Out with the old

1^st January 2017 must be the most eagerly-awaited date in a long time. Getting this year and its awfulness over with will feel like a purification ritual, and I have a feeling that tonight’s festivities will be even crazier than usual. I’m not going to reflect on the year here, as I don’t want to dwell on the horrors. Instead, I’m going to offer my observations on some of the traditions associated with New Year’s Eve – Silvester – here in Germany.

The days between Christmas and New Year are strange in Berlin.  A good percentage of non-natives have disappeared to spend the holiday in their home towns or countries, leaving the capital eerily deserted, with many businesses closed for the duration.  During these Marie Celeste days, dedicated firework shops open up enabling people to take advantage of the brief buying window, which they do in no small measure.  For a couple of days, fireworks explode sporadically around the city, then the momentum gathers until, from about 6.00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, the skies resound with non-stop booms and bangs, and even the more sedate neighbourhoods come to resemble war zones.  As I write this, the lovely sounds of the Berlin Philharmonic’s Silvester Concert on TV are doing battle with the riotous noise outside.  Health and safety considerations will by now have gone out of the window as fireworks are let off in the streets and hofs, often by kids. 

A slightly less dangerous New Year’s Eve pastime is doughnut eating.  All day the bakeries display row upon row of them, iced in various colours, which people buy by the boxful to take to parties.  Sometimes, in the preparation of a batch, one or two are filled with mustard instead of jam, resulting in a sweet-batter Russian roulette.

Whilst the bakeries have their seasonal work cut out with doughnut making, the florists too have a New Year speciality in the Schornsteinfeger (chimney sweep).  Replacing the festive fir, candle and bauble arrangements that have filled the shelves for weeks, are pots of clover complete with chimney sweep and ladder (and sometimes pig).  Chimney sweeps are lucky symbols in Germany so the figures are given to wish good fortune on friends and family in the coming year.

                               Some of the clover, chimney sweep and pig arrangements available

Bleigiessen, the practice of melting lead for divination purposes, is a long-standing custom, performed just after midnight.  Small chunks of lead are melted in a spoon over a candle flame and then dropped into cold water to re-harden.  Participants then try to determine what shapes the hardened lead has assumed and to analyse their possible meanings as predictions for the year ahead. 

On a less arcane note is the obsession with ‘Dinner for One’, a twenty-minute black and white British comedy sketch from 1963.  The film, about an elderly lady called Miss Sophie and her butler James, is televised about a dozen times over the course of the day and evening.  In the film, Miss Sophie is having a birthday party despite the fact that none of her invited guests are at the table with her.  The butler takes their places, adopting their voices, drinking their drinks and becoming increasingly inebriated as the sketch progresses towards a saucy ending which exploits its recurring line.  It’s difficult to understand the fascination with ‘Dinner for One’ but it’s an enduring New Year’s Eve institution in Germany. To see the film, follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lzQxjGL9S0

So, whether you’re spending the evening melting lead, eating mustard-filled doughnuts or playing with explosives, I hope you get through it in one piece and wish you ‘einen guten Rutsch’ (a ‘good slide’ into the new year)!

Euro Exits

 

The Johannis Sommergarten

The Euros are coming to an end and once again I have witnessed the phenomenon of German fans’ fervour for major international football tournaments. Besides the larger public spaces such as beer gardens, it seems that every bar, café, restaurant and even the odd späti, has a screen set up so that customers can watch the games. Sometimes it’s just a cronky old TV on a table or a flatscreen hanging in a tree. They are protected from the elements by umbrellas or by makeshift canopies fashioned from bits of wood or chipboard. Many of these arrangements are very precarious and involve hazardous-looking tangles of cable but the opportunity to watch Albania against Switzerland while tucking into falafel or pizza outweighs any trifling health and safety concerns.  

 

Screen outside a Vietnamese restaurant on Dunckerstrasse

As we were here for the World Cup in 2014, we were well prepared and knew what to expect but it still amused me when I was walking home from an event on Veteranenstrasse during the first week of the competition, to find the streets full of people watching the game between Portugal and Iceland on outdoor screens.

