I'm not a camera

Waking up to the morning rush hour on Prenzlauer Allee, I watch the street life rolling inexorably on; the trams that slide in and out every few minutes, the S-Bahn station across the road that, at similar intervals, disgorges a fresh swathe of passengers, the frequent clamour of an emergency vehicle as it hurtles towards whatever calamity requires it.  In the Vietnamese restaurant next door a cleaner is mopping the floor in readiness for another day’s business.  The florists across the road have spread their wares out on the pavement – fir branches, poinsettias and bunches of mistletoe.  Over to the left, through the naked branches of the tree outside my balcony, I can see the huge silvery globe atop the Fernsehturm.  It is a clear morning and Christmas is nine days away.

I am reminded of the opening passage of Christopher Isherwood’s 'Goodbye to Berlin': I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

I don’t want to be a passive observer, merely receiving transitory images, but an active agent, participating in the life of the city.  In my own small way, as I make my way to my language course of a morning, or sit in a café reading my book while nursing a coffee, I feel that I am weaving my own little thread into the fabric of a Berlin day.  I am among pedestrians and cyclists, people forging ahead towards their own destinations, people exercising their dogs or taking their kids to school. There is traffic noise, movement, human voices, many of them foreign like my own, belonging to people like me who have sought to make their home in this once divided, now eclectic capital.

Bite Club at Urban Spree, Friedrichshain, Sunday 15th December