J. M. Tyree
DELIRIOUS BERLIN
Note: This snapshot of my travels was taken in the summer of 2022, when England celebrated Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee, and Germany introduced its nine-euro train ticket, allowing unlimited travel for one month on local and regional trains across the country. The ticket was part of a larger government relief package designed to offset rising energy prices in the wake of the war in Ukraine. Since then, the Queen died, Germany entered an economic recession, and the nine-euro ticket was discontinued in favor of a new forty-nine-euro scheme, while war in Europe continues to rage. —JMT
In London, the summer’s commemorative English flag bunting and bottled-gas beacons for the Queen’s Jubilee quickly gave way to reports of polio in the sewage, botched deportations of asylum seekers to Rwanda, transport strikes caused by a decade of austerity, and the promotion of exploding plastic containers for sparkling wine as a new and exciting benefit of Brexit. In June, we fled for Berlin as quickly as we could. The German capital’s swagger might well turn out to be an unsustainable mirage based on cheap Russian gas, and the local dialect remains a puzzle of egregious datives that are even more complex than the notorious national grammar. But right now none of that matters, because Berlin is the most interesting English-speaking city in the world.
The summer energy as the sun tips towards the solstice becomes delirious as a feeling very familiar to Berliners—the sense of having seen it all and existing inside an oasis that could (and probably will) evaporate—takes hold more globally. We now see more of our oldest friends from North America in Berlin than anywhere else. Those that haven’t emigrated already are trying to learn German, tempted by the exit ramps from the direction of travel across Ye Olde Anglosphere. Most Berliners we meet still feel pity for Americans, but they treat the current state of play in England as a topic that is not even worthy of their famous sarcasm. At a dinner party of academics, intellectuals, and artists, we realized that all of us had an important part of our education in the UK and that none of us stayed. Speaking privately to other Americans, we mostly agreed that staying to fight for our spouses and our nieces makes sense—analogies to the 1930s fall away very quickly when one travels in Germany, especially when one need look no further than the history of the United States itself for clues about what might happen there next.
Returning to London from Europe, one feels that sense of “absence” that Patrick Keiller describes in his essay “Film as Spatial Critique,” at the center of the English capital. Zone 1 after dark feels empty and trashed, and everyone seems frayed to the breaking point. Keiller should make a new film about the American-themed candy stores that have taken over Oxford Street, based on the science fiction themes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) or Night of the Living Dead (1968)—London as a zombie town that is still animated but no longer living, in which the numbers logic of viral replication has replaced all other directives in the Covid era. While not everyone in Berlin follows the law requiring a medical-grade mask on the subway, Londoners on the Tube don’t require such precautions or follow any recommended medical advice whatsoever, because the undead don’t breathe.
It costs more (and takes more time) to travel on Thameslink between Gatwick and Finsbury Park than it does between on DB from Hamburg to Lübeck. (In fact, DB runs the London Underground, which costs a small fortune to ride.) By contrast, the German government, responding to rising petrol prices as a result of the war in Ukraine, decided to create a nine-euro monthly ticket good on any public transport system in the country. While you cannot use this ticket on fast intercity trains, basically this makes traveling virtually free and, I’m told, has unleashed wanderlust amongst younger people and weekend day-trippers. What some Londoners spend on their miserable commutes for “back to the office” managerial tyranny in a single day could be used, in theory, by a German to travel from Berlin to Rostock, Rostock to Wismar, Wismar to Lübeck, and Lübeck to Hamburg (aka the Nosferatu Hanseatic Delirium Tremens Trail). It’s kind of crazy-making, in a good way, to think that you can just rock up to a train station and go anywhere for free—the mind fills with simultaneous possibilities for bilocation.
My personal fantasy of a Beat Generation-style rucksack revolution emerging in Germany as a result of the golden ticket scheme might be slightly fanciful. But I can report that the nine-euro June ticket makes the visitor to Berlin delirious. It’s light for sixteen hours a day, most places feel mostly safe at most hours, and you can go just about anywhere you like. The junkies are everywhere requesting “Kleingeld” and you can see them nodding out all around the city, the small-time dealers in the parks are often in forced-labor servitude to drug gangs due to their lack of legal immigration papers, and the welcome facilities for Ukrainian refugees at the central train station stand as a daily reminder of the not-so-distant obliteration of cities in the Donbas. All is not well with the world and Berlin is no exception to the rule, but it might be one of the places from which it’s fruitful to contemplate what went wrong.
