Berlin

Here is a highly poetic prose-excerpt from Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, the second part of his book, The Berlin Stories, which I read again during a visit to Berlin last week:

"From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty paster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle-class." (Copyright 1935 by Isherwood, published in 1945 by New Directions, and still in print; p. 1 of Part Two).

Berlin has become an ultra-post-Modern city, not in the way Tokyo is, but in an historical sense, for history seems to coalesce excessively and surrealistically in Berlin. It is a monumental city, a "crammed monumental safe," with massive public art, domes, cathedrals, and churches, but also with the enormous Nazi-era buildings, and now with the gleaming new 21st century towers of global capitalism, especially in the Potzdamer Platz. Chiefly rubble in 1945, Berlin has been painstakingly reconstructed--the pieces of cathedrals and other famous buildings glued back together, with relentless German determination and unyielding expertise. The building that used to house the East German parliament is at this moment being dismantled, its steel skeleton exposed. It had erased a palace. Now it will be erased, and the palace will be reconstructed. History is a contact-sport in Berlin. The horses on top of the Brandenburg Gate were recast from the old mold, discovered in a basement somewhere. A parody of capitalism, an old-fashioned Coca Cola sign sits atop a building in the former East Berlin, and of course there are several chain-hotels (Hilton, Ritz-Carlton), MacDonalds, and Starbucks.

The large statue of Marx and Lenin remains in the Alexanderplatz, as does the goofy fountain--and the radio tower, which, like the Space Needle in Seattle, is so ridiculous that it is appealing. And at Humboldt University, the unabashed university-motto is taken from Marx--the quotation about philosophers needing not just to interpret the world but to remake it. If Berlin could speak, it might say, "Enough, already, of the remaking. I need a breather."

As in Isherwood's paragraph, bankruptcy remains a problem. Berlin is 62 billion euros in debt. It is in more debt than the state of California.

But as always, Berlin stubbornly seems to belong to Berlin, to those who inhabit it at the moment. Astoundingly, Hitler and the Nazis, the American air force, Russian tanks and troops, and the Cold War couldn't obliterate it. Its perpetual decadence does not lead to decay but seems to provide resilience, life. Everyone, it seems, has had designs on Berlin, and so it is awfully designed but charmingly awkward and ugly. Isherwood captures this. Everything and nothing seems to have changed since he was writing, over 70 years ago.

The first part of The Berlin Stories, The Last of Mr. Norris, is (in my trivial opinion), one of the great short novels in English, on a par with Heart of Darkness. It is irresistibly readable.

My wife and I visited the Nollendorfplatz, near where Isherwood lived and set part of his narratives. It remains a so-called "gay and lesbian district," and it still seems somewhat small, shabby, and endearing, as it seems to have been in Isherwood's time. Chiefly we just wanted to go there, but we were also looking for a place to eat. However, it's dominated by cafes and bars that are long on coffee and booze but short on food (even good cafe food), so we chose to backtrack a few U-bahn stops to the Potzdamerplatz.

On a separate trip to the Potzdamerplatz, on Altepotsdam Strasse, we found a wine shop, drank some Rheingau wine, and had a platter of cheese. German wine is a little bit of heaven, and here's a ceremonial toast to Isherwood, and here's wishing good luck to Berlin and its 21st century inhabitants.

Revisiting Europe

I'm scheduled to give a paper at an the international conference of a Law and Society academic organization. I'm talking about Langston Hughes's political poems, especially the ones he wrote about specific issues, in some cases even specific legal cases, such as one involving a House of Representatives member named Arthur Mitchell, who sued railroad companies because of their Jim Crow rules, and who prevailed ultimately at the Supreme Court level. I think I may be the only literary scholar amongst social scientists; that should be interesting.

The conference is in Berlin. The last time I was there was in 1981, and of course to visit what was East Berlin, I had to go through checkpoints, return to West Berlin within a short span of time, and buy a certain number of East German deutschmarks. Now the wall is down, Germany is united (although I'm sure issues remained to be worked out), and the Cold War has seemingly been replaced by something as constant but nebulous and as easy to manipulate, politically: "the War on Terror." Obviously, terrorists who want to harm the U.S. exist, but at the same time, I think politicians like Cheney have a worldview that somehow requires, needs, a bifurcated world. But I'll leave this to the Law and Society folk.

On a more routine level, something called the Chunnel exists now--a highway under the English Channel. When I traveled from London to Mainz (Germany, where I was to teach for a year at Gutenberg University) in one very long day, I took a small ship from Dover to Ostend, and virtually everyone but me and a young Irish woman got terribly seasick because the waters were so rough. It was quite a spectacle. Of course, she and I didn't really know why we didn't get sick; something to do with our inner ears. I think at one point we just looked at each other and shrugged.

Here's hoping all goes well with my journey from the U.S. to Berlin via Amsterdam, and here's hoping all goes well with your travels. In the meantime, here's a poem remembering the channel-crossing some 26+ years ago:

Channel-Crossing

Irish Girl sat on a crate,
topside. Cigarette-smoke
out of her mouth joined
English-Channel mist.
American Me stood beside
her oafishly. Everyone else
but a bemused British crew
was puking. A man threw up
into the wind. Wet, pink
pebbles flew our way.
Below-decks, a danse-macabre
of vomiters staggered,
careened. Irish Girl and I
didn’t know why we
weren’t ill from the heaving,
pitching barrel of a boat. Her
smoke smelled fine. I
made her laugh, once only,
can’t remember how. Her
eyes were dark blue,
her hair dark brown but
with secret plans to become
red. This was when
the Tunnel was still
a Jungian blueprint beneath
the ocean. We docked, Ostend.
Irish Girl took a train
different from mine. A
widening channel of years
later, I do hope she’s alive,
never been sea-sick, and
laughing.