In the weeks leading up to the tournament the shops began to fill with football-related wares, from special beer packs and black, red and gold pasta to crisps with players’ names worked into the flavours (Lukas Paprika being a particularly excruciating example).  In the grocery sections, aubergines, tomatoes and yellow peppers were arranged into flag-mimicking black, red and yellow rows.

Germans took to the streets on matchdays wearing football shirts, flag make-up and schwarz-rot-gold garlands, and every German goal triggered a city-wide firework display.

Alan and I watched the opening game between France and Romania at the Castle Pub in Gesundbrunnen.  I like this bar a lot, it’s a sprawling space with a craft beer bar and, tucked away at the back the tiny but excellent Carcosa cocktail bar. The following evening we met some friends for England’s game against Russia at the Johannis Sommergarten, a lovely no-frills beer garden tucked away behind a church in Moabit. That evening there was a Turkish wedding in progress in the adjacent community centre and guests periodically stole into the beer garden to catch a glimpse of the match.  We were joined at our table by a wine-drinking chap who had no great affection for England but grew more sympathetic as the game wore on and seemed almost disappointed when Russia equalised in the dying minutes.

I didn’t watch England’s game against Wales as it was played on the day that Jo Cox was murdered and I couldn’t think of watching football that day. In fact for the following week I had no appetite for the tournament at all as it became overshadowed by other events. It wasn’t until friends Abby and Albert invited us to watch Germany’s last sixteen game against Slovakia over a barbecue at their flat that my interest began to rekindle.  On the way there we called in to watch Ireland’s game against France at Emil’s on Schönhauser Allee, a typically ramshackle space with a beer garden and Italian pizzeria occupying a yard surrounded by crumbling factory buildings. Rows of deckchairs were arranged to face a large screen and, somewhat incongruously, a fashion show was taking place in one of the buildings. 

The following evening we went to Tante Käthe in the Mauerpark to watch England’s game against Iceland. This is another typical Berlin venue, home to a sausage and fish barbecue on Sundays and full of unexpected features such as the lily pond in the corner and blue plastic sheep on the porch. I felt so deflated by the Brexit vote that I had little enthusiasm for England and I actually cheered Iceland's victory, as someone behind remarked with grim irony on England's second European exit in four days. After the final whistle the  winning team’s flag was hoisted up a pole to accompanying music in a bizarre but quaint ceremony. 

 

Lily pond at Tante Käthe

 

 

Raising the Icelandic flag

For Wales’s game against Belgium we went to our friend Gareth’s in Pankow then we watched their semi-final against Portugal at Neue Heimat, one of my favourite Berlin venues. The indoor space had been filled with sand to create a beach full of deckchairs but we sat on the carpeted pallets around the edge. Tempted as I was to order one of the special ‘Brexit Mule’ cocktails from the bar, I judged it more prudent to stick to beer.

 

Neue Heimat shortly before the semi-final between Wales and Portugal

 

The following evening, we went off the beaten track for the semi-final between Germany and France, to the Gaststätte Birkenwäldchen at the Berlin-Chemie Adlershof Sport Verein.  This quirky ‘pub in the woods' was discovered by our friend Jon who has a flat in Adlershof and needed somewhere to drink after his previous local, the lovely ‘Leichenkeller’ closed. The Gaststätte is reached by turning off the market square in the old part of Adlershof and walking along the cobbled and wonderfully named ‘Genossenschaftstrasse’ until it peters out into the woods. Picking our way through the trees was fine on the way there but by the time the game had finished we had to rely on Jon’s torch as the woods aren’t lit.

 

The Gaststätte Birkenwäldchen  

 

Sadly, there won’t be any trophy-parading processions in Berlin this year and I’m guessing that the atmosphere on the ‘Fan Mile’ will be more subdued tomorrow than it was two years ago. I’m certainly not too bothered about the final so I’ve no plans to watch it anywhere yet, but that could change by tomorrow afternoon…

 

Annus Horribilis

A few weeks ago the language part of my course came to an end and I began the orientation module, a 60-hour programme devoted to German culture, the country’s legal and political structure, and German history from the rise of Nazism through to the end of the Cold War.