Meanwhile, tonight the bridges in Kreuzberg and the gardens at the former Tempelhof airport—now a vast park littered with signs and monuments to past national atrocities and containing an American baseball field as a remnant of the former US Air Force base—will be filling up with youthful drinkers and women walking hand-in-hand with their Club-Mate bottles gleaming under the bright theatrical lights outside the Späti, or just creating an ad hoc techno party with a small wireless speaker in an illuminated bus shelter like figures out of Caravaggio. Our hosts’ Kiez near the old Wall offers this counterbalancing sense of liberated public space that is Berlin’s most endearing quality, a go-anywhere, do-anything, talk-to-everyone, dancing-on-the-abyss city with an intensely hedonistic and sexually frank twenty-four-hour vibe that isn’t fake-friendly (or even friendly at all, which also can be refreshing). Even in its expanding expat areas with brutal rents that vibe like Brooklyn East, Kreuzberg is a pretty ugly place where one feels it would be nice to live if one had the resources, but everyone tells us that this is just how things are in the summer. Locals describe how elbows and tongues sharpen in the ghastly gloom of winter at the point where the daylight ends in miserable darkness, with official sunset times before four p.m.
But, for now, it’s a weekday out in the city, on holiday in June in the nine-euro zone where the reactionary and violent energies bursting out across Europe and America haven’t yet fully strangled everything in sight, although they are always encroaching. The expat academic friends generously hosting me, James and Joseph, take the day off to show me around the chain of lakes in the Grunewald Forest. They skinny-dip in the Schlachtensee (I retain my bright blue boxer briefs and blush at the passing German families like a good American boy, but of course nobody cares). They have schnitzel and beer (I have a cheeseburger and sparkling rhubarb soda) in a West Berlin establishment that is so delightfully set in its ways that we probably could have paid our bill in Deutsche Marks without raising any eyebrows. We’re time travelers here. There is West Berlin, there is old school West Berlin, and then there is the kind of German restaurant in which the men’s bathroom still contains a communal hairbrush. After lunch, Joseph, a Canadian Italian Berliner, takes me to a film history pilgrimage site, the Nikolassee S-Bahn station, where Billy Wilder & Co. filmed part of Menschen am Sonntag (1930), with its romance in the bushes and its depiction of the joys of daily life in Berlin before the nightmare set in. Joseph has published a book about the history of the city, and we haven’t seen each other since before the outbreak of the pandemic. He wants me to see the remnants of the Wall from the train, so we head out to Potsdam because, why not, and take in the monument to the defeat of fascism and the bleak chic of the area, with its heartrendingly lovely concrete shabby tower blocks upholding his American visitor’s shallow architectural Ostalgie.
We’ll part at Berlin Hbf so that I can join friends from the States at Tempelhof for a wander past the placards memorializing the Islamic graveyards and massacres committed against the Herero people at the site where the Nazis built their monument to aviation, where the Berlin airlift had its epicenter, and where Florence + the Machine now echoes across the tarmac from their summer show. We wander down to Südstern past the caravans parked along the park road for vegetarian plates from Seerose, a halloumi sandwich with hot sauce from Habibi, and a Johannisbeere ice cream cone at the outdoor tables of Delfin. It’s fun just to say the names of things in German, especially after-dinner desserts and breakfast pastries. Kirsch-Plunder! Apfelkrapfen! I’ll have the “sweet snail” and a cortado, I’ll be the kirsch-plunderer-in-chief, I’ll take as much of this apple crap as they can dish out, I’m Orson Welles on holiday. Germans weary of hearing about Mark Twain’s famous essay about their language, but Twain was right, German is hilarious and impossible. Every other sign in town contains a “fahrt,” my favorite being the entrance to a bleak tunnel adorned with the pilgrim’s motto, “Wallfahrt.”
The previous week, I’d traveled with two of these American friends, both philosophers, Steven and Morgan, from Berlin to Hamburg to Lübeck because, again, why not. We ate chicken tikka on jacket potatoes at outdoor tables overlooking the warehouses near the city gates used as the abandoned building where Nosferatu lives in Murnau’s classic 1922 film. Just as I’d lined up my shot in my best imitation Expressionist light, with the setting sun pouring through a keyhole shape in the building, a paddle-boarder glided into the frame to ruin the picture, a 10/10 German prank on a film location tourist.
Never go on holiday with two philosophers, especially if one is a Hegelian. The dialectical reversals about where to get breakfast will make your head spin. Only the tour of the port container in Hamburg finally shut them up—global capitalism is infinitely complex and would continue to run on its own without us for a very long time. All kidding aside, these are lovely old friends, especially when they aren’t reminding you constantly that arts profs like me learn next to nothing about the history of aesthetic theory in the course of their education. But three cranky straight middle-aged men really should not be sharing a room in Hamburg during the White Nights. In truth, we drink a lot of coffee and mostly avoid the Reeperbahn, but I perform “Coming in the Air Tonight” in our hotel room as the green light lingers in the northern sky long after sunset. The next morning, I get them to pose in front of the famous Caspar David Friedrich painting of that dude in the fog that all philosophers like so much. The stern museum staff excoriate us for a variety of offenses related to our water bottles and our manner of carrying our coats in the galleries. It’s hot.
