Berlin Thoughts

Berlin: 1 August, 2017 

There is so much in this city that still remains so broken, so scarred. This city is rapidly changing, getting a facelift, some therapy, plastic surgery – yes, artificially. The old Tacheles is boarded up, its artists and squatters pushed out of the former shopping arcade beneath a shattered dome of dirty glass. Cranes and flashy property ads take the place of weeds, colonising the deserted parking lot that once stood square in the heart of Berlin. Echoes of the bombs that once devastated this city can barely be heard, drowned out by the honking of impatient taxi drivers in shiny Mercedes on Friedrichstraße. Traces of graffiti – public art that once graced the walls of these war-torn skeletons – are being cleaned away; the bars of former East Berlin being razed one by one, rubbing out the Soviet past of Berlin-Mitte. Few seem to notice: cyclists whizz past, cars speed by, trams ring their bells, tourists (in hoards) take their silly selfies. After all, the city’s most expensive homes are right next door. Berlin’s gotta grow, no? Growth is good, growth is needed, desired…? Growth…?

I finish up a meal of organic vegan dumplings in a minimalist café that runs fully on renewable energy. Rather, I sit on the benches outside this shining exemplar of sustainability, studying this curious junction in the heart of the city. It has four corners, vastly different: one, a magnificent 1700s baroque building in gilded gold housing a Scandinavian furniture store; two, a shoddy 1900s structure in dirty brown with its brick cracks patched up with careless white streaks, an old Italian bar below with glaring red neon lights flashing; three, a newly-built structure of concrete and glass, home to an advertising agency; four, nothingness – a plot of weeds with aged and splintered billboards feebly attempting to keep nosy tourists out, the flat walls of the buildings around lucky enough to have survived the bombs covered in severe graffiti.

I tire of this disjointed scene and mount my bike grudgingly (I have always lamented the lack of bike lanes in this European capital, but what would one expect in a city once so divided, each half wildly organically growing, spreading, multiplying beyond capacity? But let us not lose our focus). I live in the north of Berlin-Mitte – former East, formerly socialist, formerly Soviet. I live in a brand new structure of glass and steel, next to the BND, next to Daniel Libeskind – chic, coveted. This street was once by No Man’s Land – international oblivion, belonging to no nation, no human. Not today. No trace of that exists, save for a double brick line across the asphalt marked ‘Berlin Wall’. I often tire of this area – it has no character, a missing soul.

So I take my bike on a little 10-minute detour behind my apartment – ‘Kieler Weg’ reads the sign. I am stopped in my tracks by a dystopian landscape just a few minutes away: a hulking tower of raw concrete flanked by apartment blocks at the end of the lane overlooks a silent canal separating me from a desolate landscape of cranes and weeds. The hulking turret has a plaque: ‘in memoriam: to all who were killed attempting to cross the Berlin Wall’. Where I stand, where I walk freely, once a site of death and separation. Sickened, I move on along the canal. A faded brick structure stands alone on the opposite bank, dressed in graffiti, its windows long-since boarded up. A pool of weeds threatens to consume it, as do the cranes. They work in unison for nothing else exists here. Few know of this place, so well marked out for the remembrance of posterity.

As the sun bleeds red across the night sky, I cycle northwards. Berlin-Wedding, once a capitalist Western district, now mostly undesired by the people of this city. A hastily-constructed eyesore of TV dishes, Turkish flags, and sex shops looms before me. Funny how things work. 25 years ago, risking one’s life jumping the Wall from East to West, Mitte to Wedding. Now young dreamers and old men strive for the opposite, for the ‘chic’, the ‘fashionable’ – to afford the rents in the former East, now masked. Confused and a little sad, I turn back, away from the impending storm, to Mitte and my soulless modern structure of a home.

THIS IS BERLIN. DAS IST BERLIN.

"Good morning Berlin,
You can be so ugly, so dirty and grey,
You can be so beautifully appalling." 

- "Schwarz zu Blau" (Peter Fox) 

An ugly city. A gritty, grimy, disfigured, maimed, triumphant, and bewitching city. It will catch you, grip you, strangle you - sacrifice yourself to it, let go. Eyes on the walls that scrutinised the Stasi, they scrutinise you now. Now-blind eyes that peered into the lives of communist automatons - they peer into yours now. Eyes sprayed in rainbow paint, layer upon layer of colour and texture, of hideousness upon beauty and beauty upon hideousness; eyes of owls, of druggies, of goggled Martians upon walls of defunct factories of the departed East - they watch. 

A glistening river of blue is traversed by a gleaming yellow train - the blue and the yellow, they grate under the stare of an icy sun. Yet it is winter and a frigid wind howls through the alley. Scraps of subsistence show themselves in a busy rustling, the wings of feculent pigeons; green alcohol-stained shards tinkle menacingly against cobblestone as the roar of diesel from a passing truck momentarily drowns out all other noise. 