 

Part of the course involved a visit to the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Unter den Linden where we were given the task of locating particular exhibits and answering questions about them. In the section devoted to World War II I noticed an anti-Jewish propaganda poster from the 1930s.  I’ve seen such images before of course and felt thankful that such hatred was a thing of the past. Now though I’m not so certain, and seeing that poster I couldn’t help but recognise parallels with today’s political climate.  A few days before, UKIP had unveiled a Nazi-inspired poster, the purpose of which was to fuel hostility towards refugees and migrants. Later that day MP Jo Cox was murdered by a white supremacist shouting ‘Britain First’.  The following week Britain voted to leave the EU, not over concerns about TTIP or the EU’s pandering to capitalism, but because of racism and xenophobia.

I felt shell-shocked waking up at four on the morning of 24^th June and reading that Britain had voted ‘Leave’.  It seemed that overnight my position had shifted; I suddenly felt very sensitive about the fact that I was British. Travelling to the Volkshochschule on the tram later that morning I felt ashamed. I’m sickened that the victory was secured by the prejudices of the very worst elements of our society.  The kind of ‘proud’ Brits who, when in continental Europe like to assert their ‘superiority’ by singing about World Cups and World Wars and strutting around wearing England shirts as if the national team was actually something to boast about.  

The British media must take a large share of the blame for all of this, particularly papers such as the disgusting Daily Express with its alarmist anti-migrant headlines. I still can’t figure out exactly how front pages that shriek about migrants ‘stealing our jobs’ or bringing crime waves to the streets of Britain avoid charges of incitement to racial hatred.  The BBC too has played no small part, consistently referring to refugees as ‘migrants’ and providing a platform for nasty Nigel Farage to spout his repugnant views. Such exposure has resulted in Farage and his party being accorded undue respectability and has given a green light for racists to voice their ‘concerns’ about immigration whilst imagining that talk about ‘taking the country back’ does not constitute racism. (One thing I learnt within hours of the Brexit vote was that bigoted racists really don’t like to be called bigoted or racist).

Increasing support for far-right politics is not just a British phenomenon either; there is to be a second general election in a year in Austria because that country’s constitutional council nullified the result of the last one in which the far-right candidate was narrowly defeated.  Pegida and AfD are gaining in popularity as is the awful Marine Le Pen, and the USA is facing the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency.

It seems to me that the world is in self-destruct mode at the moment with all of the rights that have been secured over the course of the last century at risk of being lost.  Workers’ rights, gender equality, LGBT rights and protection for racial and religious groups – freedoms which were often achieved after great personal sacrifice – would all disappear should the far-right become politically powerful again.  And yet some actually want human rights legislation to be scrapped. Decency and tolerance are regarded with the utmost suspicion and, thanks to the Brexit vote, racist attacks have multiplied five-fold.    

It’s been a very difficult and depressing couple of weeks. Almost daily there has been a new cause for despair. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all a nightmare and I will wake up to find that it’s still 2015 and none of this year’s awfulness has happened. 

Seasons' Eatings

 

A traditional German restaurant discreetly promoting its Spargel menu.

 

In these days of global commerce, when it’s possible to buy daffodils and gladioli, strawberries and apricots all year round, it’s great to see the enthusiasm with which the Germans embrace seasonal produce. The annual frenzy of ‘Spargelzeit’ – asparagus season – never ceases to amaze me. Although England’s asparagus season is quite an event in the culinary calendar, it’s nothing compared to the mania that surrounds it here. Pop-up Spargel vendors appear in the streets with piles of the swollen white Beelitzer Spargel on trestle tables. Supermarkets begin stockpiling Hollandaise sauce, selling ‘Spargel Kartoffeln’ – potatoes deemed particularly asparagus-friendly – and frozen pizza manufacturers produce seasonal asparagus specials which, for me, is a tribute too far (a bit like Landliebe's Christmas yoghurts).

