n. apartment share, abbr. WG, from dwelling and community.
ex. Triangular room in WG for illegal sublet, DM 300. Near transportation and entertainment. Electricity, hot water, ceiling-swing, some cigarettes, cultural metamorphosis, unlimited petty tyranny incl.
Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop.
The German landline issued its disconcerting monotone beep as I held my breath on the other end of the receiver. It was my worst exchange-student nightmare: calling a German stranger unsolicited; failing to be understood—or, worse, being sure that the German stranger was silently deriding my language abilities. Please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up. A rather counterproductive prayer, to be sure, as one doesn’t find a new place to live by letting the phone ring, hanging up, and then talking to nobody. On the fifth or six boooooop, a sharp voice answered.
Come on, Schuman, I told myself. Sei tapfer! Be brave! There was no way I was getting stuck out in the Freie Universität dorms, twenty-five miles from anything interesting, with only a bunch of dorko international students to keep me company in my dingy complex that was basically prison with beer. What the fuck was I going to do out there? Study? All the cool kids in my program had taken our possibly misguided directors’ offer to refund our dorm fees and search for housing independently in correspondingly cool Berlin WGs (Wohngemeinschaften, literally “living communities,” the German name for an apartment shared with someone who isn’t one’s family). And since I already lived in a WG with Gertrud, I couldn’t be expected to stop now and be subjected to such indignities as rules and not being cool. What the fuck use was living in the coolest city in the world, at its second-coolest time in its history (after Weimar, natürlich), if I wasn’t going to be cool? This was a potential tragedy. Too bad the only way to find a WG was to step directly into the gaping Nietzschean abyss of terror that was subjecting random potential roommates to my halting, phlegm-filled telephone Deutsch. This I did by answering ads placed in the Zweite Hand, a free weekly that was like Craigslist, but in print and with slightly fewer dick pics.
“Hallo? Halloooooooo?” repeated the voice on the other end, perturbed at my twenty seconds of heavy-breathing silence. My throat had once again coated itself as an immediate reaction to any attempt to speak German with anyone. I finally managed to croak out the single sentence that I’d been practicing under my breath all day: “Ist das Zimmer noch frei?” (“Is the room still available?”)
The voice at the other end paused, but not because he didn’t understand what I said.
“Äh … nein. Nicht mehr. Tut mir leid.” (“No. Not anymore. Sorry.”)
I assumed he paused because he was attempting to process someone being so terrifically rude. Germans are in some situations a direct people: as Gertrud was so kind to point out, they will think nothing of telling you that you have gained weight. But in other situations, they have ironclad laws of politeness. One of these is that when telephoning a stranger, you are expected to give your entire curriculum vitae as your initial greeting. This I learned the hard way, after Gertrud overheard me have one of my doomed conversations and set me straight. The sole acceptable manner in which to announce myself on the other end of a telephone when answering an advertisement for a vacant room from the Zweite Hand rivaled a passage out of Robert Musil’s two-thousand-page novel The Man Without Qualities: Hallo, guten Tag. Mein Name ist Rebecca Schuman, und ich bin Austauschstudentin aus den USA. Ich habe Ihre Anzeige in der Zweiten Hand gelesen, und ich wollte wissen, ob das Zimmer noch frei ist. I wrote it out and practiced it two hundred times in front of the mirror.
For my troubles, I managed to book exactly two viewings of available rooms within my monthly rent budget of three hundred deutsche marks (the rough equivalent, at the time, of $175), a price point at which the pickings were slim to none, and Slim had just walked out the Tür. Furthermore, any place that was available to the likes of me was nightmarish, such as the austere room (with yet another coal oven) in Friedrichshain, where the proprietor was a mopey schlub in his late thirties who insisted that anyone who moved in had to hang out with him.
“So,” I said, when he wouldn’t stop staring at me, “what do you do?”
“Ich bin Arbeitslos,” he said. (“I’m unemployed.”) “Und was machst du denn in Berlin?” he asked. (“What do you do in Berlin, anyway?”)
I told him I was a student of German literature at the FU, which at this point was almost true—language class was over, the FU semester was imminent, and I was even mildly excited to choose between a course on Bertolt Brecht and one on Weimar modernism. Brecht plays were morally instructive and short (bonus), but Weimar modernism included the excellent paintings of Otto Dix, who specialized in the Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, in which Dix deliberately made pretty people ugly and grotesque, when he wasn’t drawing worms crawling out of the skulls littering the battle sites of the First World War. Another substantial selling point of Dix’s paintings was that I didn’t have to look any words up to read them.
“Ach so,” said Herr Sad-Sack. “What authors do you like?”
“I am a great admirer of Franz Kafka,” I said.
“Er war kein Deutscher.” Did every German in the world have direct orders from the ghost of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself to disown Franz Kafka? They were the ones with the imperialistic language that colonized half the damn continent with their Lebensraum. Maybe they were just jealous that Kafka was so good and Faust II was bat-shit crazy.
“Well,” I said, “I also enjoy the poems of Gottfried Benn.” I’d just discovered them, and because they were short and used small words, Benn had officially become my second-favorite author. Also because he was dark and disturbing: much of the verse was set in a Berlin morgue around 1912, because Benn was a medical examiner by Brotberuf, which literally means “bread-career” but is German for “day job.” My Lieblingsgedicht, or favorite poem, I told the guy, was a particularly graphic piece of expressionism called “Schöne Jugend,” or “A Fine Childhood,” about a family of rats discovered inside the decomposing body of a young prostitute. At the end, the mortician drowns them in a bucket. “Oh, how the little snouts squeaked!” Excellent dinner-party fodder, I found. “Have you heard it?” I asked my potential new roommate, who finally found occasion to stop staring at me.
