One year on (Part Two)

Moving to Berlin was such a monumental adventure that as soon as I arrived here I was determined to record every last detail.  As part of this project I started my blog and began keeping a diary.  However, the diary didn’t quite work out as I’d intended, becoming merely a bland and neutral list of things I’d done.  A typical entry is this, from last November:

Monday 25^th – Start of the Christmas markets – cold crisp weather.  Bought some DVDs from the bargain boxes outside the shop on Schönhauser Allee.  Wandered down to the market at the Kulturbrauerei, & had flammkuchen from the man in the funny hat.  So delicious, especially with the fairy-liquid coloured garlic sauce.  Stopped on the way back for coffee at Atopia.  Think the wintry weather has finally rolled into town. 

And this, from July, is no better:

Sunday 6^th – Baking hot.  We walked down to the Mauerpark, loped around the flea market then down to La Focacceria for a couple of slices of pizza.  Bought a bottle of water in Gleimstrasse and poured some over my head just to cool down.  In the evening we had a few beers at Wohnzimmer, sitting outside. 

It’s hardly Samuel Pepys.  All that my diary is able to tell really me is that on a particular day I’d been in a particular bar or café or walked down a particular street, with a few mentions of the weather thrown in.  I have attempted to address this by writing more fully about my day to day experiences but I wonder if it’s even possible to produce an accurate account of something while you are actually immersed in it and whether it might only be later, when you are able to properly reflect, that you can begin to deal with it appropriately. 

Another reason for my lack of productivity in this could also be that I’ve been having such a bloody good time.  Philip Larkin once said that happiness ‘writes white’, that it produces only empty pages.  It’s certainly true that I can always find plenty to say about my more negative experiences while trying to write interestingly about the brilliant stuff is often just beyond me.

Part of the problem might also lie with Berlin itself.  Back in June, I went to hear Rory MacLean discuss his book, Berlin: Imagine a City.  One of the points that came up in the discussion was the difficulty of writing about the city, as though it were somehow evading attempts to commit it to paper.

But whilst my ability to write about my life in Berlin has been somewhat inhibited at times, my creative imagination has flourished.  Besides focusing, often manically, on the various fictional pieces that I’ve been working on for years, I have found myself writing down some of my experiences as though they too were events in a fictional narrative.  Approaching it this way, treating myself as a character in my own ‘story’ and creating fictional counterparts for the people I’ve come to know, has seemed a much easier undertaking.   I’ve tended mainly to do this when I’ve had my more unusual or disorientating experiences so these accounts often have a darkly comical feel.  They also amount to a sizeable narrative that bears only a passing resemblance to the characters or events that inspired it. 

It’s very unreliable as a memoir but maybe in producing it I’ve inadvertently dug the foundations for my epic Berlin novel?

Berlin: One year on

On 24^th October last year, after eight years in the prison education job that I’d loved, I handed in my ID, belt, key and radio pouches and walked out through the gate for the last time, aware that I was cutting myself adrift from what had become a massive part of my life.

I was about to move to Berlin for what, at the time, was to be a one-year stay.  When, earlier in the year, Alan had suggested that we sell the flat in Chodowieckistrasse as there seemed little chance of us ever being able to occupy it, and use the proceeds to finance a year in the city, I initially thought it was a crazy idea.  However, the more I considered it, the more I realised that making one of those potentially reckless, no going back decisions was probably exactly what we needed.

We’d had four particularly stressful years when it seemed like we were clobbered by a new misfortune almost daily.  I’d had a scary medical condition which I recovered from physically, but took a long time to come to terms with psychologically.  Alan had bouts of depression which were aggravated by redundancy and a succession of bereavements, the final blow being the loss of his mum in July 2012 after a long and terrible battle with breast cancer.  We ended up in a rut, lacking the energy or motivation to do much more than sit watching repeats of 'Come Dine with Me'.

So coming to Berlin did have an element of ‘running away’ about it, but it has also been our salvation. 