 

 

Wagner's seasonal asparagus and ham pizza

 

Restaurants of course get in on the act, supplementing their regular offerings with specially devised Spargel menus featuring asparagus soup starters and mains in which it seems to be the principal ingredient, the accompanying schnitzel or salmon playing only a supporting role. It’s even used in desserts, especially at that magical point in the season when Spargelzeit and strawberry time overlap.

From around the end of May the strawberry-shaped Erdbeer Hütten are a familiar sight on street corners and outside supermarkets and stations.  The strawberries are of the highest quality, perfectly ripe and delicious. I always feel a little sad when I see the huts being closed up and towed away to wherever it is they spend the cold months, signalling the end of summer.

 

Strawberry hut on Prenzlauer Allee

 

Autumn is the season of Federweisser (still-fermenting white wine) and mussels but before that it’s the turn of ‘Pfifferlingen’ (chanterelle mushrooms) to have their share of the restaurant menu limelight. There isn’t the same level of excitement over Pfifferlingen as there is over Spargel though (last year a ‘Spargelfest’ had to be cancelled on safety grounds because about ten thousand more people than expected planned to attend and a larger venue couldn’t be found in time) and I’ve yet to see anyone creative enough to work them into a dessert but who knows, maybe there’s an imaginative (or mad) chef somewhere plotting a mushroom and mango mess or a Pfifferlinge parfait?

Spargelzeit is coming to an end now. The sandwich boards which have stood outside restaurants tempting passers-by with their Spargel-heavy specialities will soon disappear for another year as barbecue season gets under way and Berliners take to the city’s green spaces with disposable grills and never-out-of-season sausages.

 

Eastern Promise

 

Travelling daily to the Lichtenberg Volkshochschule, I’ve developed a new appreciation of Berlin’s eastern suburbs. Sometimes after class I’ve taken a tram ride through Lichtenberg, Marzahn or Hohenschönhausen, through street after street of busy dual carriageways, criss-crossing tramlines and seemingly endless Plattenbauten, and discovered a very different city from the one within the Ringbahn. Built in the 1960s to help ease East Berlin’s chronic housing shortage, the Plattenbauten remade the landscape here. They were highly sought after as nobody wanted to live in the insalubrious, crumbling, Altbauten with their antiquated plumbing and dark, dingy hofs. Nowadays it’s the other way round; the Altbauten have been renovated into sparkling apartment buildings and the Plattenbauten are seen as monotonous, characterless blocks lacking in charm or beauty in areas with no social scene but plenty of social problems.  

It seems to be a mandatory stipulation that all Soviet architecture is dismissed as ‘ugly’. That adjective is certainly overused in discussions about the city’s eastern neighbourhoods.  But Post-War Berlin was a bombed-out wasteland and there was an urgent necessity in both the east and the west to get housing built.  A peak into some of the less gentrified western neighbourhoods will be rewarded with a view of buildings far uglier and run-down than the often immaculately-maintained blocks further east. Parts of Charlottenburg, Wedding and Gesundbrunnen for example contain housing developments that would be heavily criticised were they in Lichtenberg or Marzahn. 

Solidly working class and home also to refugees, communities of Vietnamese and Eastern European immigrants and one-time socialist comrades, the Plattenbauten, and the neighbourhoods they characterise, are highly atmospheric to an 'Ostalgie' sufferer like me. 

Lichtenberg

I have to confess that before I enrolled at the school I had only ventured here on a handful of occasions (to visit the Dong Xuan Center, the Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen or, more often than not, the Landsberger Allee branch of Ikea). Lichtenberg, nestling in between Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg, and Hohenschönhausen, shouldering up to Weissensee, could have been in a different country for all the notice I took of them. Not that I deliberately singled the eastern suburbs out as particularly snub-worthy; I neglected swathes of Charlottenburg and Schöneberg too, tending to stick to the areas of the city that I knew best.