Directly after that, I schlepped out to the desolate nether regions of the eastern district of Treptow, populated only by neo-Nazis, their racist grannies, and Hans and Effi, the two incredulous roommates who were attempting to rent out a windowless closet, one that might have been able to accommodate a twin mattress on the floor if it were placed diagonally. “It’s yours if you want it,” said Hans. I kept the Gottfried Benn quotes to myself and tried not to weep openly until I’d made it halfway back to the U-Bahn.
In the depths of my housing despair, Gertrud persuaded me to see a movie, the highly anticipated feature-length version of Kleiner Arschloch (Little Asshole), a proto–South Park cartoon starring a gleefully obscene little boy. I only understood about a fifth of it, and I was too deeply ensconced within my own personal storm cloud to laugh at anything I did understand, with the sole exception of the titular Asshole’s grandpa—voiced by legendary German comedian Helge Schneider—who insisted that he was a tithe-paying worshipper at the Church of the Holy Vagina. After the film ended, I very much wanted to harrumph my way home and feel sorry for myself within the confines of my own frigid four walls while I still had them, but Gertrud cajoled me into going out with her and Paul, a very tall and floppy-haired friend from Chemnitz who was now a computer science student at the FU. “Look, I’ll even invite you,” she said, meaning she’d pay.
Unable to pass up free beer, I moped my way to the bar and then fretted in silence. I had had it with Berlin—it was fucking freezing, everything had meat in it, there were racist grannies everywhere, and nobody would let me live with them. And, worst of all, I definitely wasn’t cool.
The good news is that if you are in an uncool mood and don’t feel like talking to anyone, going out drinking with a bunch of Germans is exactly the right thing to do with yourself, as you will not have to utter a single syllable. There’s an old joke related by Walter Benjamin (another legendary German comedian), about three authors who are out at a pub. After fifteen minutes of silence, one of them says: “It’s hot today.” After another fifteen minutes of silence, the second says, “No wind, either.” And the third one, after another fifteen minutes, goes: “I came here to drink, not to talk!” The joke was supposed to be making fun of the Swiss (Germans are always picking on the Swiss), but I have instead found it to be a nonfictional account of almost every night out I have ever spent with German-speakers of any nationality. These are people who do not engage in small talk. If you ask a German-speaker wie geht’s (how they are), you’d better be prepared to hear some details about irritable bowel syndrome or some such, because that motherfucker assumes your query is sincere. Germans either talk about real topics or they don’t talk at all. If you don’t know the person well, or are not intimately familiar with either German football rivalries or the ninety-thousand political parties, you can expect to sit there in silence.
The bar Gertrud and Paul chose was near pitch-black inside, which saved the proprietor the trouble of decorating, save for a row of sticky semicircular booths. Paul disappeared and reappeared with three beers. The three of us drank in silence, lit cigarettes, smoked them, put them out, lit more. After the requisite hours of staring, Gertrud became the evening’s abject blabbermouth.
“Na du,” she said to Paul, who was hunched over one of the same cheap cigarettes Gertrud preferred. “Rebecca’s looking for a place to live.”
At that, Paul shot up to his full height, and his small round glasses almost flew off his pale visage. “We have one for you!” he said. “Wait, how much can you pay?”
“Three hundred.”
“That’s exactly what it will cost!”
“Oh, you’ll like their place,” said Gertrud. “It’s in Kreuzberg. And it’s not really a flat per se … it’s a Fabriketage.”
I had gotten mildly better at admitting I did not know every German word in existence since my time in Münster as failed Ersatz-Kelly, so I believe I actually asked what a Fabriketage was, since its literal translation, “factory story,” didn’t conjure up any sort of human dwelling. “I don’t know the English word,” said Gertrud, and Paul just shrugged—I would soon learn that Paul, like a proper East German child, had learned Russian as his foreign language. “A Fabriketage is a … you know, a Fabriketage. It’s like a big space that takes up the whole floor.”
“Oh,” I said. “A loft.”
“Ja genau!” said Paul. (“Yes, exactly!”) “A loft.”
Was he serious? Had I just been offered, sight unseen and purely because of my excellent ability to materialize three hundred deutsche marks per month, a room in a super cool loft in Kreuzberg? Was I about to stop being polite and start getting real?
Not necessarily. The place went by the official moniker Loftschloss, or “loft-castle,” which was a play on the word Luftschloss, which literally translates as “air castle” but is the German word for “daydream.” And it was the stuff of daydreams, if you daydreamed about living in a midcareer David Bowie video, which I obviously did. It took up an entire story of a building not zoned for residence, just above a ground-floor tire shop and below a third-floor Turkish mosque. It was located near the Görlitzer Bahnhof train station, which had once held political significance as the final stop on the U1 line before the Wall. Correspondingly, Kreuzberg had been the grungiest district of West Berlin, its property values plummeting when the Wall bisected many of its streets (and a few of its actual buildings, for good measure). A lot of its apartment houses were simply abandoned, and then reoccupied by members of the counterculture who elected not to pay rent in exchange for living without electricity or heat. A mere seven years after the Wall fell, Kreuzberg had gentrified only slightly, home to a vibrant community of Turkish immigrants and the working poor, some of the city’s most legendary dive bars, and most of its few remaining actual squats. It was undisputedly Berlin’s most interesting neighborhood, and not just because its main thoroughfare, Oranienstraße, boasted one otherworldly watering hole after the next, so many that I once tried to order one beer at each of them and only made it halfway down one block before I ran out of money and lost the ability to see straight.