I recall the strange mixture of excitement and fear at setting out on this new escapade.  During the first few weeks, I spent much of my time just wandering around the neighbourhood, taking it all in, trying to get a feel for the way life is lived here and to investigate things that it didn’t seem so important to know when we only came as visitors. 

 

One of my first photos - from the balcony of our flat in Prenzlauer Allee

 

It was a novelty having no job to have to get up for but it also felt strange having no structure to our days.  Despite suddenly having all of that time on our hands though, one thing we never were was bored.  There was simply too much to experience.

I couldn’t have predicted how the year would pan out.  It’s certainly not been without its problems, yet it has been the most enriching, mind-broadening, mad, and brilliant year of my life.

If we’d stuck to our original plans, we would be returning to England this weekend.  As it is, we’re going to be here now at least until the summer.  We might return skint but we’ll have had one hell of an adventure.

A neighbourhood of two halves

Although I'm a Prenzlauer Berger by tradition and temperament (albeit a non-pushchair-owning one), I love to explore the city's other neighbourhoods as each has its own individual character, often shaped by the people who live there.  Kreuzberg, once nestled against the Wall and home to  proponents of West German counter-culture, is one that wears two distinct faces: the 'edgy' east, bordered by the Spree ,and the more 'genteel' western half of the neighbourhood, cradled by Tempelhof airfield and the Viktoriapark.  

For me, the change of identity is most noticeable in a walk down Graefestrasse, which forms the central spine of a longer trek  from U-Bahnhof Moritzplatz (Line 8) to the airfield.  The distance is about 6km and would take around an hour and a half but, as ever, it’s possible to select a particular section and/or make stops along the way.

From the station, Oranienstrasse extends in both directions, but the most interesting stretch is the one to the east which cuts through Oranienplatz where hardly anything remains now of the refugee camp that occupied the platz until a few months ago.  I’d not been down Oranienstrasse for a while until, one Sunday in the summer we met friends for the flea market at Neukölln and our subsequent meanderings took us there.  The street has changed quite a bit in the ten years since I first walked down it. In those days it was already beginning to lose its ‘cool’ reputation and it has certainly acquired a few more designer shops and tourist buses since then.  It’s still a lively and often tatty street though with some good places to stop for food or drinks and, I’m happy to say, a lot of my old favourites are still around (it's also just a short walk to the appetite-inducing Markthalle Neun).

 

Looking across Heinrichplatz from an outside table at Bateau Ivre

 

From the junction at Görlitzer Bahnhof, walk down Manteuffelstrasse to the canal.  If it’s a Tuesday or Friday afternoon, the Turkish Market will be in full swing along the opposite bank.  I’ve already mentioned the market in a previous post so I won’t do so here.

Crossing Kottbusser Damm, Graefestrasse is a street that seems to change its identity at every junction.  At the top end, the Turkish flavour continues in the bars and cafes.  Further down, around the junctions with Böckhstrasse and Dieffensbachstrasse, things get a little gentrified.  The tree-lined streets around here are as prettily bourgeois-bohemian as anything around Kollwitzplatz.  Café Avril, on the corner of Böckhstrasse is an agreeable place to sit and people-watch for an hour or two.

Continuing southwards, there is a rather bland stretch between the junction with Urbanstrasse, down to Hasenheide.  Here, the Volkspark Hasenheide is an attractive diversion if the weather is suitable. It incorporates a small animal park, as well as plenty of paths and green spaces and, in summer, a freiluft kino.

 

Trümmerfrau memorial in Volkspark Hasenheide.

‘Trümmerfrau’ literally translates as ‘rubble woman’ and refers to the women who, after WWII helped clear the streets of the mountains of debris caused by allied bombing

 

On Hasenheide itself, between Graefestrasse and Südstern is the Brauhaus Südstern which offers beer, food and both indoor and outdoor seating. 

