alle Religionen sind gleich und gut, wenn nur die Leute, die sie praktizeren, ehrliche Leute sind

After getting off the train from Dresden, I took the subway back to Faruq's place, exchanged brief words with his roommate whom I had offended, and then lugged my bag to the apartment where I would be spending the rest of the week.  Faruq had told me that it was in a very centrally located neighborhood, and that the only downside would be the presence of large numbers of young, drunk Australians and Americans.  Sure enough, as I approached the door to the apartment building, I overheard a young, drunk American woman say, "You're from Australia?  That's so cool!"

I was so exhausted from my Saxon deathmarch that I fell asleep without dinner, after quickly verifying that all of the television channels were only in German (in Israel I could at least watch an international BBC station, and the Israelis don't dub foreign shows like the Germans do).

I was awakened at around 6:30 in the morning by the doorbell.  It was Asaph.

"Can you help me turn off the automatic date stamp in your father's camera?" I said, welcoming him to the country from which his grandparents had fled in terror in the 1930s.  (All of my cameras had broken before the trip, so I had borrowed a camera from Asaph's young brother, and then from his father.)  "Also, can you get citizenship here?"  Then I went back to sleep.

I woke up later and realized how great the apartment was.  It was in the central neighborhood of Mitte, near Alexanderplatz, and right by an S-Bahn station.

 

The building was new, with an elevator and a nice stairway.

There was a large central courtyard where children could play, theoretically.

I never saw or heard any, though.

You could see the television tower from the living room.

 

There was also a good view of train and tram tracks, and periodically a beautiful ICE train would go by.  I kept trying to take a photo of one, but I always just missed it.  They are fast!  Zu schnell!

The kitchen had a dishwasher, and the bathroom had a washing machine.  The Germans still seem to find clothes dryers wasteful, however.  (We even had a dryer in Israel, despite the much more arid climate and plenty of space to dry laundry on a balcony.)  But the Germans are very environmentally conscious.  Luckily they have found something positive into which they can channel their compulsion for Ordnung.  The garbage room held 10 different dumpsters into which one needed to sort one's garbage correctly, upon pain of fine and social shaming.

In New York, an equivalent apartment would cost at least $4,000 a month.  The rent for this place was only €800.  Berlin ist arm, aber sexy.

After a breakfast of more Germanized French pastries, Asaph convinced me to do something I never would have done on my own: take a bus tour of Berlin.  Since Faruq was the only person I knew in Berlin, and he would be at work, I decided I didn't have to worry about anyone seeing me engaging in such an activity.  We walked over to Alexanderplatz, bought a ticket, and hopped on a bus.

The sound system didn't work very well, but I was alarmed that one of the language choices was called Interskan.

 

I had never heard this term used.  I was aware that the three mainland Scandinavian languages were mutually inteligible (something I had learned from spending three months in Denmark in 1990), and that the existence of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian (especially Norwegian) is often used as an illustration of that old Yiddish aphorism:

".אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט"

(Although Arabic is a good counter-example to the argument that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy", since all of those Arab countries just say that they speak Arabic, even though the actual language spoken in Morocco can't really be understood by an Iraqi.)  I had also heard that in certain situations, like maybe on SAS flights, people used a homogenized version of the three languages that guaranteed mutual intelligibility, like how Scottish people are forced to talk when they leave their country.  But I had never heard it called Interskan.  I was disappointed.

We decided to get out at the Schloss Charlottenburg, to soak up some more of the glory of the Hohenzollerns.

 

We didn't go into the palace, but instead just walked around the gardens.

 

They were beautiful, and I was reminded of how much I always liked the name Charlotte, until it was ruined by a popular television series about four extremely sexually active women in New York who buy lots of shoes and wear weird clothes.  Now the name implies someone who is sexually repressed, possibly having as few as one sexual partner per week.

 

We then went and ate at an Italian restaurant where I managed to say one whole sentence in grammatically correct German to the waiter.  I will not write out what I said, since I am not fully confident that it was, in fact, grammatically correct.  It was understood, however.  The waiter was not German.

We saw some children with their crazy giant German backpacks, coming home from school.

We then went to the Berggruen Museum to look at Picassos, Klees, and Matisses, but we spent most of the time trying to translate the titles of the paintings into English.

We then hopped back on the tour bus, but it was so late by then, it stopped running at Potsdamer Platz.  So I decided that we would walk back to Hackescher Markt.

We looked at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  Asaph was yelling in Hebrew on his mobile phone, making some animated business call to Israel.  I reprimanded him.

 

We then stopped in Bebelplatz to look at the monument to the 10 May 1933 book burning by Nazi students and paramilitary groups.

 

"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

I had planned on avoiding anything related to the Nazis or the Communists on this trip, but these two sites were very moving.

As was the Neue Wache, with the haunting Mother with her Dead Son by Käthe Kollwitz.

