Berlin, A Story to Go
- A Sentimental Journey –
Adriana Carcu
I arrive in Berlin after many years. The last time I have been here the city was still a huge wound, the traces of the fallen Wall crossing it like an ugly scar. Coming out of the new train station, a tall glass monolith that looks rather like an airport terminal, I can already see the new skyline, the buildings, the cranes. I say “Hallo” to the taxi driver and he answers, “Hi!” A good start, I think to myself.
We drive to the borough called Prenzlauer Berg situated in what used to be East Berlin. I suck in the first impressions. I make a comment about the sedate traffic and the driver tells me, “We have all realized that hectic doesn’t make it any faster”. Good philosophy.
The place I need to get to is a film production studio located in the Kulturbrauerei, an impressive red brick building complex that used to be a brewery in the last century, and has now been re-functioned into a conglomerate of theaters, clubs, shops and art galleries, all spread along the 6 connecting yards. The place has 4 entrances, each of them on a different street.
When the taxi stops in front of one of them, the first thing I lay my eyes upon is the word LIEBE in huge steel letters against the red brick wall. A very good start.
I meet the people at the studio and since they are on the way to lunch, I join them in the place around the corner where I eat my first real Italian pizza in my 20 years of residence in Germany and approximately 70 visits to various Italian restaurants. On the way back, I take a look around. The buildings are a sundry combination of some Jugendstil that has gone through the hardships of the communist era. Some of them have gained back the original glamour; some still bear the scripts of the recently defunct post-punk era, but all in all, the small international restaurants, the pubs with Russian names (an Eastern Block nostalgia marching in) and the fashion shops I pass by, give me the pulse of the place, the global village hype.
Next morning I take a stroll through the streets, navigating among the discarded Christmas trees, some of them still fully decorated (probably thrown out the window in a bout of post-Christmas depression) some of them sprayed in galactic blue. I pass art galleries, organic food stores, a Chinese, an Indian, three Italians, one Spanish. Many flower shops, candy shops, fresh fruit stands; shops with thousands of shining lamps and even a beach shop; dozens of small cozy pubs with heated terraces, candles and large plates of red apples on iron tables; small potted bushes that have started to bloom from the heat of the huge radiators.
I walk about with a feeling of easiness and wonder and I then stop abruptly in front of a shop thinking first that I haven’t seen right. I read again, STORY STORE, and below on a blackboard in chalk, “Stories to go. The only shop in Germany where you can buy stories tailored for any occasion, for every life situation.” Inside I am told that pirate stories and stories of magic are in great demand, “you just give us the setting and the characters, tell us who you want to be and we weave the story for you”. I can see stories of adventure, of dream and love in there. In the end they make me aware of the special Valentine offer, a story called “You are a Thing of Wonder”. I laugh and tell them that although it sounds like me all right, I’d rather have it written by someone else.
In the evening, we take the underground to the Berlin Philharmonics. My friend Razvan, an absolute classical music connoisseur is thrilled with the anticipation of hearing a Bach piece in the orchestration of Anton Webern. He says, “We can leave afterwards if you like” and he’s right: although our seats are right in the middle of the stage, beyond the timpanist, Schubert’s 8th symphony will prove too romantic for my taste as well.
In the underground, again that laid back air. Most of the people are reading, I can see book titles in three or four languages, some are chatting quietly with their seat neighbors like with old acquaintances. “Through the night dark and drear” we come out in the Potsdamer Platz, and in the open windy square I finally get to see the new Berlin, the capital I have been following through all these years in its amazing metamorphosis, the city of festivals, the city of parties, the city of the stars. Huge, shiny buildings are piercing the sky, the policewoman, a Brunhild with thick golden tresses on her back, is directing the traffic, the cars glide, the pubs glow, and still, it seems that we are the only people in a hurry. I sense again the same serene equanimity the Germans so appropriately call “Gelassenheit”, and I realize that this must be the mark of the new Berlin; a trace resulted from the fusion of two worlds and the concoction of thousands of ingredients, social and national in sort.
After the concert, we descend into the subway again and while waiting in front of a sweets kiosk from another century,
I look at the large paintings posted on the tiled walls advertising the exhibition “Nineteenth-Century French Master-pieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York”
with the feeling that it is 15 years ago and I am still a Tour Director guiding a bunch of fifty American high school students through the old romantic Berlin.
Berlin, 10th January, 2008