M8 tram stop

On my way to school that snowy morning in January, the first thing that caught my eye, seconds into my journey on the M8 tram, was the Russian supermarket Intermarkt Stolitschniy. There is usually a shashlik barbecue outside in the car park while inside is a Russian wonderland with smoked fish, caviar and vodka in plentiful supply. At the fish counter the produce is so fresh that some of it is still swimming in tanks. A little bakery in one corner sells black bread and pirogen, and I found the honey cake that I used to love from the Russian café that was next door to my flat until it closed about a year ago.  There is a huge pick and mix section too with enough Russian confectionery to ensure that the dentists of Lichtenberg never go out of business.

The Intermarkt Stolitschniy

Just beyond the supermarket, the M8 bears left into Karl-Lade-Strasse and arrows along a tree-lined tunnel, past Anton Saefkow Platz, reminiscent of a 1970s shopping precinct with cafes and bakeries, fountains, a public library (one of four in Lichtenberg) and a little market. Plötners, a traditional German café with plenty of outdoor seating, is a pleasant place to stop for lunch, especially on a sunny Saturday. Adjacent to Anton Saefkow Platz is the park around the pretty Fennpfuhl. 

The Fennpfuhl park in its autumn glory

 

Some early season barbecuers

 

Just a couple of tram stops further along is the Dong Xuan Center, a sort of Vietnamese Cash and Carry amid a bleak-looking, half-derelict industrial estate. The Center is almost a city within a city, occupying a series of vast hangars, each containing Asian supermarkets, restaurants, wholesale and retail outlets and even hair and beauty salons. The clothing is of the market stall variety and there are gadget shops, shops selling acrylic rugs, nylon sleepwear, vinyl handbags, in fact anything and everything that can be fashioned from polymer-based materials.

Continuing along the route of the M8, just over the S-Bahn tracks at Springpfuhl, on the spectacularly-named Allee der Kosmonauten, is Helene Weigel Platz where the Erich Weinert Stadtbibliothek and the now abandoned Kino Sojus stand. Given the names here, one might almost imagine that the Wall had never come down. The Kino was built in the early 80s for the residents of the surrounding Plattenbauten, and remained open until 2007.

Kino Sojus

Further along, the tram stops at Alt Marzahn, with its single storey buildings and cobbled lanes converging around a little church. It has the appearance of a quaint country village despite the towering backdrop of Plattenbauten. With the Tierhof - an agricultural centre with goats and geese and a display of antiquated farm equipment - it even smells like the countryside here. Just behind the Tierhof, on a slight hill, is the local landmark: a working wooden windmill.

Alt Marzahn

 

The windmill

Display of farming implements

 

Across the Allee der Kosmonauten is the Garten der Welt, a visit to which I’m saving for later in the year.

In neighbouring Hohenschönhausen, the main point of interest is the former Stasi prison, the Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen.  A visit here is a must for anyone interested in the Cold War and the methods employed by the East German security services. It’s run by former inmates and volunteers who give guided tours.

Nearby, in a quiet, leafy suburb, are the neighbouring lakes of the Orankesee and the Obersee. By the Obersee is the Mies Van Der Rohe Haus, built in the 1940s for the Lemke family. The house was Mies’s final German project before he emigrated to the USA. Accorded listed status in the 1970s, the building now houses contemporary art exhibits.  Across the water is the Bar am Wasserturm in, as its name suggests, an old water tower. The Orankesee just across the road has a jolly beach and beer garden.

Bar am Wasserturm, Obersee

 

Heading back towards Landsberger Allee on the M5 tram, near the junction of Hohenschönhauser Strasse and Weissenseer Weg is the Volkspark Prenzlauer Berg, one of the city’s highest points. There have been allotments here since the 1920s but the hill was formed after World War II using debris from the bombed-out buildings of Alexanderplatz. Now there are wooded pathways and even a vineyard producing ‘Berliner Riesling’.