 

We stopped in the Lustgarten, which is not what you might think.

 

Across the street you could see the remains of the Palast der Republik, the former so-called parliament of the so-called German Democratic Republic.

 

They are having quite a hard time demolishing it.  I saw it back in 1990 and then in 1996.  It wasn't pretty.

I admired the Berlin Cathedral, although later Faruq told me that it was his least favorite building in Berlin.  I was surprised, since it is a Lutheran cathedral, and therefore has no connection to Poland.  Or Judaism.

Later that night, Asaph, Faruq, and I went out to dinner at a funky restaurant where we drank too much rosé wine, which was quite unmanly of us.  We sat at a table outdoors next to a pretty girl who smoked too much and her prettier boyfriend, who shouldn't have tolerated all that smoking.  I am not anti-smoking by any means, but this girl was going to end up looking very old by her thirtieth birthday.

"This place, these people, there is flair here, right?" asked Faruq.

There was, but I wouldn't admit it.

Then Faruq offered to take us to meet his roommate at a party being held at a bar in his neighborhood.  "This late?  Don't all Germans go to bed by now?" I asked.  It was not yet midnight.

"Please.  This isn't Poland."

"I heard that Poland has really good nightlife," I said.  I was just making that up, but I assumed.

"Whatever," he said.

We got to the bar.  There was a small Israeli flag hanging by the door.  Surprisingly, Faruq walked right in.  The bar was crowded with scruffy, disheveled, skinny guys.  The walls were covered with graffiti, stickers, and posters.  It made me think of the East Village, although I haven't been to the East Village in ages, so who knows what the East Village is like anymore?  It could be nothing like this bar was.

We greeted Faruq's roommate.  Asaph then went to the bar to buy beer.  He came back to report that he had been charged a deposit on the glasses, presumably to prevent us from throwing them away, which is what I normally do with glasses in bars and restaurants in New York, choking our landfills with glass.  Faruq's roommate explained that the bar was run by a non-profit registered association.  I doubt that there are many bars like that in the East Village, but, again, who knows anymore?  Maybe the Mafia is a non-profit registered association now.

We heard Hebrew being spoken. There was a large group of Israelis sitting around a table.  They must have seen the small flag outside.  Israelis seem to like Berlin these days.  I guess they figure they're safe, at this point, since what are the chances?  Also, some can get German citizenship, if their families were citizens of the Reich, before they all had their citizenship revoked, owing to being Jews.

I thought, uncharitably, that this was a group of somewhat less attractive Israelis than one normally sees inside Israel.  Perhaps this was why they liked Berlin.

Faruq said he had to leave, using the excuse of having to get up early for work at a prominent architecture firm.  I suddenly remembered that the word "workaholic" is used in Germany, and there was even a terrible German film made with that as the title.  This saddened me.  This word should not be used in English, let alone German.

We went down into the basement, where smoking was allowed.  It was even more crowded, and there was a filthy mattress on the floor.  "Sometimes there are sex parties here," said Faruq's roommate, proudly.  I looked around at the other patrons, and then at the mattress, and thought: nein, danke.  I already had scabies once, although I got it from a cheap hotel bed in Miami Beach, and not from sex.

Comments

[TED]

I hate it when children are encouraged to play theoretically. It leads to an unhealthy fascination with philosophy before the mind is mature enough to handle it. It's no wonder the Germans don't allow their children to use the theoretical playground, which, in any case, would take time away from organized sport and the memorization of train timetables. I seem to recall a story in Der Struwwelpeter about a child who insisted on playing theoretically and grew up to be Nietzsche.

By the way, I'm pretty sure that the new globalization means that trouble would follow you even to Berlin. We are all held in the long arms and cruel embrace of the fiscal crisis.

[henry]

How closely the remnants of the Palast der Republik resemble the Berlin Cathedral in an imaginary state of (de-)construction! "Tand, Tand, ist das Gebilde von Menschenhand!"

[Dan]

That thumb amputation in Der Struwwelpeter is terrifying.

[Jack]

excellent post. full of joy and whimsy!

i would quibble with your characterization of the ladies of sex & the city as "extremely sexually active" given what i know of you, me and our mutual and non-mutual acquaintances.

but charlotte is a nice name.

[eurostar88]

"We are all held in the long arms and cruel embrace of the fiscal crisis" NOT...I had the same experience in South Beach 15 years ago and ended up buying an ocean front condo as a result...Plus I now use the extra garage space for my Rolls Royce (convertible, noblesse oblige!)

[Joe Clark]

The у in русский is all wrong in your photograph. It isn’t a Latin Y. The form shown doesn’t even work as a small cap. (Or as Mongolian.)

Hence, this Interskan business is not the only questionable item on the menu.

[Bob]

Finally the mystery of the camera date stamp is solved!

[R J Keefe]

Congratulations on the complete German sentence!