‘What country, friend, is this?’
7 January 1991. I arrive in Kreuzberg on the seventh anniversary of the suicide of the young mother of a German friend. There’s a lighted menorah in a window on the street. From the fourth-floor window of a house a girl is throwing bits of a Christmas tree down to a boy. A boy and a girl on opposite sides of a side street mime endearments to one another as they part. A cinnamon-coloured sausage in the window of a Turkish fast-food place is a horseshoe shape over oily stuffed vines. My Sexcess is showing at a corner cinema. Near the entrance to my house is a picture showing a bee entering a rhinoceros’s open mouth, amid an aureole of many-coloured flowerheads.
The street is one of high, noble houses, late-nineteenth-century houses, where the middle classes lived at the front and the working classes at the back. My front room faces the street, which is dark creamy colour, where, among the lime trees, there is a blankness now and a memorial silence.
Next morning a sanguine-coloured church is nimbused distantly. The sky is butterscotch and almost spring-like and what looks like a wine-coloured wartime dress is strung on a hanger by a window of a chipping, a disintegrating façaded, glassy-green house.
12 January 1991. I take the train to Friedrichstrasse and cross what was once the border within the station.
A blond boy in motorbike boots has been eyeing his neighbour’s motorbike magazine and a conversation about motorbikes starts up before we reach Friedrichstrasse. A woman beside me, who thinks I’m American, tells me of her sister who married an American army officer, lived first in Norfolk, Virginia, then moved to Missouri. ‘She never had children. All she had was bulls.’
In one of the tunnels under Friedrichstrasse a man, slightly bowed, is selling catkins, holding them out in his hand.
First time I came here, in the summer of 1986, women were waiting with marguerites on the other side. It was a summer when the lucid light of Central Europe turned the zinnias being sold at corner shops along boulevards to brilliant peach, when London had seemed particularly grey and after London the light, the sunshine here was beatific, was open arms for me. There was a host of bituminous-shirted punks moving along under the faded carnelian of Liebfrauen Cathedral on my first journey into East Berlin, springing on one another’s shoulders; drunken soldiery – some in clasping, tottering pairs – in Marx-Engels Park; although it was a sunny day a lady in a long pink mackintosh on Alexanderplatz, pink ice cream dribbling, seared down her face; clusters of country people, the men in check shirts, near the satellite clock on Alexanderplatz which tells the time in Phjong-jung and Guatemala City; a tattoo on the wrist of a gypsy woman with long black hair and a white braid at the back of her head.
Young girls wrapped femmer (fragile – I think I got the word in Yorkshire a year before) art postcards in salmon-coloured paper in shops by the Wall and back on the West side the Wall told me: ‘Never forget the power on the right side fights with the power on the left side. We got to Berlin together. Forget East and West.’
A young man dragged a little boy by on a sleigh as I stood in front of this piece of graffiti, the sun going down over a nearby cobbled square surrounded by modern apartment blocks.
February of last year I returned to the border. A man in the costume of a carpenters’ guild, in a scarlet baker’s hat, stood motionlessly on the West side near an opening in the Wall, a hammer pin on his lapel. He was sixty miles from home, he said. Behind him there were lizard-skin patterns on the wall.
Young people in the voluminous apartment rooms of Kreuzberg complained. They felt cheated, disgruntled. West Berlin drug addicts, squatters, had been excluded from the soup kitchens in November and this contumely was still cogitated by those many shades removed from them socially. Sculpted-featured young people stood in pairs in the rooms of Kreuzberg, surveying distant cups and saucers as if they were a phalanx which was threatening them. These rooms seemed jeopardized, these rooms which accommodated themselves to many purposes: sleeping, cooking, eating, partying, gatherings over a litter of philosophy books.
Back in Berlin in the month of January 1991 the atmosphere is initially calmer, more loving, like the first time I came. The moon in all its stages in earrings, cairns of silver studs on boots, loganberry jackets like bits of Otto Dix brocade. A man in a hound’ s-tooth hat comes up and makes a funny face at me over a lemon cravat on the metro.
A boy from East Berlin holds out a Bavarian mug beside a sleeping elk near Gedächtniskirche and a man uses a Lippizaner pony to obtain money. The woman who showed little placards saying, ‘The orgasm of the Goddess is peace’, ‘Pity the sexual desperation of women over thirty’ near Gedächtniskirche, in February of last year, is still here. She wears a coif now. A one-legged man in a suit with a white hankie in his breast pocket comes up and presses a sweet into her hand.
Walter Benjamin’s punctured features are everywhere on a poster, he who said that if the collector loses his collection he is invalided. The Gestapo confiscated his library in Paris and he killed himself in the Pyrenees. Berlin is like a collection of cities; it brings a collection of cities together. Especially now with olive-faced Romanian women in scarves of midnight blue who beg near the Gedächtniskirche.
‘I’ve come to Berlin to have the shit fucked out of me,’ a boy from the English Midlands tells me. He comes from a town where the tramps take anabolic steroids and become huge-shouldered, drink cider vinegar and eat molasses. I remember a Jewish girl in London describing the trauma her mother underwent first time back in Germany since the war, driving through on the way back from a holiday in Yugoslavia.