Allotment house, Volkspark Prenzlauer Berg

I’ve read plenty of patronising and frankly lazy articles dismissing the eastern neighbourhoods as ugly and sneering at their communist origins and ‘unfashionable’ locals. I try to look at these smug and superior pieces as providing a beneficial public service in that they probably do enough to convince those of a similar persuasion that the lands beyond the Ring are not worth leaving their trendy kiezes for.

I shall continue to visit long after my course ends.

Back to School (Again)

 

The Margarete Steffin Volkshochshule, Lichtenberg

 

When I first came to Berlin, one of my goals was to achieve a basic competence in the German language.  I enrolled on a course at my nearest Sprachschule and completed four modules, to A2.2. I found the course incredibly tough and there were elements that I just couldn’t comprehend so I decided to take a break and go back over everything I’d done before continuing further. I was also running out of spare cash at the time and the modules were quite expensive. It was around this time that I started teaching at the language exchange and I also embarked on an online TEFL course which I hoped would result in more teaching work. I was writing a lot as well so my commitment to learning the language began to falter and I never did open my books for my intended recap.

Then, last November, a Spanish friend told me about the Integrationskurs which can be taken in any of the city’s Volkshochschulen. I already knew about the course but I wasn’t aware that for EU citizens it’s possible to take it at a reduced fee and receive a 50% refund on completion. The course comprises an intensive German language element up to B1.2 level and an integration module focusing on German society, culture and law.  I went down to the Volkshochschule in Lichtenberg and took a test which determined that I was at level A2.2 and then, just before Christmas, I received the official approval to take the course at the special rate.

One snowy afternoon in January, as I was on my way home from a session with my tandem partner, I decided to call in at the Volkshochschule to find out when the next course would be starting. I’d decided to start with the A2.1 module as I’d forgotten most of what I’d learnt two years before. I had imagined that I would be placed on a waiting list and would have some weeks to prepare so I was slightly stunned when I was asked to come back at 9.00 the following morning as the next course was to start then and a place was available. So I paid the module fee and at 8.30 the next morning I found myself rumbling through a wintry East Berlin landscape, on an M8 tram bound for the school, A4 pad and pencil case at the ready.

The lessons run from 9.00 until 1.15 daily and each module takes four weeks to complete. There is also about two hours’ worth of homework to do every day so by the time I’ve written up my class notes and done my homework, most of the day has disappeared. It’s intensive and time-consuming but I’m learning much more than I did at the Sprachschule as the modules there only took two weeks to complete and nothing really sank in.

In true DDR fashion, the school is named after Margarete Steffin, a writer and actress who worked (and had an affair) with Bertolt Brecht. Our teacher is also a DDR original, and Lichtenberg native. In the first week she set up a ‘Kaffee Ecke’ bringing in coffee, sugar, a range of teas and a kettle so that we can make our own drinks as the school doesn’t have a canteen. We pay 50 cents a day, which means that besides the extra convenience, it’s a lot cheaper than fetching our break-time coffee from the bakery across the road. She also regularly brings in cakes and biscuits for us all.

My classmates are from more proletarian backgrounds here too. At the Sprachschule my fellow students were Prenzlauer Berg professionals: graphic artists, architects, and even a composer.  Everyone spoke English so that was the language we used during our breaks in the nearby bakery. The students at the Volkshochschule are mainly from the Vietnamese and Eastern European communities of Lichtenberg. There are a couple of Syrian refugees, two Italians, and a beer-loving Japanese student. Hardly anyone speaks English which forces us to converse in German and I’m finding that much more beneficial.

The A2.1 module ended last Tuesday and our teacher had asked that we each bring an item of food typical to our native country. Once the blind panic had subsided, I decided to make a bread and butter pudding. I reasoned that no one would be any the wiser if it failed to turn out as it should but I bought a couple of large bags of salt and vinegar crisps as a stand-by. The lesson finished early and we each brought our offerings to the table. There was home-made pizza, all manner of sweet items and some delicious salads. My favourite was a Ukrainian speciality made with potatoes and beetroot.