For some reason I cannot remember now we all spent way too much of our vacation arguing the merits of the Guadagnino film Call Me by Your Name (2017). Steven and Morgan were for the film, and Joseph and I were against it. Everything and everyone in the film is way too nice for my taste, and this struck me as enbubbled in a blinding gauze of privilege and frictionless, sanitary, and uncomplicated lovemaking that decorously takes place offscreen. I preferred the camp body horror of the director’s remake of Suspiria (2018), which got something right about the evil energies that swirl beneath the streets of Berlin. Even in this regard, however, it felt somewhat like a soft-drinks version of some of the vile and deranged energy from Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, the West Berliner’s ultimate expat horror film, which was banned in Britain during the Thatcherite “video nasties” censorship backlash. Tilda Swinton plays a double role across genders in Gaudagnino’s Suspiria, which lends the film additional frisson, although it’s not exactly the equal of Swinton’s more radical creations for The Last of England (1987) or Memoria (2021). If the current problem of Anglophone art is a generalized nice-ification that combines awkwardly with our political drift into puritanical moralizing, then the topographical ugliness and insistent hedonism of Berlin as a probable portal to hell provides an antidote by dwelling more deeply in the shit.
It would be interesting to consider Swinton rather than Adjani in the lead role of Possession. There might be something sort of German-ish about Swinton—without knowing her complete filmography one wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in 1988 she made a film with Cynthia Beatt about cycling around the Berlin Wall and that, according to her interview at the Berlinale, she once played the role of Mozart in German. In Possession, Adjani undergoes a now-notorious mental and physical breakdown/supernatural miscarriage in a Berlin subway tunnel that remains one of the most stunning and frightening performances in cinema history, one that seems to focus the energy of an entire era in its agonized screaming from the guts of the divided city. In another scene the couple attack each other with an electric bread knife. Director Zulawski was said to be working out his divorce by expanding it into a metaphor of a doubled and split city and country and world and universe that run on violence and crave love that they cannot return. He’d filmed in the place closest to his native Poland, which had rejected and banned his early films.
These larger nightmares will always be there, waiting to emerge from the monstrous history underlying cities from Berlin to London and Washington, DC, where, eventually, I’ll have to return to face the music there. Of these three cities, Berlin confronts its horror most directly, but it is also the city that seems most at ease right at the moment. Maybe these things are connected. If so, the past has something to do with the future. This is also one reason why the figure I associate most with Berlin, as an Anglophone visitor, is probably David Bowie, sinking in the quicksand of his thought in 1970s Kleistpark. If you want to rock, you have to put in time living in Germany and channeling the darkness.
Back in the present, night descends over Südstern as we watch people gather in the streets around the station, just an ordinary evening unfurling in the middle of Europe like an unremarkable rose in a little park or square somewhere in this city, thousands like it. My friends depart. Nothing major is happening here, and that is so calming to my animal spirits that I cry by myself in the dark walking back to Kreuzberg to my brilliant friends’ house like a sentimental drunken ass in his twenties, looking forward to the next round of conversations about everything and everyone we know that filled our evenings along with D.A.F., Lali Puna, and recordings of my host James’s extraordinary compositions as he prepares a talk on annihilation and endurance. I don’t want to leave Berlin just yet, it’s a whaling-ship kind of university. Hamburg even more so: What émigré writer W. G. Sebald said of the English Suffolk seaside in The Rings of Saturn I could reapply with a sense of inherited guilt back to that cold German city of bridges firebombed to ruins by the airmen of my grandfather’s generation (“Dort, dachte ich, war ich einmal zu Hause” / “There, I thought, I was once at home,” he wrote of a place he’d never lived). I don’t want this visit to remain an island in my memory before the next waves of the pandemic crash in and the lights go out across America one by one. What would be my fourth or fifth Berlin train journey of the day (I’ve lost track) would cost me nothing additional—I’m already starting to take the nine-euro ticket for granted. But the U-Bahn is too speedy and it’s very simply too useful for my purposes tonight. I want to extend this evening a little bit longer.
J. M. TYREE is the coauthor, with Michael McGriff, of Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object/Deep Vellum), an NPR Best Books selection. He serves as a contributing editor for New England Review and Film Quarterly. His film essay “Ways of Looking at Vertigo” was published in Bennington Review’s Issue Eleven. His uncanny novella set in Germany, The Haunted Screen, is forthcoming from A Strange Object/Deep Vellum.