 

Beer-making apparatus in the Brauhaus Südstern

From Südstern the walk proceeds along Bergmannstrasse.  On the left hand side is a cemetery which I visited for the first time when I did a creative writing workshop in the summer.  It’s worth wandering into for its ornate crypts and memorial statuary (and the odd red squirrel).

Continuing along Bergmannstrasse, Marheinekeplatz has the Passionskirche at one end and the Marheineke Markthalle at the other.  On Saturday there is a lovely flea market in the square.  The Markthalle has a number of food stalls and is a good place to stop for something to eat, or to sit outside in the sunshine with a drink.  From Marheinekeplatz, Bergmannstrasse is lined with shops, cafes and bars.  A small detour can also be taken to Another Country bookshop in Riemannstrasse.

 

The Saturday flea market at Marheinekeplatz

Chamissoplatz is a pretty square just behind Bergmannstrasse where a small farmers’ market sets up on a Saturday.

From here, Mehringdamm can be reached via Fidicinstrasse or by continuing along Bergmannstrasse.   In the corner of a hof towards the Mehringdamm end of the street is Colours – one of my favourite vintage shops in the city.  It’s large inside so time is needed to properly explore.

Once on Mehringdamm it’s just a few hundred metres to the now closed Tempelhof airport.

In front of the airport buildings on Platz der Luftbrücke is the monument to the Berlin Airlift that took place between 1948 and 1949.

The airfield, which can be accessed via Columbiadamm, is vast.  In a referendum held earlier this year Berliners wholeheartedly rejected development plans for the site.  The runways are now used by joggers, walkers, skaters, cyclists and kite-flyers.  There are also dog runs, barbecue areas and toilet blocks.

In Tandem

It’s a sunny Thursday evening in June.  I am sitting, a weissbier in front of me, on the terrace of the café that overlooks the Lietzensee.  I have a view over the ‘see’, its surrounding park and, just beyond it, the Funkturm.  It’s my first tandem speaking session with Elke, who is sitting next to me with a glass of white wine and a pretzel that is so large it ends up feeding us both.  We chat, almost exclusively in English, for several hours.  On this occasion we are less concerned with practicing languages than with getting to know each other and Elke’s English is vastly superior to my German.

I’d met Elke the previous week when she turned up at the language exchange I sometimes teach at.  She was looking for a partner to help her get rid of her German accent.  I’d tried to reassure her that her English was perfectly understandable and that her accent was very charming but she insisted that it was ‘ugly’.  She said that to many Germans accent was very important and could convey all sorts of benefits or handicaps.  This surprised me as I’d thought it was only the British for whom such snobbery still existed.

Elke was determined to speak flawless, accent-free English.  She had a mild fixation with Englishness in general, including what was, to me, an unfathomable enthusiasm for the British royal family and other upper-class institutions.  She actually asked me once if I ever went fox-hunting!

One time, Elke said she’d like to try something traditionally English so I conducted a quick internet search and found that ‘afternoon tea’ is available at several top-notch hotels in the city but at eye-watering prices.  Then I remembered a shop on Mehringdamm that sold English products.  After another spot of googling I discovered that it was called ‘East London’ and that it had a café so we met there for tea and scones with jam and clotted cream, Elke declaring herself a fan. 

Apart from our differing perspectives on British toffs, we did discover at that first meeting by the Lietzensee much common ground, including a shared interest in literature and cinema.

I learnt that, romantically, Elke was going through a bit of an upheaval.  After having been single for ten years, she was about to set up home with her new partner who was moving to Berlin from Hamburg.  It was, however, fraught with difficulties.  Her partner had a small daughter who was loath to leave her friends and father behind.  Elke – childless herself – had become accustomed to her own space and her own routine and wondered how she would accommodate not only her partner but the demands of a child as well.  There was also opposition from her partner’s family to be dealt with, and concerns about possible prejudice from her rather conservative Charlottenburg neighbours.

I’ve followed the fortunes of this relationship over the course of several meetings this summer.  In fact it seemed to me at times that they provided Elke with an opportunity to discuss her anxieties with someone outside the situation who could offer an objective and sympathetic ear.