Two days later, the A2.2 course started and a few newcomers joined the group. On Wednesday it was our teacher’s birthday and she brought in cakes for everybody so once again a bout of communal feasting took place. During that day’s break, one of our classmates organised a collection for her and popped across to the shopping centre for some chocolates and flowers.

When this module finishes I won’t be able to start the next one as I’ll be in England for three weeks and, although the school will be closed for one of the two Easter holiday weeks during that time, I’ll still miss too many lessons so I’ll have to start the B1.2 module in May with a different teacher and new classmates. I’ll be sorry not be a part of this little group any more but I’m looking upon it as another new adventure!

The stars look very different...

 

David Bowie’s death on 10^th January was one of those events that make the world seem a very different place afterwards.

Two days earlier, on Friday 8^th January, Bowie celebrated his 69^th birthday by releasing an album called ‘Blackstar’.  It was a fine start to the eventful weekend I had planned. That afternoon I travelled down to Shakespeare and Sons on Warschauer Strasse to meet a friend I’d been corresponding with since last autumn when he sent me a copy of his self-published novel to review.  We spent the afternoon discussing our writing and our sources of inspiration. My friend said that the idea for his novel had begun to ferment as he listened to the music of Depeche Mode and wanted to produce a story with a soundtrack. We also talked about the role that Berlin plays in fostering creative activity. Neither of us knows for certain how long we will be here for and we both feel that leaving the city would have a detrimental effect on our productivity. 

That evening Alan and I met a couple of friends at a pizza restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg and I had what is probably my most surreal Berlin experience to date (edging out last summer’s Jarvis Cocker chocolate cake incident) when I walked in and spotted Blixa Bargeld tapping out an imaginary tune on a table-top while waiting for his takeaway order. It provided us with the perfect excuse to spend much of the next day listening to Einstürzende Neubauten.

On Sunday 10^th we attended the Luxemburg-Liebknecht-Lenin Demo in Friedrichshain, walking the two kilometres from Frankfurter Tor to the Socialist Memorial in Lichtenberg.  In the evening we decided to stay in and listen to music. I played a couple of Bowie tracks and we spoke briefly about him, about his music and his influence.  I remember entertaining a fleeting anxiety about him based on nothing more than his age (I’d played a Velvet Underground track and thought of Lou Reed, who died the weekend we moved to Berlin, at the age of 71. The music world had also recently lost Lemmy, aged just 70).  In the morning of course, I awoke to the news that Bowie had died.  

My first thought was to send a message to my old friend Ian. Although I’ve hardly seen him during the last thirty years, I still think of him every time I hear an early Bowie track.  Ian was the first friend I ever made when, at the age of three, we became next-door neighbours.  When we were kids he was obsessed by Bowie and was forever singing ‘Starman’.  As teenagers, while I listened to Abba, he bought albums by The Beatles and Kraftwerk and tried his best to broaden my musical horizons. We spent much of that day reminiscing via Facebook messages about our childhood escapades, including an adventurous bus trip to Derby as twelve-year-olds to buy The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’.  It was only during the 80s when I went through a phase of listening to little more than Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ album that I began to fully appreciate his talent.

I also exchanged messages that day with my friend Abby who, the previous Friday, had toasted Bowie's birthday by raising a glass in front of the poster on her wall - the iconic white face with lightning-bolt make-up.

Many music business deaths have occurred in shocking or sensational circumstances. I was sad when Amy Winehouse died and stunned by the murder of John Lennon. But I genuinely grieved – am still grieving – over Bowie's gentle passing. It’s possible that being in Berlin has something to do with it; Bowie is loved here. His productive (and redemptive) stay in 1976-78 is legendary.  Shortly after the news broke on Monday morning, candles and floral tributes began to accumulate around the doorway of Hauptstrasse 155, where Bowie had shared a flat with Iggy Pop.  His death was the top story on the German news channels.  One politician even credited him with bringing down the Berlin Wall, such is his reputation in the city’s pantheon of ‘Heroes’.

