile or two away, but a significant presence in Neukölln, which is crossed by the strip of air space used by approaching planes.

*

The manuscript of Kleist's translation of Molière's play Amphitryon has been lost, in fact scholars cannot even agree on the year of its composition. The most likely scenario, to my mind, has Kleist translating during the period (1805-1807) he spent in Koenigsberg. A literary nomad, Kleist was partial to borrowed books. Perhaps the Molière edition he used still exists, with his scribblings in the margins? The magnificent old library at Koenigsberg, now Kaliningrad, was destroyed during the war; I read the report of its last director, who fled shortly thereafter. The books have been dispersed to libraries throughout the former Soviet blok, to Vilna, Warsaw, Petersburg, Torun. I write to these libraries requesting information on their holdings, and find them surprisingly well stocked in 17th century French literature. This might make an interesting research pilgrimage some year--some other year.

*

Neukölln still displays its origins as a cluster of small villages. The old market squares still exist, spaced a good ten minutes' walk from one another; on some of them, farmer's markets are still held once or twice a week. Now there is a large Turkish population, which makes for lots of small groceries full of wonderful things like fresh olives and flatbread and sheep's milk cheese. Everyone talks about the tensions between Germans and Turks, and of course they do exist, but I never see anything of this in Neukölln. My neighbors (not that this is any better) are more likely to make nasty comments about Ossies.

A joke of sorts about foreigners and Ossies: an encounter actually experienced by East German friends of mine, a couple in their sixties. They find themselves in an unacceptably long line at the supermarket one day, and one remarks to the other, this is just like under Socialism. Whereupon the man in front of them, a Turkish local, turns around and says: well, we never sent for you!

*

I have been researching the role of translation in German Romanticism, and am astonished at the richness of the material I find. It seems all the important Romantic figures were thinking and writing about, if not also practicing, the art of translation. I spend many happy afternoons in the rare books section of the Staatsbibliothek flipping through issues of the Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung from the 1790s, a daily literary journal widely read at the time. Not only is there a strong emphasis on works in translation, but frequent reviews appear of language-learning textbooks, grammars and foreign-language and bilingual dictionaries. In addition, the journal regularly publishes reviews of books that have appeared in foreign-language editions both in Germany and abroad, in languages including not only English, French and Italian but also Latin, Danish, Polish and Hebrew. Reviews of translated books tend to place emphasis on a discussion of the translation itself; often books are reviewed in pairs: the original and its translation, or competing translations of the same book. And occasionally reviews discuss exclusively the translation. In American book reviews today, a translation's merits and failings are rarely discussed.

*

Next door to my house is a second-hand shop for housewares. I never see anyone inside. The owner, who seems not to recognize me even after I'd been saying hello to her on the sidewalk for months, keeps a short-tempered Doberman on a chain beside the door—this surely accounts at least in part for the absence of customers. Through the windows of the shop you can see piles of dishes, dusty chairs, children's toys, the odd half-assembled bicycle; there doesn't seem to be space enough to walk. The shop serves a more social than practical function: neighbors gather here to talk, particularly my building's superintendent, who can be found having a cigarette on the front steps in all weathers, since his wife won't let him smoke in the apartment. He has a dog too, a dark gray Pekinese that has become frail with age and has to be lifted up the front step. In fact, Neukölln is full of dogs, and since custom here does not require the dogs' owners to clean up after them, the sidewalks are eternally embellished with dog shit. This is the punchline to my landlady's joke: why is everyone in Neukölln hunchbacked?

*

It is December 31, 1995, one day after Heiner Müller's death, and the Berliner Ensemble is in mourning. After the evening's performance of Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, the last play Müller staged, there are no curtain calls, just a heavy second curtain lowered over the first to signify that the stage is closed. The actors have played particularly well in Müller's honor. The lead actor, Martin Wuttke, will later be named Müller's successor as the theater's artistic director. He does an astonishing job of creating character in a role as highly stylized as Müller's conception of Brecht's Ui (whose rise to power transparently references that of Adolf Hitler). In the opening scene, he stands on all fours as a loudly panting dog, his lips and tongue dyed a bright red that makes the role all the more grotesque; he maintains this pose longer than seems possible. By the play's climax, Ui is giving speeches contorted into the shape of a swastika, arms and legs bent at right angles, gasping out the word "belief" with particular emphasis each time it occurs. Several days later I find myself having drinks in Kreuzberg with a handful of West Berlin acquaintances, none of whom seem to find Müller's loss significant.

*

A new subway stop opens a few blocks from my house, and the BVG, the Berlin transit system, organizes a street festival to celebrate. It's a bit like a county fair: on the shoddy, glitzy side, but surprisingly extensive, with a miniature ferris wheel, swing-you-in-circles rides, merry-go-round (with cars instead of horses), and then real horses, sort of: four of these tiny little ponies being led around in a tiny circle with excited children on their backs by handlers who look about ready to flip out from boredom; the whole show gets held up when one of the ponies stops to pee all over the place. Lots of beer stands, Schiessbuden, discount plant sales, rack upon rack of excellent polyester clothing. (Neukölln is the fashion capitol of the universe: they've perfected the art of wearing high heels with jogging pants.) I watch this woman putting "fantasy make-up" on little kids, slapping it on lovelessly with a sponge like someone who's painted more fence slats than is fun. Then someone pushes me out of the way and I wind up stepping on some guy who immediately gets this huge smile on his face as if he's enjoyed being stepped on, so I beat it out of there right quick. Neukölln is always good for excitement. The subway stop itself (Hermannstrasse, on the U8 line, linking it to the S-Bahn) is new and shiny in its seafoam blue tiles. Even the escalators are shiny.

*

The week I'm due to leave the country, the grocer from the little shop across the street where I've bought my vegetables all year asks me where I'm from. When I tell him, he looks surprised and says he'd assumed I was Yugoslavian. I've felt at home here, but it isn't so much my having adapted to the neighborhood as the neighborhood's having assimilated me. Americans don't live in Neukölln, Tempelhof Airport notwithstanding, and so Neukölln has provided me with an alternate history.