There was Milchbar, whose jaunty underwater murals—complete with a 3-D shark eating a surfer—were in stark contrast to its rough-and-tumble clientele, which allegedly included the members of Die Toten Hosen, Germany’s most famous punk band. There was Schnabelbar, another pitch-black affair with spiky postmodern sculptures jutting out of the wall. There was a place just called Z, which I am pretty sure was a cover for an illicit massage parlor in the back. There were the legendary rock clubs Trash and SO36, both of which were so grimy you had to make sure you were wearing something you could throw away afterward, in case you had to sit down somewhere inside.
So yes, technically the Loftschloss was indeed a fabulous loft right in the middle of the most interesting neighborhood in the best city in Germany. However, one kleines Problem: Paul didn’t have the authority to offer me a room in it, and furthermore, what I hadn’t really been offered wasn’t actually a room. What I hadn’t been offered was actually a corner of the living room partitioned off by a heavy black curtain. And what I didn’t realize was that there was actually another partition in the loft: between inhabitants, some of whom wanted another roommate and her three hundred deutsche marks to offset the rent—and, it turned out, the costs of a substantial and probably illegal DIY renovation—and some of whom wanted the living room to retain all four of its corners.
This was, however, not properly communicated to me (or, at any rate, I didn’t understand it if it was), so when Paul invited me out to “meet the rest of them,” I labored under the deluded assumption that the subsequent three hours of silent glowering was but a fun, informal get-to-know-you event. What it was, however, was an audition—specifically, an audition for Leonie, a formidable urban-planning student and eco-warrior with a crew cut and a permanent scowl, who I quickly gathered was the Loftboss.
I was to meet the Loftschloss group at a pop-up bar in the basement of an apartment building in Mitte, the kind of place so endemic in postreunification Berlin that it was impossible for the order-loving authorities to keep track. To find it, I had to sneak into a locked courtyard behind some residents, then follow the noise until I found an unmarked door to the Kellerbar, where bottled Beck’s was served through a hole bashed through a wall. It was kind of hard to see, on account of the shoulder-to-shoulder tall people wearing scarves indoors and the cement-thick smoke. If I hadn’t dragged Gertrud with me for moral support, I would have just turned around and run home.
“Oh, don’t be a coward,” she said. “Go. Look, Paul is right there. He likes you. The others might not, but Leonie doesn’t like anyone.”
As soon as Paul saw us he disappeared in the direction of the hole in the wall and, true to form, rematerialized with a beer, which he placed into my claws after kissing me briefly on the cheek. (This is a charming affectation in a culture that otherwise abhors physical contact. To this day I’m not sure how most Germans reproduce. I assume it has something to do with very orderly machinery.) “Du, I’ll introduce you to everyone,” he said, and by “introduce” he meant point at them, mumble a name, and not expect them to acknowledge my presence or even look up from their loud arguments about the environmental impact of open-toed sandals.
The friendliest of the bunch was Johannes, with a shock of bright blond hair that stuck out in electrified curls about six inches in all directions, a broken front tooth, delicate cheekbones, and skintight jeans covered in multicolored patches, in the manner of early-season Punky Brewster. His primary act of friendliness was that he made eye contact when he nodded at me wordlessly, and he thrust his open pack of Lucky Strikes in my general direction. Detlef, from Hamburg, baby face clashing with his black leather jacket, even managed an actual handshake, and his subsequent lack of conversation was of the distinctly benign and classically German variety. Then, however, there was Rolf, petite and handsome, but dark and dour, a Sprockets character come to life who actively sneered when Paul brought me over. “It’s nothing personal,” he said, “but I really don’t want another flatmate. Especially not in the living room.” Nice to meet you, too, man.
And then the cluster of Loftschlossers parted to reveal the infamous Leonie. “It might be personal,” she said, before coughing theatrically and making a face at my cigarette. Leonie was from Munich, and her apparent iron-fisted rule of her household presented a rather distorted view of the Bavarian character, which is generally regarded as among Germany’s most laid-back. Over the ear-splitting electronic music, she explained that she refused to travel internationally because of the environmental damage, therefore implicitly disapproving of my presence in Germany to begin with.
“And what are you doing here, anyway?” she asked. “Studying literature?”
“Ja. My most favorite author is Franz Kafka.”
“What a cliché.” To her credit, she didn’t go out of her way to tell me Kafka wasn’t German.
“I also like the Bertolt Brecht,” I said, which was even true, given that I’d just chosen the Brecht seminar and purchased a full stack of his plays.
“I prefer the writings of Judith Butler.”
“Never heard of her,” I said.
Leonie laughed out loud, and then asked me if, since Paul had described me as Jewish, I was a Zionist. Since I’d never heard the German pronunciation (TSEE-on-IST), I didn’t know what she was talking about, and she laughed even harder. I excused myself to go find what passed for a ladies’ room at this establishment, got lost for twenty-five minutes, and possibly ended up relieving myself in the facilities of someone’s private residence, whose door was inauspiciously left unlocked. (Well, auspicious for me. Inauspicious for the poor schmoes who lived there.) My only other conversation with anyone for the entire evening wasn’t even with a Loftschlosser. It was with a really weird friend of Detlef’s, Moritz, who had spent a year of high school in Connecticut and spoke a disturbingly perfect WASP English that made him resemble a spiky-haired Patrick Bateman in leather pants. This was going great.