Our most recent meeting was at Zeitlos, adjacent to Savignyplatz S-Bahn station.  Over happy hour cocktails in a rather gimmicky bar that has sand on the floor and tries to look like something from a Gauguin painting, Elke told me that things hadn’t been going too well.  A few days later, she e-mailed to say that she and her partner were having a temporary break which she believed was necessary if their relationship was to survive.

Having a tandem partner – even one with a complicated private life – is a great way of improving your language skills, whilst making friends and gaining an insight into their lives.  I’ve got into the habit of writing down words or phrases that I stumble over so that I can give them to Elke to translate for me when we meet.

It’s also had the added benefit of providing us with opportunities to get together for a natter over coffee and cake, beer or cocktails, or, just the once, tea and scones.

A double anniversary

Two significant and inextricably linked events have been uppermost in my thoughts today.  It’s ten years since I first set foot in Berlin, arriving on a warm but drizzly afternoon for a two-night stay in a hotel just off Friedrichstrasse.  The next day I called home for news of my dad who had been in hospital for two weeks and heard from my brother in law that he had just died.  I had known that his condition was bad and I also realised that he would not be going home from hospital but I hadn’t expected him to die just then so I thought it would be OK to make the trip.  I suppose this was down to the fact that he’d been at death’s door two years earlier when he’d spent seven weeks in hospital with a condition that defied diagnosis (in fact we never did discover exactly what it was that had almost finished him off that time).  He’d been admitted with mobility problems and his condition deteriorated to the point that one morning I received a call from the sister on his ward telling me that he had suffered heart failure and would likely not survive the day.  My mum, sister and I gathered at his bedside and sat there the entire day and evening.  To everyone’s surprise, he did survive.  We went home that night, only for the same thing to happen the next day.  He not only survived a second time but recovered enough to return home, although with his health and mobility seriously compromised.

There were two more hospitalisations before the final one on 1^st September 2004.  The last time I saw him was the 13^th, a Monday evening.  There was a TV opposite his bed showing a news item about a ‘Fathers for Justice’ campaigner standing on a Buckingham Palace window ledge dressed as Batman.  Dad asked me to look online for flights to Ireland the following summer.  He was Irish and wanted to visit his home country with the whole family: Mum, my sister, our husbands and my sister's girls who were six at the time.

It was in the days of dirt cheap Easyjet and Ryanair flights.  The previous week we had flown to Budapest for next to nothing and we’d booked the Berlin flights for something like £2.99. 

Whether he was aware of the impossibility of such a trip being made, I don’t know.  Maybe he wanted to give himself something to focus on, or was trying in some way to convince us that he would still be around the following year.

I remember discussing my imminent Berlin trip with him and him telling me about the controversial American playwright Lillian Hellman who’d visited the city with fellow writer Dashiell Hammett during the late 1930s.  Dad was a big fan of Hammett and I had taken him a copy of ‘The Thin Man’ when he went into hospital.  The fact that it remained at his bedside untouched should have indicated to me how ill he was.

I’m not going to idealise my dad here.  He did have a lot of faults, and I would even say that his commitment to his roles as husband and father was often seriously deficient. But he was a complex character.  He had suffered a lot of personal tragedy and was often brooding and angry. 

My last memory of him is as a very poorly old man talking about American writers and making holiday plans from his hospital bed.

In some ways Berlin will always be bound up in my mind with my dad.  With a different mindset I could have hated the city because of this and never want to return.  But return I did.  Year after year.  Maybe tomorrow night I will remember him in the manner most appropriate by seeking out an Irish bar and raising a commemorative glass of Guinness.

It’s what he would have wanted.

 

I was standing here when I heard the news (more or less exactly where the pedestrian 

in the white top is) I think of it as 'Einstein Corner' for obvious reasons.