Along the street, a primitive Mercedes has received a new paint job - it now gleams the colours of the rainbow, star rusting, as it rests upon the kerb; a scruffy stray snoozes lazily beneath its broken fender to drown out the unrelenting tumult of freedom that reverberates through the winter air. "Fuck alley", in all-too-legible scrawl on the fifth storey of an unfinished block, adds the finishing touches to the scene. All is illuminated by a glaring blue sky. 

I stand beneath psychedelic construction hoarding, considering some makeshift posters - "You - Me - One Being; Allah, Maria, God, Buddha", it reads. James Blunt's new album is being advertised right beneath - a creative passerby has given him a new hairdo - paint dyes his hair a neon orange. An elderly man with studs through his chin materialises behind me, says, "you Thai?" I say I'm from Singapore. He tells me about his stopover in Singapore in animated German, complete with beaming eyes and gesticulations (never mind the brown booze bottle in his hand). He then wishes me a "schöner Tag" and leaves on his merry way. 

I get shouted at by a drunkard down the street - "good day to be alive, huh?" Black, white; old, young; tall, short; gay, straight; pierced, unadorned; tattooed, undecorated. Another German with a tremendous nose ring asks me something about what we stop to observe - a queer lady reclining in a wooden chair in the gaping hole of a construction site. "Ein Tourist" he explains he is, thinking I was a local (who perhaps somehow turned Asian one fine day). 

People stare, glance, look - I walk. It's all amicable curiosity, really. Unless they're drunk. (Or high). The needle stands far off, the centrepiece of the spectacle. Der Fernsehturm, it's called. Crowning glory of expired socialism, now the icon of this swarming metropolis. Before me stands a row of bricks across the street. An almost indiscernible reminder that the Wall once stood. Right here. To the left, an abandoned Trabi stands proudly on display, rusting. Behind it, boys stumble out of a club, drunk, smoking (weed?). Cigarettes don't smell ordinary. It is noon. Layers of history criss-cross beneath my feet; life surges past me in an unhurried rush. 

I am appallingly in love with this city. I am alive. This city. A one-legged veteran of unending wars, it hobbles nobly, medals gleaming; no spoils, no takings, just living, breathing, unvanquished. 

This is Berlin. Das ist Berlin. 

Cuvrystraße, Kreuzberg, Berlin.

thoughts on art and a city (taken from a no-longer-needed-college-application-essay)

So I'm flying off home to Germany tonight, and I no longer need to apply for college (since I've a place), so why not blog one of my now-useless essays which I had intended to submit and make it a tad less useless? 

If the world were art-less, I doubt I would choose the option of life over oblivion, I recently remarked to a friend over tea. I rarely exaggerate, and this is no exception. What a tragedy that so many newly-developed countries shun art, thinking it "impractical" and "inessential", and that my home country counts as one of them. Singapore suffers from a terminal stage of what I term the "Asian Materialism Syndrome", a disease I diagnosed her with after she left me inexplicably "empty" after just four brief years. Unlike San Francisco and Berlin, two cities I had previously called home, life seemed overwhelmingly "sterile". Perhaps it is not clear that culture simply cannot be engineered, despite the futilely dauntless efforts of certain governments and societies. Some fail to fathom that culture is not to be found solely in the concert halls and museums of a metropolis, but on its streets and in its back-alleys too. And if even Chinatown in an Asian capital has to be meticulously engineered, something is clearly awry. For two years, this desire to be "filled" by art plagued me while I served in the army - it is not easy for concrete skyscrapers and prefab housing to inspire a human being above and beyond the mundane. 

Probing aural art more closely, I do additionally veer towards inarticulateness when it comes to describing music. After all, "[music] commences where speech ends." (Alphonse de Lamartine). It is something that gnaws at my core and drains me, yet fills me to the point of cathartic excess. There is something just so noble and so penetrating about the sound that a piano creates that stirs me more than it does others, in a way that all else is incapable of - especially the sound of that old upright piano sitting in its dusty corner of our living room. It is a trove of memories of my past 19 years of existence, its threadbare hammers having experienced all of my agony and ecstasy, my passions and my sadness. It was akin to an old friend I could rely on, or rather one that I could invariably force into empathising or rejoicing with me. I lived vicariously through it, and it "lived" vicariously through me. It saw me grow up, in technique and emotion, and I grew up through it, sensing and thinking ever more astutely. 

I breathe in the cultures and landscapes of the world when time prevents me from traveling, seeing the world without ever having to leave the piano bench. Much of my interior maturity was born through this wonderful, living instrument, and never will I neglect what that old piano and its enticing art taught my heart and my mind. 

These brief encounters unblinded me - I could suddenly "breathe" once more. Art, no matter how vast a concept, dictates the movements of my heart and my mind, filling my life with an indescribable richness and beauty. This is its power and its allure.