Humor, Stammgaeste, und alles Berliner

--Graffiti in Viktoriapark, near my apartment in Kreuzberg--

It’s taken me a while to get here. Oh, I’m just going to come out and say it: I love Berlin. I can’t resist it any longer. Eventually this city just makes you feel at home. But Berlin has it's own character, it's own energy, something like New-yorker fast-paced self-confidence mixed with Parisian charm. No, it cannot be placed under labels according to stereotypes in other cities... Saying that I love Berlin means for one thing that I’ve come to terms with its dry humor. At first I interpreted it as plain unfriendliness. I entertained romantic thoughts of the warm Midwesterners running to your rescue when you stand on the corner of a Chicago street with a map. But Berlin is something else, and you have to admire the sarcasm. Here is a few examples….

I pick out a movie at the video store. We were celebrating Halloween with the Nightmare Before Christmas (as you can guess, there were not too many festivities going on even though the kids try to convince their parents to give them candy) and luckily Video World had a plentiful supply of Tim Burton movies. I thought to myself, I’m so clever to have signed up for an account already – one euro per day, what a good system! I went to rent my movie, in a slight rush since I wanted to make the next bus home. The man behind the counter said, have you ever been to this branch of Video World before? I shook my head Nein. Well then we’ll need to see ID. My enthusiasm quickly evaporated. ID, why isn’t my Video World card enough? I looked through my wallet and took out my flimsy STA-travel student ID, hoping it would work. I’m sorry, but this is not an official ID. Anybody could get this, said the man, slightly frustrated. I pleaded with him. It’s only Halloween once, I just really need to see this movie, I really am the person in the picture on the ID. He finally gave in. Okay, but go home and bring me an official ID in the next couple of hours. Phew. So later that night after thoroughly enjoying the movie I walked back to the Video store, passport in hand. I returned the movie, and handed him one euro and my passport. The same man looked at it for about five minutes, and then said to me, why did you bring me your passport? Wait… Was he joking? He thought a couple of seconds more, still flipping through my passport. Then he said, no what we really need is an authorized German driver’s license. And fingerprints. Which would be hard for you since you’re American. My face dropped. Did I understand him correctly? There’s just no chance for me then? After a few flustered moments he smiled at me and said, no no you’re good. We have your information already. We didn’t need a passport. Tschuss! Ha ha, funny. That would have been nice to know earlier.

Another example: I was looking in an incredibly large bookstore called Hugen Duebbel for a specific dvd for my dad’s birthday. After much searching I found the dvd section on the first floor. The walls were alphabetized, but I still couldn’t find the tv-series I wanted: Stromberg, the German version of “The Office”, in my opinion the funniest and driest humor of them all. After about twenty minutes of searching I was losing hope. There was so much CSI and 24 but no Stromberg to be found. I saw a man with a Hugen-Duebbel label on his shirt. I asked him (very politely, if I might add) if he could help me with something. He turned to me with an ornery face and said only, with what? Sigh, I thought to myself I should know better than to expect any form of customer service in Germany. I told him what I was looking for. Right away he directed me to the spot, perhaps a bit annoyed that I couldn’t find it on my own. There were four dvd’s there, the first season, second season, and third season, and then one dvd with all three, called the Stromberg “Burography”. The prices were clearly in favor of the combination dvd but I had not quite registered that yet. I thanked him hoping he would leave me to make my choice. After all, my Dad had never seen Stromberg before so maybe just one season would be sufficient. Then in undoubtedly Berlinerisch dialect he said, this is a very very difficult decision. I can see that you are struggling. You could for instance purchase the first season for 15 euros, and then the second season for the same, and then the third also for 15 euros. Meanwhile your friend that bought all three together for 20 euros is sitting at his tv and laughing at you. I looked at him totally confused. What had he just said to me? Then I figured it out when I checked the prices again. Okay, yeah, I think I’ll get all three then. He smiled just for a second and then went back to other work.

It feels like some sort of interaction like this happens just about every day: I think that I’ve misunderstood someone and then I realize that they were just messing with me a little bit in true Berliner spirit. The verb in German for that is jemanden verarschen, perhaps literally translated to making an ass of someone. Loving Berlin means laughing retrospectively at those moments.