My own first journey outside Ireland keeps coming back these weeks of January, something I haven’t thought about for a long time: 1968, just after the revolution, Paris, incarceration with a French family who had a reproduction of van Eyck’s Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini over the mantelpiece in a suburb of Paris where the apartment buildings are prune-coloured – a redundant, cap-topped, trunk-shaped building near by – and where a marmalade-haired, demented Irish woman exile from the 1930s wandered through the arcade.
15 January 1991. Young people, some with hair the green of unripe bananas, bang on Coca Cola tins, on bits of corrugated iron, litter bins, biscuit tins, blow whistles, clink bicycle bells outside the Gedächtniskirche. Boys and girls, one with honey-coloured rat-tails, strum guitars and sing ‘Sag mir wo die blumen sind?’ ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ on the steps. Last time I heard that song was in Prague the night before the Pope came.
Narcissi and little American flags and pictures of Jan Palach and President Masaryk in a trilby everywhere.
‘Kam śly uśechry kvétiny?’
Nuns militaristically waving little French tricolours, singing ‘Alleluia’, leading cohorts of young people in storming motion across bridges where boys were dressed as the Beatles under soot-black statues of St Christopher and St Marguerite, bridges blasted by crimson sun.
The sun in January in Berlin is hesitant, still spring-like.
The green and yellow sluices in the hair are a shared feature at the triangle of wasteland for the homeless at Linné in Kreuzberg. Once this triangle was a part of the East that lay on the Western side of the Wall. Now it’s a caravan site, the blinking post office tower not too far behind it, terracotta funnels, high-rise apartment blocks wedging in the triangle.
Smoke comes out of caravans painted with red and white stripes and shaped like Yorkshire caravans, ledge-topped. Alsatians bound around and there’s the face of a jackal on one flag and a scrabble of ultramarine on another. There are five such sites in Berlin, few squats now. A squat recently opened in East Berlin was closed by the police after eighteen hours.
It is 17 January. The war has broken out. I give money to one boy who is part of a group of figures swathed by the smoke of a fire and he follows me to return a coin from the DDR which was among the collection. Beside us, ‘Pour la vie. Encore. Encore. Encore. Encore’ and ‘Hurt la loi’ are scribbled on the door of a Turkish supermarket.
On 19 January at the fleamarket off Ufer Hallesches men in koofis cloak their goods on long tables in the waste ground and bicycles with trailers behind them veer towards the entrance. It began, this market, when Poles came and sold cigarettes and alcohol to Turks. Then it was closed down and fenced off. A year ago it was opened as a controlled fleamarket. The aquarelle canal surface near by, the mustard-coloured winter willows, the stretches of mud all are part of a landscape which anyone who’s been to Berlin in winter recognizes as a dream part of this city, but now the dream is tinged with nightmare again.
In the evening Bach’s Cantata Number 81 is sung in the Gedächtniskirche, among the little azure slabs of windows. A woman offered me Eucharist in this church during the week and I welcomed the sacrament.
Auch in abnehmender Frist, auch in den Wochen der Wendung.
Niemand verhulfe uns jewieder zum Vollsein,
Als der einsame wigene Gang uber der schaflosen Landschaft.
Not in a waning phase, nor yet in the weeks of versation
Would there be ever one to help us to fullness again,
Save for own lone walk over the sleepless land.1
19 January. Die Turtles plays near the Gedächtniskirche. A woman and a little girl stand, both with candles, near a pool of wax which has exploded into a bonfire.
On my return from my first journey away from Ireland, at Dublin Airport, there were photographs of tanks in Prague, bicycles amid smoke. The bikes pull up and the cyclists watch now. A woman in a fur coat, a viridian ribbon through her auburn, sock-style-edged hair, carries a candle, weltered in her hands. All around are little bonfires of wax and the word Krieg a motif among them.
‘What part of the USA are you from?’ a boy with spindly lemon hair asks.
At the mention of the USA another boy tells me to forget about oil, go looking for brains.
I feel like saying ‘Hell, I’m an Alabama boy’, like the cups on sale in Greyhound bus stations on the borders of Alabama.
When he finds out I’m from Ireland he is brotherly. He went to school for a while in Cork. People thought him odd because he liked to walk the fields. It was considered all right to lean on a spade and stare at the landscape all day. But all the same, and paradoxically, Irish people have a powerful empathy with their own landscape which is enviable to a young German.
He is from Oldenburg in the north of Germany. There are three hundred soldiers from his town stationed in the east of Turkey near the Iraqi border.
A dumb Turkish couple make signs to one another, she with a copper beehive, he with magenta-tipped tan shoes. They sit on the steps and snoggle. ‘Don’t war. Take Gysi’ a placard behind them says.
I walk home, through back streets, by lime trees, by churches lit up on top by red lights. The monochrome sleepless land in my mind is part Ireland, part Berlin, part the suburbs of Paris, part the suburbs of Prague.
In my apartment the catkins from Friedrichstrasse are still fresh and so are the memories of my first visit to Berlin, a journey away from wasteland after all, from back streets in Lewisham where the graffiti said ‘Lady Luck and Dexter Sapphire’, beside tinker encampments where vardos, stationed there in winter, emblazoned at the front with clumps of grapes, were now gone on reconnaissance.
1 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Elegy for Marina’.