Dancing in the Street

 

Saturday 30^th August was the day of the ‘strassenfest’ in Dunckerstrasse.  The street was closed between the junction with Stargarderstrasse and the bridge over the railway tracks (right outside our door) in preparation.  From early in the morning I could hear the clatter of the stalls being set up. 

The festivities kicked off at 2.00 in the afternoon and went on until 11.00 p.m. with a line-up of bands playing on the stage at the Stargarderstrasse end.  In addition to the three bars in that stretch of the street, there was a beer tent, and one of the bars – Beakers – had set up an outside cocktail bar from which they did a brisk trade in mojitos and caipirinhas.  Even the bakery on the corner stayed open all evening to sell bottled beers.

 

Beakers cocktail bar

 

There was a sekt and wine bar, food trucks, a stall selling T-shirts and bags, and a couple of bizarre attractions for kids.  In one, kids queued to get strapped into a winch suspended from a crane, then had to try building a tower from 'Club Mate' crates.  As the tower grew, the kid would get winched higher into the air and crates would be passed up to her or him on the end of a pole.  As soon as the tower collapsed, the kid would be let down and the next in line would have a go.  This went on until nightfall when the winch was replaced by a spotlit mirror ball which scattered a starry pattern of light over the street and houses.

 

A climbing 'attraction'

 

 

A very impressive crate tower 

The neighbourhood turned out in force to dance, sit on sofas or the ground, eat and drink or generally just mill around.  Kids and adults alike joined in the dancing and the atmosphere remained convivial despite the volumes of alcohol being consumed. We looked in for an hour at around five o’clock, when it was still fairly low-key, and sampled a mojito from Beakers’ cocktail bar, then went back later to listen to the bands for the last couple of hours.

 

                      Either an imaginative bit of decoration or a novel way of drying the smalls

 

 

One of the early bands setting up

Strassenfest regulars ‘Auge Blau’ were a favourite with the locals – a sort of cross between Madness and The Darts.  The lead singer spent the duration of one song launching paper planes into the crowd, and another had an accompanying ‘hand’ routine that everyone performed enthusiastically.

The strassenfest is an annual event.  There is great co-operation from the locals who have live music blasting right below their windows, and from the authorities (though the police keep a watchful eye from the sidelines).  Compared with the UK’s dismal ‘royal jubilee’ street parties, this was a joyous affair with a real community feeling.

 

Light reflecting from the mirror ball onto nearby buildings

 

The weather could have been kinder – the skies were extremely dark all day – but it remained reasonably warm and at least the rain stayed away.

Nice Work!

For various reasons, I didn’t do much active job seeking during my first few months in Berlin.  We did register early on at the Job Center but that proved a completely futile exercise. 

I spent a lot of that time working on various writing projects that up until then I’d not really had much opportunity to develop.  And, to be perfectly honest, I was enjoying a break from what had been quite an exhausting job.

After twelve years in education, eight of which I’d spent teaching in the highly demanding environment of a prison for young male offenders, I was ready for a departure from that particular line of work.  I’d arrived here feeling pretty burnt out and adamant that I didn’t want another job with that level of pressure or responsibility.  I also thought that Berlin was probably already awash with English speakers offering their services as teachers.  My attitude at the time was that if staying in the city meant stacking shelves in Lidl or serving drinks in a bar (even though I’ve never done either of those things), then that’s what I would do.

I began an intensive German course in order to improve my prospects.  I completed the first level, as far as A2, but I ran out of cash for further lessons.  I’d really enjoyed the course too, and would have loved to carry on.

In April, with my batteries recharged, I began to revise my opinions about teaching.  I think that being back in a learning environment, albeit as a student rather than a teacher, had rekindled my interest.  I’d also begun teaching the odd session at the language exchange we’d been going to since our move, so I decided to take an online TEFL course to equip myself with the requisite paperwork (one thing I did learn at the Job Center is that qualifications are paramount here, although I'm still not convinced an MA in women's political writing of the 1890s will be much help). 