After Rolf’s disconcertingly schoolmarmy girlfriend showed up to spirit him away, and Moritz and Detlef peeled off to go to another party (I hoped no women were dismembered as a result), Paul, Johannes, and Leonie huddled in what appeared to be an intensive confab. One of Gertrud’s gentlemen had also shown up, and they were off canoodling somewhere, so that left me, alone and staring through the smoke at these perplexing strangers, only one of whom seemed even mildly enthusiastic about my joining their “living community,” and the rest of whom seemed at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile. After about fifteen minutes of kibitzing, everyone gathered their coats and packed up their cigarettes and slugged back the last of their beers, and just as they were about to leave, Paul turned to me and gave a quick jerk of his chin in the direction of the door—which, to be fair, is German for “definitive invitation to accompany us to the next questionable guerrilla drinking establishment, and the one after that, and the one after that, too.”
That evening Paul was wearing a fluorescent turquoise jean jacket, and as I waddled on my short legs behind these considerably taller people, I would sometimes nearly lose sight of them in the muddled dark of Berlin’s rogue tangle of half-constructed streets, if not for the fortunate beacon of Paul’s blinding garment. Four increasingly illegal bars later (one of which, in lieu of a restroom, had a toilet shoved in the janitor’s closet), it was nearing five in the morning, and I was no closer to knowing whether or not I’d be allowed to join the Loftschloss. Paul simply kissed me on each cheek and told me to mach’s gut as I dragged myself onto a night bus, freezing and dejected. I was almost too dejected to notice the stark, austere beauty of those Stalinesque wedding-cake buildings looming in the dull-blue darkness, the menacing disco twinkle of the Fernsehturm as my bus glided by. And I was definitely too dejected to care when a cute guy who looked to be my age bummed a cigarette after I disembarked near Gertrud’s, and also too dejected to enjoy the small victory of telling him I lived gleich um die Ecke, the idiom for “right around the corner” I’d been practicing all week. What good was having all of these adventures if five German strangers I wasn’t sure I liked were ambivalent about letting me squat in their living room? I slept until two the following afternoon.
But halfway through my first pouty coffee, Paul called Gertrud’s place and instructed me to come by the Loftschloss, drop off as much of my stuff as I could carry, pick up my new keys, and would I please bring the three hundred deutsche marks in cash? Apparently they had all proclaimed me cool enough to live with them based solely upon whatever they had gleaned from ignoring me. This, I would soon learn, was an excellent demonstration of a near-universal national telepathy: Germans are able to gather all pertinent information about each other from glowering silently in each other’s general direction at bars. Somehow at the end of the night a lot of them pair off, then move in together, have kids without being married, take their full year’s parental leaves, and live happily ever after.
“It’s in the second Hinterhof behind the Sanders Tires sign,” said Paul.
Hinterhof literally means “courtyard behind,” and it refers to the building at the rear of the courtyard that almost all German apartment houses have—in many cases, courtyards, plural, as the Loftschloss was technically in the courtyard behind the courtyard behind.
I nervously Guten Tag’d the blue overall-clad auto workers as they very loudly dislodged some hubcaps. I even-more-nervously buzzed the button marked LOFTSCHLOSS 1. ETAGE (in Germany, the ground floor is “floor zero,” which causes some confusion among Americans and not a small amount of yelling from perturbed neighbors). As soon as Paul let me in and I entered the vestibule of my new home for the first time, I was awash in the smell of concrete and plaster and something faintly sweet, which I would soon learn is a smell oddly common in Kreuzberg loft buildings, and which to this day, if I catch a whiff of it, makes me so nostalgic I start reaching for my pack of Lucky Strikes, even though I haven’t smoked in a decade and a half.
The Loftschloss was not, as Gertrud had warned me, one giant room. It was two giant rooms, plus an actual freestanding, wall-enclosed bathroom with its own stand-up shower and central water heating and everything. I’d barely had a chance to peer around the vast, definitely-industrial-looking space—pipes visible everywhere, unfinished walls, and not a residential fixture in sight—before Paul thrust into my hand the most curious set of keys I’d ever seen. There was a regular-sized one for the door of the loft and a bizarre, giant, cartoon-looking thing wider in circumference than a number-two pencil, with no method of affixing it to any sort of chain. This, Paul explained, was for the outer door, whose lock hadn’t been updated since before the war. You operated it by sticking one end of the key into the keyhole, turning it around until it caught, then swinging the door open, walking through, and pulling the key out the other side of the door. You had to unlock the door from the inside to get out, as well as from the outside to get in. This seemed to me rather terrifying, but perhaps just as the Germans assumed nobody would be forgetful enough to lose their coat-check ticket at the club, so did they assume nobody would be careless enough to set a fire.
“The others are all out,” Paul said. He grabbed my suitcase, wheeled it across the industrial carpet, and lifted a thick black curtain that had been suspended on a rod balanced between two giant pipes that ran across the ceiling.
“But what’s this?” I asked. There was an actual bed there, with a white metal frame that looked like life-sized dollhouse furniture.
“Oh, we put it together for you,” said Paul. “That was actually Leonie’s childhood bed in Munich.”
“Look how close it is to the radiator!” I said.
Paul looked concerned. “Are you going to be too hot? We can move you.”
“Nein!” I assured him, and was then left to unpack my Urban Decay nail polishes and traveler’s checks and giant plastic travel speakers alone, before I collapsed for a luxuriant nap, which I took with my bare feet poking out from under the blanket. I awoke to the sound of glasses clinking and the smell of smoke; someone seemed to be having a party at the small round table that sat some nine feet away from my room’s partition. Was I invited by default, just by living in the party room? What if they all ignored me—like, not German-ignored me benignly, but ignored-ignored me meanly? On my first day? I cowered under my covers, thumbing through my copy of The Threepenny Opera. Was the name Mackie Messer supposed to strike fear into my heart? I couldn’t tell. But at least I could put the opening number to the music in my head. I would have no such luck for Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe. Even though the plays required, you know, effort, they were actually pretty interesting. Perhaps I should be too scared to enter my own living room more often, I thought. Eventually, though, my bladder’s demands became unignorable, and I had no choice but to peek my head out from behind my wall-curtain.
