Some Berlin Tunes

The building where David Bowie and Iggy Pop lived.

Burnt out and lost in his own revolving cast of identities, David Bowie left for Berlin, well, West Berlin.

He didn't go alone. He brought a friend, James Newell Osterberg Jr., or Iggy Pop, as most of us know him. Berlin would have seemed the perfect place for them. A city living on the edge, walled in, surrounded by Soviet tanks, and still a rough ruin. But still free. 

They shared a flat (in my neighbourhood). They collaborated, went to local shows, worked with Brian Eno, jammed with Kraftwerk, and made a musical hash of rock, punk, and electronic. And they've both gone back, again and again. Those Belin roots went deep.

So, it was a treat to find this audio treat: Iggy Pop's Berlin Bound radio special. 

Mixed up in Pop's playlist is some Nico, the lady from the Velvet Underground. She's German, by the way. Some Kraftwerk, which has become a household favourite here. Some Anton Karas, who you might remember from The Third Man soundtrack. And, of course, some Rammstein and some Bowie.

Pop's playlist is perfectly Berlin. It defies genre, from Krautrock to electronic, to 1920s oldies. It's all ear candy, if you give it a shot. And it captures some of this city's musical awesome-ness. 

The show is up for about 3 weeks, so I hope you give it a listen.

Berlin's New Plattenbauen

Filling in Berlin's blanks with new buildings.

While reading Farnam Street's newsletter, I came across this interesting long read, The Housing Theory of Everything.  

The TL;DR version is that overpriced housing leads to all sorts of problems — inequality, lower economic productivity, climate change, and lower birth rates. You get overpriced housing when demand exceeds supply. 

Like any theory for everything, some of its arguments are flimsy. But there are some takeaways that make sense, like building higher-density communities to increase housing supply in a smaller area.

Berlin is struggling with a housing shortage. Everyone has a story about how hard it was to find an apartment. Prices are also rising. And there's a fear that locals will be priced out of their own communities and the character that draws so many people to the city will be gentrified beyond recognition. 

Berlin has been fighting it in different ways. When we moved to Berlin last year, there was a rent cap in place. It was thrown out of the constitutional court. In the recent election, a referendum passed that allows the city to appropriate property from the large companies that domain Berlin's real estate market.

Measures like that, which run against free market orthodoxy attract a lot of love, hate, and headlines. But, there's something else grinding on, away from the headlines. 

Berlin is pocked with all sorts of bits of unused land. There are swaths of land running along the city's commuter railways. Strips of what was once the kill zone on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Empty lots that were levelled in the war, and left empty for decades.

These are all spaces where new modern, residential high-rises are rising, or Neubauen. Berlin is gradually adding high-density residential housing to meet the growing demand, filling in the blanks on the city map. There's just one hiccup.

Berlin's architecture was dominated by big, stone apartment blocks built in the late 1800s (and rebuilt in the 40s and 50s) seem like they were built to last centuries. The housing built after the war feel eternal, but feel like they have some durable staying power.

Some of the new builds are nice to look at. But, having looked a few of them while we were apartment hunting, many feel like they might fall apart soon after you've moved in. They're built quickly and cheaply to maximise profit for the developers. The density pushed by that long-read doesn't necessarily mean quality.

In some ways, they're no different than the Plattenbauen, those old prefabricated East Bloc residential buildings that make seems to make so many eyes sore. The purpose was the same: create supply to meet the demand for housing. The difference is that some one is walking away with a fat profit.

A Crazy Little Thing Called Hope

Spring is feeling a little more… springier in Berlin.

The patios at bars and restaurants have re-opened. People are lining up outside recently opened stores cluthching negative Corona test results. Hipsters and not so hip old guys like me are drifting into the public parks.

The weather has been sunny, warm, and perfectly timed with Berlin's loosening restrictions.

Normally at this time of year, the people of this outdoor-drinking-loving city emerge gradually from their indoor-drinking hibernation. But, in case you haven’t heard, and you're not as sick of this phrase as I am, this is the "New Normal," so this spring’s awakening feels less like coming out of hibernation and more like awaking from a coma and sprinting madly outdoors.

And the whole city is outside. We’re walking around, sucking in the semi-fresh air and soaking up our Vitamin D the natural way. Some of us are walking about with beer in hand. Others are trying to keep their toddler out of the traffic. We're all quietly wondering, “What is this feeling?”

It’s hope.