In June, whilst I was still engaged on the course, I accepted work as a freelance copywriter for a start-up.  The job was basically to produce spam e-mails for online businesses to bombard their customers with.  My project was to write for a tacky ‘aspirational lifestyle’ company.  Right from the beginning things went wrong.  The templates I was to access had been uploaded as read-only.  Other things had also been incorrectly set up, so by the time I actually began writing I had wasted about four hours.  I finally got to submit my work but it wasn’t until about six o’clock the following evening that I heard back.  I was asked to revise everything I’d done and return it as soon as possible. 

As I’d committed myself to teaching at the language exchange that evening, I rushed back home afterwards without staying for the customary drinks, and worked on the revisions until about one in the morning.

Again, I waited in all the next day and again I received an e-mail in the evening demanding revisions.  I’d followed the advice I’d been given, checking out the company in order to get a feel for its ‘brand voice’, and looking at the campaigns produced by other copywriters, and I honestly couldn’t see how my work was deemed unsatisfactory in comparison.  I’d say in fact that it was better than some of the examples I looked at.

The company I was producing this spam for was spectacularly vulgar, basically a kind of online TK Maxx providing cut-price designer goods (i.e. unsold stock from previous seasons).  It aimed to offer what it termed an ‘elite’ lifestyle to aspirational types who epitomise the worst of the shallow, acquisitive, materialistic culture in which ‘status’ is based on what one owns rather than what one is or does.

The last straw was when I came to submit my pay claim.  I had devoted about twenty hours to this project but I was told that it was somehow ‘policy’ to pay for only three hours’ work per assignment.  When I pointed out the time I’d wasted because of the way things had been incorrectly set up, I was grudgingly awarded an extra hour.

I chalked the whole soul-dirtying exercise up to experience concentrated on completing my TEFL certificate.  It took me about ten weeks, and I eventually passed the exam with a Grade A, so I set about searching the internet for teaching jobs.

A couple of weeks ago I had a Skype interview with a teaching agency for a job as a freelance teacher of business English and was told that I would be called on for a face-to-face interview.  However, they later e-mailed to tell me that they wouldn’t be proceeding with my application.  The reason given was that they’d reviewed my experience and background and decided that I didn’t meet the profile.  Strangely, the reason I was interviewed in the first place was that my CV indicated that I satisfied all of their criteria so I can only assume that they didn’t like the look of me in the Skype interview!

It’s not all been frustration and rejection though.  Friends have helped, giving us phone numbers, e-mail addresses and links for places where work might be found.  I have a list of schools and teaching agencies to approach, and a few weeks ago I was given the number of a research institute which is conducting a sociological study on behalf of a German university.  The study is Europe-wide so there was a need for English speakers.  I rang the following afternoon and was asked to go down more or less straight away.  I found myself alongside five other interviewees.  We were given a presentation and a practice session, and finally taken to the call centre to try our skills at approaching potential respondents.  I signed up to work four afternoons a week and am now in my third week.  A bonus is that it’s in Weissensee and I can walk there in just over half an hour and explore the backstreets on my way home.  I have had more challenging and more prestigious jobs, and it’s obviously going to be of a finite duration, but for me it’s something just to be earning again. 

It’s not easy finding work in the city, especially if your German isn’t fantastic.  Berlin is poor in comparison with other German cities and unemployment is relatively high.  I meet a lot of people here who seem to have very vaguely defined occupations too.  When I ask what they do for a living, the answer is often ‘working for a start-up’ or, mystifyingly, ‘freelance’.  I’ve encountered playwrights and poets trying to find a market for their talents; I've met entrepreneurs and outright chancers.  But what we all have in common is the desire to make lives for ourselves in the city we love.

So I’m trawling daily through sites such as Craigslist. On Friday, I’m going on an ‘orientation day’ for a teaching agency and I’ve heard that there are more surveys in the pipeline at the research institute.  I’ve come to realise that finding permanent work is going to be tough, and I’m going to need sharp elbows, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed and thumbs pressed (and any other body-part metaphors that might be called on)!