“Ach, Rebecca,” said Paul, who was flanked by Johannes and two people I’d never seen before, a beautiful girl with glowing skin and her boyfriend, a genial-looking guy with red hair and a beard. “You’re alive! Komm schon, join us for an amaretto! You’re not the Hausmaus!”
The girl was Anke, the guy Andreas, and they were yet more friends from Chemnitz. Those Ossis were really tight. Paul poured a shot of liquor into what I would later learn was an egg cup, and I pounded it back before I noticed that my companions were sipping theirs daintily—especially Anke, who only had about half a sip’s worth to begin with.
“We’re celebrating,” explained Andreas. “Anke bekommt ein Kind.” This expression, ein Kind bekommen, literally means “to get a child.” From where? I wondered—and then I figured it out. She was pregnant. That must have been why her skin was so luminous. But wasn’t this terrible news, as a pregnancy would be to myself and literally anyone I knew? Weren’t they too young? (They were twenty-four, and they didn’t seem upset.) But she was drinking! Paul watched my eyes rest on Anke’s tiny glass of amaretto before I composed myself and said, “Wow! That’s wonderful! Congratulations!”
“Don’t be such an American,” he said. “A little sip of amaretto is fine.”
I blushed and grabbed a cigarette, then looked at Anke guiltily. “Kein Problem,” she said. I’d just lit up and blown a satisfying cloud into to the sexy darkness of the living room when I heard the door unlatch and then yelling, of which I only understood the phrase es ist zum Kotzen, which literally means “it is to the vomiting,” but is slang for “it’s absolutely sickening.” Paul excused himself and walked across the cavernous room, bare but for the table and my curtained-off corner, to talk to an obviously irate Leonie. All I could make out was “[something something] knew [something something] smoking [something something] living here!”
Leonie, I soon found out, claimed severe allergies to many common irritants, including cigarette smoke (except, funnily enough, when she was out at any bar, Kaffeehaus, or club), which she also happened to loathe (100 percent correctly, of course). But for some reason, in the Loftschloss she’d been outvoted by Paul, Johannes, and now me (implicitly; it was clear that I would not be getting a full Loftschloss vote anytime soon). Thereafter, despite her vomit-related protestations, a cloud of airborne nicotine hovered at all times near our twelve-foot ceilings. The smoke snuck into the far corners of the oddly sunny “west wing” (Westflügel), which was currently one massive Pergo-floored room, but would soon house all five of the other Loftschlossers in quasi-separate dwellings they built themselves. It permeated the dark-blue industrial carpeting that covered the “east wing” (Ostflügel), the half of the loft designated as the living room, and peeked beyond the thick black fabric that served as my wall.
That first night in the Castle, after what sounded to me like a German Edward Albee play, Leonie and Paul seemed to reconcile (the détente involved “[something something] window [something]”), and Andreas, Anke, and their tipsy fetus were loosed into the Berlin night, with assistance from Paul and his giant cartoon key. I crawled back into my toasty corner and smiled myself to sleep at how quickly your life can change, if you just follow the right jean jackets through the streets in the middle of the night. I was going to be so cool for living there.
The next morning, however, was no time to be cool. It was, instead, time for manual labor, which I quickly realized came with the terms of my nonexistent lease. The task ahead, of questionable legality, was the self-administered renovation of the west wing, which was to be divided into a kitchen and three bedrooms: one Einzelzimmer (single room) each for Detlef and Rolf—who, I learned near-immediately, were never home—and a massive triple at the wing’s far end, which Johannes, Paul, and Leonie would share. That wing had been in a state of mid-division the very day I moved in, so my true introduction to the loft and its inhabitants—and to speaking German all day long and finally slipping uncomfortably into fluency—coincided with a crash course in interior renovations.
“Rebecca!” Leonie yelled at me from atop a ladder I was steadying, after definitely not enough coffee. “Gib’ mir den Akkubohrer!”
“The what?”
“Akku … bohrer.”
I held up a hammer. “Das?”
“Nein. AKKU. BOHRER.”
I held up a bucket of half-mixed plaster. “Das?”
Finally, Leonie clambered down from the ladder I’d been holding up with not a small amount of brute force, stomped around me, grabbed a cordless screwdriver, muttered “Nutzlos,” and then huffed her way back up the ladder. Akku means “rechargeable battery”; Bohrer means, literally, “screwer” (heh). Not a word that had been on my vocab lists in German 102, 202, or 310, but I certainly knew it now.
Ludwig Wittgenstein uses a construction site as an example of language learning in the Philosophical Investigations—the boss says, “Bring me a board!” and the analphabetic assistant learns what a board is through petty tyranny. Wittgenstein castigates us for believing, wrongly, that this method of language learning (“ostension”) is how we learn our native tongue (because, he points out, in order to understand the gesture for “this is a board,” we have to understand what “this is” means, and thus in order to learn language we already have to understand how language works). But it is, he admits, a working (albeit clunky) method of second language learning, and it is basically how I functioned as building apprentice at the Loftschloss, learning the words for crossbeam, nail gun, and socket wrench by being prompted to do things with them, and then accordingly shamed until I figured out what word I’d never heard before went with what object I had never used before.
As a second-language teacher, Leonie left a bit to be desired.
“Your German, übrigens—which means ‘by the way,’” she told me a few mornings into my apprenticeship (switching into barely accented English for “by the way”), as I held a wall panel in place while she stuffed old copies of the Zweite Hand into it as insulation—“is even worse today than usual.”