Loving Berlin of course also means getting used to a lot of things. The grey days for instance, days where it drizzles the whole day off and on so that of course you don’t bring your umbrella with you and there’s so much fog in the morning that you just don’t want to get out of bed anyways and when you leave classes in the afternoon it’s dark by 4:15 and you’re convinced it must be at least 10 at night. Grey days that occasionally make you want to be in Chicago again where at least it’s sunny in the winter even if it’s 10 below zero and windy. But then the (monthly?) sunny days here are just that much more wonderful and invigorating because of all the grey ones.

Loving Berlin means not stressing out at the grocery store when the line of ten people behind you pressure you to unpack and pack fast like your life depended on it. You need to lay all of your groceries quickly on the conveyer belt being careful to use those little divider things so as to not confuse your groceries with the person ahead and behind you. Then equally quickly you need to transfer them to your bagpack and grocery bags and simultaneously reach into your wallet to pay, preferably with exact change (they hate breaking fifties). Oh geeze, the consequence of this situation is that there is always some sort of soft item that gets squished at the bottom of my bagpack, mozzarella cheese or bread and hopefully not the eggs. Oh Lidl, how I love your prices but despise the way you do business…

And on Friday night I was again reminded why this place has a culture worth exploring. I had just finished my very first longer piece of German literature, a forty page short story by E.T.A. Hoffman called “Des Vetters Eckfenster”. It’s a romantic example of “Flanerie”, a French movement started by Baudelaire that sort of sounds like modern ethnography. This book featured observations from a window overlooking the Gendarmarkt in Berlin. Anyway, excited as I was to finish this story my focus shifted to the people who had just sat at a table with me. The Café Bilderbuch on the Akazienstrasse has become my new favorite place to work. They have delicious hot chocolate (not to mention beer) and they are open until 2 am on weekends. I had been there for about three hours, cozily sitting on a red plush sofa with my dictionary, laptop and small yellow “Reklam” version of Hoffman’s story. Three men around in their fifties asked me (again, Berliner humor) if I had my mind set on using the entire table for my work. Earlier I might have interpreted that as unfriendliness, but I have since learned otherwise; they were just asking me if they could join me. I was finishing my work and they were exploring the menu, commenting on the “typical German food” they wanted to eat tonight (they said that in English with thick accents, since they saw that I was an English speaker from my german-english dictionary). When the food came I asked them if they could tell me more about what they ordered. Sauerkraut and Rotkraut (lots of cabbage, always) and Nuremberg Wurste (sausages) and potatoes and baguettes and Auflauf (casserole). After the food lesson they asked me what I was doing in Berlin and where I was from. I confess! I said that I was from Montreal, which they found fascinating since they’d seen most of Canada but had not yet been to Quebec. Saying that I was Canadian worked in my favor; we talked a bit less about Obama and a bit more about the wilderness and the beauty of snowy days. They told me more about themselves too. They were three old friends, who had gotten to know each other while on a crew team together in West Berlin, and just about every Friday night they meet at a different place to share drinks. One lived for 30 years in Ibiza off of the coast of Spain, and another had a daughter studying economy in Bangkok, and the third was almost a crew champion when he was in his twenties.

As I put my work away they invited me to a beer. I learned that they not only all had crew in common, they had Berlin in common. When I asked where they grew up they all agreed that they were echte Berliners, in other words true, or actual Berliners, born and raised in Berlin. The usual follow-up statement to that is, there aren’t too many true Berliners any more. The conversation seemed to consistently come back to the question of what makes them Berliners and what they love about the city. One said that growing up in West Berlin felt a bit like an island because of the wall, and that’s why the city felt so important. His friend disagreed, saying that West Berlin had everything a person needed, so that the wall didn’t even feel that restricting. And of course the fall of the wall on November 9th, 1989 was one of the deciding events of all three of these men’s lives. For people to come together, west Berlin, east Berlin running towards each other on that night without reservation to celebrate unity and change… that is certainly part of what it meant to be from Berlin. After Obama’s win I think I sort of understand a bit of what it must have felt like, finally having politics reflect what they wanted for so long. Like Anna Rae said in her blog, I definitely feel a change in my relationship to the US. I feel for the first time proud to have something positive to talk about, something good to look forward to. But like I said, I told these guys I was Canadian, so clearly I’m proud of that too.

We talked in the café-turned-bar-at-night for a few hours before we shook hands, said it was a pleasure, paid and went home. They gave me some tips of some old-timer student bars in the area, places where it’s still kosher to smoke inside and where the ceilings are still black because of it.

Before going home I returned to that same Video World and rented perhaps the least German movie possible, “Sex and the City”, for a chick flick night with my roommate Anna. No problems with renting the movie this time.

--Akazienstrasse in the rain--