And it’s probably too early to admit to feeling that feeling. At the time of this writing, Berlin's infection rate is dropping and 2,391,749 vaccinations have been given. But, with variants lurking around out there and a Merkel-less federal election this fall, we're all senstive to the tooth-grindingly awful fact that our fortunes can shift at any time.

So, we won’t bask too long in this sunny sensation of hope. Instead, we’ll crack open another cold beer and cautiously enjoy what we have right now: sun, a little more freedom, and a mad desire to just get out there.

Playground Rules

When Berliner parents take their kids to the playground, or Spielplatz, they often bring little buckets, shovels, and other sand toys. The parents plop them into the sand. The kids either play with them or run towards the more interesting swing or slides.

Other kids find the unattended sand toys and play with them. There's a sand toy social contract that says it's alright to share your toys at the Spielplatz.

My son discovered a toy dump truck at one of our local playground and started playing with it. That moment of bliss (he's going through a construction vehicle obsession phase) lasted about 10 seconds.

Another kid screamed NEEEIIIIIIN!!!!! He ran across the playground to Levi. He snatched the excavator from him and shouted Nein! once more. Levi ran crying to me. The other kids' mother tried to explain the concept of sharing to him. Not all kids grasp the sand toy social contract.

Our neighbourhood playgrounds offer endless opportunities for surreal interactions like this. 

Children in Germany are astonishingly good at lining up to await their turn on the slide. They give space to the youngsters. They won't push or shove unless someone plays with their sand toys. Then they drop the gloves.

Social distancing can also be easily described as social awkwardness, expecially around strangers. 

Kids have been picking up on this social awkwardness. I see it with Levi. He sees another kid, and he wants to play, but he stands back, cautiously. You can see the wheels turning. Should we play? Is it safe? Why wouldn't it be safe? Maybe I'll just stare from a safe distance for a little while longer...

Playgrounds are an oasis for the kids during a lockdown. But smartphones are clearly a survival tool for bored parents who visit the same Spielplatz day in, day out. I decided a while ago to stop looking at my phone when I’m out with Levi. If you try this, you will start notice how much time other parents are on their phone at the playground.

My favourite is the dad – and it’s almost always a dad – who looks at their phone and gets sucked in. They’re mesmerized and lose all track of time. Their kid – because they’re a kid and can't stay still for longer than 7.4 seconds – runs off to another end of the playground while the dad is lost in his screen.

After a few minutes, the dad looks up to where their kid was playing a few minutes ago and doesn’t see them. A bunch of expressions play out on his face. Surprise. A bit of panic. Mostly it’s that facial expression that says Oh, no, I have to tell the mother that I lost our kid because I was playing Break-a-Brick. 

There’s a frantic visual scan of the playground, but it's a subtle visual scan, because he doesn't want to make a scene. Then there's relief when he sees his kid at the other end of the playground. Then finally, a smile of satisfaction as he resumes his game of Break-a-Brick.

Berlin Remembers

 

Yesterday, as I was picking up my son from the Kita, I saw one of those red memorial candles on the ground beside the door. Someone had lit a candle and put some carnations in the plague that commemorated Rosa Luxemburg having lived in that building for a few years in the early 1900s.

It turns out that yesterday was the anniversary of her murder by paramilitaries in 1919.

So what does a Marxist killed 100 years ago have to do with anything? 

Nothing... And everything.

I don't think there's another city that goes out of its way to remember as much as Berlin does. The good bits and the bad, ugly bits. Rosa Luxemburg is just one of many brutal openers to the tragedies the city would experience. The Nazis. The War. The Holocaust. The Defeat. The Trials. The Wall. 

Guilt is a word that gets thrown around a lot in Germany. But, another accurate word is courage. It can't be easy for a country to reckon with its past the way Germany does. To openly remember its history, instead of revising it. 

It's both chilling and refreshing to walk along the streets of Berlin and see the golden stumbling stones that bear the names of Jewish deportees, along with their fate: liberation, escape, or death camp. 

You see these types of memorials everywhere. The small statue in the quiet square where the July 20 plotters were executed. The eerie stone monuments to the Soviet war dead. The concrete and steel foundation line that still runs along the path of the Berlin Wall.

In Berlin, and much of Germany, history is still a lesson you can learn from, instead of a myth that you believe in, an ideal you buy, or a grudge you nurse.

We live in a strange age where everyone lives on their own plains of reality, feeding on information that only confirms their biases. And the way things are going, that looks like it isn't going to change soon.

Being honest about our history is getting tougher. But it's good to see it's still happening in some places.