Leonie was always, in fact, the first to point out a misconjugated verb, a misgendered noun, a trailing off midsentence because my language was too simple to express a complicated opinion.
“I really can’t emphasize enough,” she continued, “how bad you are at German.” There is a certain kind of German who truly believes she is “helping” the second-language learner by quickly pointing out all of her mistakes before she can finish an utterance—the Sprachpolizei, the language police—and what they really “help” me do is become abjectly terrified to say a single goddamned word, for fear that if I do, it will be my incorrectness, rather than the content of what I am trying to say, that is communicated.
“It doesn’t matter what I say to Leonie,” I said that night to Diane, over one-mark shots of watered-down tequila, at a café about two hundred paces away from the Schloss that ran a special Thursday-night promotion on watered-down tequila. “All she hears—all I feel like anyone hears—is ich bin fremd. I am foreign. Ich bin fremd, ich bin fremd, ich bin fremd.”
“Why don’t you just tell her to Verpiss dich?” she asked. “That means ‘fuck off,’ and she’ll be impressed with your fluency.”
The worst thing about being an intermediate second-language speaker around critical people is that when they criticize your language abilities, it feels like they are also criticizing your intellect; in mocking your clunky construction of a thought, they seem to believe that you really think that way all the time.
“You must have had terrible grades in German class in school,” Leonie said about a week into the renovation, as both of us began smearing plaster on the wall of what would soon be Detlef’s room. “Your teachers must have been very frustrated with you.”
“Well,” I said, glooping my plaster around in a figure-eight, “they didn’t have a chance. I didn’t study German in school.”
“Wie bitte?”
“I did Spanish in school,” I said. “And I was the best in the class, actually.” Finally, a moment when my host country’s tendency toward bluntness would pay off. “I began German at the start of university,” I said. “Which was”—I stopped to count—“two and a half years ago.”
Leonie stopped mid-dunk into the plaster bucket.
“Really?” she asked. “Well, then.”
She’d assumed that American children, like German children, begin foreign languages—plural!—in about the third grade. She’d assumed that we are a nation of monolingual idiots because we are impervious to our years of instruction, when we are, on the contrary, a nation of monolingual idiots because of institutionalized ethnocentricity and xenophobia, and near-total lack of instruction altogether.
“For two and a half years,” she said, “you’re actually not so terrible.”
Although that was high praise, my general sensitivity toward criticism of any sort, combined with my specific antipathy toward Leonie herself, meant that I spent my first month in the Loftschloss attempting to prove that I was smart, while simultaneously saying as little as possible. Contrary to the way I have spent every other minute of my life, hours went by when I uttered nothing at all, as I helped convert the loft from an industrial space into a residence—for which, mind you, it was not even close to properly zoned (they had a “corporation” running out of it, something to do with Johannes and Paul’s computer work). As Leonie reminded me every single day, were the landlady, Frau Richter-Schmitt, to do a pop-by unannounced, at no point was I to admit that I lived there and paid rent. This also meant that in no way was I allowed to anmelden, or register my address with the police, which meant, in turn, that I would be unable to obtain the student visa that I had been strictly instructed to get. Not only was I living in an illegal residence, I was also living there illegally. (Back then, however, there was a loophole in the law—as long as you left the Bundesrepublik before your three-month tourist visa ran out, you could just come right back in for another ninety days. All that mattered was that little passport stamp from the Czech Republic or Poland, both of which were a few hours away by train.)
I’m not being fair to Leonie here, by the way. She wasn’t a villain. She actually felt pretty neutral about me, and simply enjoyed giving me grief, which the Germans describe using the unsavory word verarschen, which literally means “to assify (someone).” She was also just really German. (A real Wessi, I would have said about six weeks earlier.) What I would call, in my wishy-washy American way, different preferences for how to do something inconsequential—knotting a scarf, opening a window, plunging a French press, eating cheese—many of the Germans I’ve met would recognize as grievous misdeeds against humanity, requiring the swift performance of a public service, namely both noticing the transgression and bringing it emphatically to my attention. If I protested that their constant criticism (they would call it “help”) hurt my feelings, Germans would respond that the ridiculous delicacy of those feelings is simply another fault that needs to be addressed immediately.
Once when Leonie thought I was either asleep or gone, I overheard her talking to Paul at the table. “Rebecca’s so quiet,” she said.
“No, she’s not,” he said. “She’s just afraid of you.”
“Nonsense,” she said.
I waited until she’d left to tiptoe out into the living room, where I saw that she’d doodled in her notebook, in huge letters, the following directive:
ICH VERBIETE REBECCA, MICH ZU FÜRCHTEN.
(I forbid Rebecca to be afraid of me.)
To be fair to all other Germans, plenty of them are substantially more laid-back about the way other people do things than Leonie was, and not just Ossis such as Paul, who was so lackadaisical about washing dishes that he protested when Leonie reminded him to rinse, a rare moment in which she and I were aligned. (“Bah!” he’d said. “It’s not necessary!”) By far the most easygoing resident of the Loftschloss was Johannes, he of the Punky Brewster jeans, busted front tooth, Lucky Strikes, and giant wild mane. He and Leonie were best friends, which only made sense, because they were polar opposites, and if you averaged them out, you got a normal person. He was skinny as a two-by-four and she was curvaceous (though a far, far measure from dick, or “fat,” which is how her flatmates inexplicably described her). His hair inhabited its own zip code; her head was shaved (possibly in homage to Judith Butler). He was vegetarian like me—yes, German vegetarians exist—and she ate like a regular person. And where her personality was as rough as the sandpapery toilet tissue in every restroom in the Federal Republic, his was as soft and gentle as a tiny baby lamb. And that is why, when Leonie declared to the rest of the house that erecting slightly more permanent walls in the corner of the living room, to make the sixth bedroom (my room) into an actual room, was “lowest possible priority”—while looking me right in the eyes—Johannes insisted we raise those walls as soon as Detlef’s plaster was dry. He was protecting me from her. And so obviously I fell in love with him immediately.