On Saturday, under a brooding sky, we made the journey over to Hauptstrasse to pay our respects. It’s an unassuming, nondescript street and I’d only been there once before, having incorporated a visit to Bowie's former address into a walk which included the Winterfeldplatz Market and the Kleistpark. It was incredibly moving to see the entrance to what is now a dental surgery festooned with flowers, flickering candles, and messages from mourning fans.

 

There is talk of renaming Hauptstrasse ‘David Bowie Strasse’ in his honour.  I hope it happens.

The shock of the new

 

A wintry Prenzlauer Allee

I always find it a bit of a shock when the first ‘normal’ day of the year comes around, the decorations are taken down and the season of goodwill finally comes to an end.  I love the festive period and in Berlin it feels extra special to me, from the last week in November when the Christmas markets open until the mayhem of New Year’s Eve.

Our seasonal preparations began the day the markets opened when we travelled to Poland with a couple of friends, catching a train from Alexanderplatz for the hour-long journey to Frankfurt (Oder).  We walked through the town and across the river to Slubice where the shops were stocked with Christmas treats.  It was midday when we arrived so we settled in for a long, lazy lunch in the Ramzes restaurant.  On the ground floor of a hotel, the restaurant has an Egyptian theme but an international menu with gigantic portions.  A starter of bruschetta was enough for three of us and the fish burger main course I’d ordered came with two burgers and a mountain of chips.  By the time we left it was already beginning to get dark so, warmed by the couple of bottles of Rioja we’d drunk, we gravitated towards the shops where we stocked up with vodka, sausages, lebkuchen, and smoked cheese.  The falling snow as we walked back over the river gave the evening an atmospheric ‘Cold War’ feel, and provided the perfect ending to a memorable day. Back at Alexanderplatz, the market was in full swing but we were sleepy from travelling and a heavy lunch so we took the tram home.

I then had a couple of insanely busy weeks completing batches of writing for the travel website.  Once the last batch had been submitted, I made the dreaded trip to the Finanzamt to apply for my freelance tax number.  In the event the two members of staff who dealt with my application were friendly and helpful and I left feeling very upbeat and ready to devote myself to Christmas-related activities (visiting the markets, shopping for gifts, and decorating the flat).

 

The Lucia Weihnachtsmarkt in the Kulturbrauerei

 

On the second Sunday of the month we went to see a film called Mietrebellen (Rent Rebels) in Karl Liebknecht Haus, the headquarters of Die Linke.  We’d heard about it through a Facebook group called Linke International, for Berlin-based Ausländer of a left-wing persuasion.  The film began by highlighting the case of a 67-year-old woman who had been forcibly evicted from her flat and died two days later of cold.  It then followed the activities of various tenants’ rights groups as they protested against rent increases and attempted to disrupt forced evictions.  After the screening there was a discussion with one of the filmmakers, Matthias Coers who rejected the gentrification argument, blaming property speculators for Berlin’s current housing problems.

The following evening I met up with some of the group again at the Berliner Ensemble to see the legendary Nina Hagen singing the songs of Bertolt Brecht.  I’d never seen a performance here, even though I’d visited the theatre the very first time I came to Berlin, so it was a long overdue experience.  We met before the concert in the Kantine just behind the theatre.  It’s a basement café which resembles a social club but with a theatrical clientele (standing next to me at the bar was an actor I’ve seen in a couple of German TV programmes, including Tatort).  Inside the theatre, images of Brecht were projected onto a screen over the stage and Hagen performed her own musical arrangements of his poetry over two hour-long sets.

On the last Sunday before the holidays we caught up with our friends Abby and Albert at a festive edition of the Breakfast and Vinyl Market at Markthalle Neun.  We had drinks and tapas before settling in at the bar in the corner to listen to the music and enjoy an excellent Bloody Mary. Two days later we flew to England to spend a cosy Christmas at my sister’s house, returning in time for a New Year’s Eve party with friends at the Mauersegler. 

 

Christmas Lunch

 

Now it’s all over, the stollen has been eaten and the streets are full of discarded Christmas trees, I’d like to wish everyone einen guten Rutsch ( a good ‘slide’ into the new year). Happy 2016!