Notes on Moving to Berlin

 

In any other time, moving from Dusseldorf to Berlin probably feels like something that resembles normal. Of course, it was for from normal, so here's a smattering of the abnormal things I noticed on the long road from the Dorf to Berlin.

Bringing Up the Toddler

 

These aren't normal times, and no I'm not talking about this Covid crisis, I'm talking about our Toddler Times. Moving across the country with a toddler is tough, so tough that Berlin felt like it was on the moon at times, not the other end of Germany.

Let's start with the stuff. Back in Toronto, I'd invite a few of the same friends to help me move (I moved five times in four years), and while I grumbled about how much stuff I had, they loved a Marshall Move because there was so little to move, and they still got free beer. I was a minimalist and didn't know it.

 

Then we had a baby and our stuff expanded exponentially. There are loads of baby clothes, blankets, towels, and wipes. There's a changing table, a bed, a bassinet, a wardrobe, and boxes, small tables and chairs, and bags of toys. There are toiletries, creams, lotions, powders, diapers, and other baby things whose purpose befuddles me. 

 

Plus, we moved into that last flat in the Dorf with the intention of staying a while and bought some decent, non-disposable furniture that we wanted to bring with us to faraway Berlin.

 

 

Outsource the tough stuff

 

It's funny how easily I pissed away my time before I had a kid. Call of Duty, fixing my bike brakes on my own, watching Sons of Anarchy, waiting in line at bars, and the list goes on. As a parent, I'm painfully aware of how little time I have, both hours in a day (because that's potentially sleep I'm missing out on) and hours in my life (because the more tired I get, the more I'm of aware of my own mortality).

 

For our move, we hired fixers, a German start-up called Smoovr that hired a moving company for us, estimated the needed truck space, dealt with the city parking permits, and so on. It lifted a small burden off our shoulders, but it helped, because this was the stuff that would start out a small and then metastasize into major, German-language problems.

 

A caveat. I'm not saying you should outsource everything but, until we invent time travel, you can't get the time you waste back. It isn't like money, you can't earn more time.

 

 

Berlin housing is nuts

 

Everything you heard about Berlin housing is true. It's crazy. Not Toronto crazy, but it's getting there. Prices are rising year on year on a dwindling amount of homes. Even during a pandemic, people were lining up to view flats, crowding into small-ish apartments, and ignoring the social distancing rules.

 

The shortage also brings out the predators. The City of Berlin implemented a rent freeze, which might not be legal, depending on what Germany's highest court decides. While everyone waits for the final judgement, landlords must charge lower rents. But, they advertise the non-frozen rent. Then, when you visit a flat, they flash you a pen-scribbled calculation of the reduced rent and recommend the difference gets set aside, because when the law is struck down, they say, you must repay that amount retroactively.

 

In one case, a landlord offered us two contracts, one for the apartment and another for use of the cellar and bike racks in the courtyard, so he could charge the standard full price for the apartment from the two reduced rental contracts. Sneaky stuff. When I asked what happens if the law is struck down and I'd be facing two full rent payments, he said I could trust him to keep it reduced. Of course, he wouldn't put that in writing. I tried to negotiate, he didn't budge. 

 

This wasn't even a nice flat. It was a ground floor unit on a busy Neukolln street, across from a bar, within site of a playground where two drunks started a sloppy, but very real, fist fight while kids played on like nothing out of the normal was going on.

 

I turned down the apartment, but he didn't seem to care: there were plenty of desperate home hunters who would probably sign both contracts and regret it later.

 

Nothing goes to plan

 

I've written before about how enjoying Berlin requires going in without a plan. But! You need a plan to move. Yet! You also need the flexibility to change that plan or at least allow events and circumstances that are beyond your control to do what they're going to do.

 

The elevator is out of service when the movers arrive? Lend a hand and carry the stuff up the stairs, so they're not working all night. There's no storage room in the basement? Use what you've got (and accept a generous offer from your father-in-law to put storage shelves in a closet).

 

Berlin, and the world in general, but especially Berlin, is indifferent to your wishes, whims, and plans. When your plans work out, be grateful. When they don't, look for another way, because the universe won't budge. This is something I'm still working on (replace universe with toddler, and you'll understand) but it's useful to remember.

 

In those times, I think of something someone said about Hungarians: "A Hungarian is someone who enters a revolving door behind you and comes out ahead of you." So, when things don't go as planned, I try to tap into my inner Hungarian and see how I can use the situation to get ahead.