The nascent stages of our relationship were kept ambiguous through a clever switch-out of German dative prepositions, which every beginning German student knows are the easiest to remember because they can be sung to the tune of the “Blue Danube” waltz. The night after he and Paul finally hung my walls up (as Leonie popped bubble wrap passive-aggressively in the other room), we went out to Milchbar to celebrate. I drank a few glasses of Aventinus, a special beer that wasn’t easy to find and was famous because it had the same alcohol content as wine. As it did every night at Milchbar, Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” came on the stereo, and, as transpired every night at Milchbar, every single German in attendance broke from their silent smoking (or impassioned debates about the Green Party) to sing along full voice with Iggy and David Bowie during that chorus of Las.
“Come on,” Johannes said to me as I was midway through my final Aventinus slug. And out we went under the bright and hollow sky. As we rounded the corner of Oranienstraße, I knew the moment was right. (At any rate, I’d had enough beer.) I grabbed Johannes by his skintight yellow trousers (he called them his Wertherhose, after the outfit Werther wears in Goethe’s novella for the lovelorn). I pinned him against the grimy wall of a crumbling building and stared up at his frizzy blond halo.
“You’re beautiful,” he said in English (he’d attended an American school in Korea and spoke fluently). “Don’t do all that makeup shit.”
This was highly debatable: I was at the time sporting a bleached-white buzz cut, the result of boredom, Leonie’s clippers, and very strong German box dye, and it made me look like the spitting image of Mike D from the Beastie Boys. Nevertheless, I humored Johannes and wiped off my Chanel Metallic Vamp lipstick and we kissed, a study-abroad cliché come to glorious life, illuminated by the streetlights, jolted through with the buzz of a not-insubstantial amount of alcohol and the frenetic city around us. OPERATION FIND GERMAN BOYFRIEND: CHECK! Hooray! Now I’d get fluent in the language for sure.
Our coupling was hastened when we came home to find an immovable passed-out rando in Johannes’s bed—somebody was always crashing at the Loftschloss on no notice—and Johannes had no choice but to traverse back to the east wing and bunk with me. The next morning, after our relationship had been consummated (and during which I learned that Gummi, the German slang for “condom,” is disturbingly similar to Kaugummi, “chewing gum”), Johannes took it upon himself to read Leonie the riot act about the bed-interloper.
“You can’t just let anyone stay anywhere!” he said. “I came home and I couldn’t even sleep in my own fucking bed.”
“Oh please, your Schulfreund Klaus was here for two weeks and I didn’t say anything.”
“That’s because I didn’t put him in your bed.”
“Wait, where did you sleep, anyway?” Leonie asked, eyebrow arched.
“Ich hab’ bei Rebecca geschlafen,” he answered with a shrug, which technically means “I slept with Rebecca,” but uses the dative preposition bei, which means “with” as in at someone’s house. When you sleep bei someone, that usually means you’re crashing on the couch or the floor. What he didn’t say was what had actually happened: Ich habe mit Rebecca geschlafen, which means exactly what you think it means, and which would have been indelicate to say outright, even for a culture that so cherishes its bluntness.
Our relationship eventually became unambiguous, a development that three out of the four other Loftschlossers found insignificant (it is possible that Detlef and Rolf never even realized it, given that they were never home). I can’t really blame Leonie, though—she and Johannes were best friends, and my swift ascendance as his girlfriend, which resulted in us being cleaved together for days at a time, provoked seething jealousy in me anytime the two of them wanted to hang out alone, or disagreed with me about anything, or—an altercation of which I am not particularly proud—decided to prepare a meal of fried fish together even though Johannes was supposed to be my co-vegetarian. Most of the time, though, Johannes acted as a giant-haired human shield, sheltering me from the more-inane instances of Leonie-related pedantry while still including me in the everyday household activities, which involved Run Lola Run–levels of improbability, minus the petty crime and time travel—so, primarily a lot of questionable hairstyles and techno music.
I wouldn’t say, however, that this was a period of assimilation into the late-nineties Berlin milieu. This is because assimilation is not a strong enough word. It was a time of full-scale metamorphosis into monstrous Eurotrash. I started dressing differently, trading my black garments for clashing bright separates—which I accessorized, at all times, with one or more scarves, no matter the weather, as per Eurotrash bylaw. At Johannes’s request, and because it clashed with my clothes, I neglected my extensive, expensive, and lovingly curated makeup collection in favor of four days’ worth of facial oil. (It probably goes without saying that, in accordance with the local mores, I lessened my showers to twice or thrice weekly.)
I started acting differently, turning up to study-abroad functions with at least one Loftschlosser in tow, or blowing them off to hang out at home, which—having been furnished with a functioning stage (including microphone and amps), three dismembered mannequins, and a rope swing hanging from the ceiling, was now officially cooler than most local establishments. I started eating differently, finally learning how to butter my bread correctly—methodically and in a perfect even layer, out to the exact edge of every piece—and correspondingly embraced the tradition of the ninety-minute Berlin breakfast, undertaken with alarming propriety even by squatters who lived in rubble. (I also started putting Bailey’s in my morning coffee instead of cream, though this was an entirely individual affectation.) I started speaking differently—in, at long last, fluent German, albeit a slang-heavy and grammatically suspect dialect of my own devising that was my earnest adoption of Johannes’s single rule about second-language acquisition: Just don’t give a shit.
But even after all this, I wasn’t truly considered a Loftschlosser until I developed the ability to stop being shocked when my roommates did something so bizarre that, until they did it, I never would have even considered in the repertoire of human action. One afternoon, for example, Paul came home with a used television, a thirteen-inch model that had most definitely broadcast the fall of the Wall live. He and Johannes immediately set about sawing a rectangular hole through the living room wall, creating the world’s first flat-screen by shoving the set into that hole so that its backside hung directly over the toilet in the bathroom on the other side.
Another morning—by which I mean noon—I awoke to the urgent demand from Leonie and Paul that I come downstairs to participate in the Gay Pride Parade immediately.
“Los, Rebecca!” Leonie said. “Heute ist Christopher Street Day!”
“But I’m wearing my Schlafanzug!” I said, pointing to my green-and-black oversized flannel pajamas from the Gap.
“I know!” she said. “You’re dressed perfectly.”
I ended up going out dressed like that to a fairly snobby restaurant for lunch.
It was my official rule never to turn down an invitation by a Loftschlosser, because each one took me to a weirder place than the last, deeper into the Berlin that my Time Out guidebook had never seen. One night, it was a tire-fire party in the backyard of a squat, whose residents performed their toilette in a full-sized bathtub placed on top of two adjacent stoves. At some point I told some of them that I could play “Wonderwall,” so, in between excoriating my country’s imperialist foreign policy and correcting my grammar, the “occupiers” (the literal German for squat is besetztes Haus, or “occupied house”) thrust an out-of-tune acoustic guitar into my hands.
“Oasis spielen!” they cried. “Oasis! Oasis! Oasis!” They pronounced it Oh-AH-sis.
The next week, it was onto the handlebars of Johannes’s bicycle with me, as he careened through the deserted streets of Mitte at four in the morning, en route to a bar called Dienstagsbar because it wasn’t a bar so much as a random gathering of people with cool hair in a gravel-covered vacant lot, and it only happened on Tuesdays. As we rode, we screamed the lyrics to a Jürgen von der Lippe song, whose comedic nuances I did not understand but whose spirit nevertheless seemed right:
Feet in the fire, nose in the wind
Men will be men, men will be men
The next week, it was a pop-up art show by one of Leonie’s friends, comprised entirely of stuffed-panty-hose sculptures, that took place inside a filthy abandoned bunker. Sometimes I felt like my roommates just woke up, combined a bunch of random nouns and verbs, and then decided to go do whatever that was.
In the late spring, we threw what was supposed to be a rent party, but on which, I am fairly certain, we lost money. At a series of increasingly heated planning meetings, Leonie and Paul almost came to fisticuffs over whether or not we should serve homemade fries, which she insisted could be prepared in bulk on our fifth-hand stove and the rest of us viewed as a mild-to-moderate grease-fire hazard that paired especially unsavorily with the fact that technically our building was always locked from the outside. The party was almost called off entirely due to these creative differences, until Johannes came through the door one day wielding a contraption from the mid-1970s that looked like a Barbie Dream West German Nuclear Fallout Shelter.
“Ach du Scheiße!” said Leonie. “Where did you find that?”
“Zweite Hand,” said Johannes. “The party snacks are solved!”
Everyone let out a cheer except for me, who had no idea what the fuck the thing was.
“What’s wrong, Rebecca?” asked Leonie. “Haven’t you ever seen a sandwich maker before?”
“Not one like that,” I said, believing, rube that I was, that a sandwich maker was a pair of hands and a knife.
It was essential that this party be perfect for me, because I’d invited all of my study-abroad classmates and it was imperative they see firsthand exactly how cool my life was. And I think that when the magical day arrived—sturdy milk-crates full of Hefeweizen procured, peculiar elder-flower punch mixed, sandwich menu curated (Nutella DM 2,50; Cheese DM 3)—they had a good time. But it was hard for me to tell, because for most of the party I was stuck on “key duty,” which meant I was responsible for using my giant Disney Schlüssel to let some partygoers in and others out, at random and somewhat indeterminate intervals made ever more complicated by the fact that nobody had a mobile phone yet.
Our guests stayed so late into the wee hours—dancing; swinging from the ceiling; staring at each other wordlessly and then pairing off into life partners; eating sandwiches—that Paul had to blow his saxophone directly into their drunken ears to get them to stumble out into the Hinterhof. When I finally trod into my corner of the living room at eleven the next morning, I found a strange guy sleeping in my bed.
“Hallo,” I said. “I live here.”
“Huh,” he said, and puffed languidly on the cigarette whose ashes were falling onto my sheets. “Is this yours?” He held up a haunting-looking children’s book, The Three Golden Keys, by Peter Sís. “It’s wonderful. Just wonderful. I can’t believe these illustrations.”
I’d never seen the book before and didn’t know how it got into my room, but it looked like the guy needed some more time alone with it, so I slunk back into the kitchen and grabbed one of the few remaining bottles of beer. I popped off the cap using one of the four cigarette lighters that lived permanently on the kitchen table, then used the same lighter to ignite a Lucky Strike from one of Johannes’s half-open packs.
As I took a slug, Paul shuffled in with his hair sticking straight up and his shirt on backward. He nodded, grabbed a bottle for himself, and handed it to me to open, since I already had a lighter in my hand.
After about fifteen minutes of sipping and staring out the window through a smoke cloud, he said: “You’re up early.”
I nodded.
After about five more minutes, he said: “It might be cold today.”
I looked vaguely in the direction of the living room, ashed my cigarette, yawned. We were, after all, there to drink, not to talk.