Today I finally had a chance to escape the rusty iron shackles of my laptop and venture out of my neighborhood, so I took the train to Keuzberg, which I'm told is the hip epicenter of Berlin (except for Friedrichshain of course). I visited an aquaintance's record store, the great but rather hidden Wowsville, run by a Spanish expat via NYC named Alberto. We chatted for a bit, I bought Las Vegas Grind Volume 3 from him (I'm glad Crypt never lets these sweet burlesque records go out of print), and we promised to hook up at some point in the future. One interesting thing he told me is that after being here for over a year he doesn't even speak German, and that there are a ton of native Spanish speakers here. Huh. At least there's hope for me, 'cause I'm pretty sure I'm speak German like a stutterer with a cleft palette.
Further explorations down the Oranienstraße revealed the punk rock record specialty store Core Tex, which only sold punk junk, but classified into crust, hardcore, street etc etc. Not my bag right now, I wanna go where Blixa Bargeld would hang out, if he still lived here. Actually, I do have an Eisturzende Neubauten badge but I haven't been wearing it for fear that it is the German Pearl Jam. Hit a comic book shop that actually had a fairly large English section. Walked around, got lost, found my way and headed home. Tonight was filled with glorious amounts of nothing. I got back to the flat, ordered a small pizza from one of the million or so (mostly Turkish-run) joints that dot this city, did some work and crashed out. I'm not sure if I'm ever really going to recover from jet/party lag - I've been embracing sleep like a lost pet. If Otter didn't wake me up to pee I'd probably remain on my ridiculously comfortable couch-bed for the entire week. But alas, I have stuff to see.
November 8th, 2007
More explorations. After waking up at at the crack of 11:00 am, I leave Otter at home and hop the train to Wittenberg Platz, one of the largest shopping districts in Berlin. Mission: new coat. right after jumping off the train you are hit with the capitalist megashopalith KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens) - the largest department store in Europe. With 60,000 square meters of shit to buy, I felt sure that I could fulfill my objectve here, hop back on the train, and revisit the couch. Bah. While it is amazing, (and I didn't even get to the floor devoted to food, and presumably, sausage), there are no certainly no bargains here. I could have bought some Levis for 180 euro, but nothing very good for me in the jacket department, as KaDeWe is essentially a gigantic Nordtrom/Macy's/Dillards/whathaveyou. My tastes run just a touch left of the Europosh, so I ventured on. Down the street I snapped a couple pix of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (the Gedächtniskirche), and mosied down to one of the three H&M's in the district, finally settling on a black synthetic number with a bunch of pockets, some gloves and a scarf. Hey, German Winter! Suck it!
When I get back to the flat Lina is here and she tells me her friend is playing at a club tonight and we're going. She plays me the tunes of myspace and it sounds like some kind of mellow Lilith Fair jazz, so neither of us is too excited and it looks like another early night. We take a cab to the club, which from the outside looks like a standard train station with a short line out front. They have an annoying habit of letting in a fonly ew people at a time, so the queue moves slowly, and it isn't getting any warmer. Finally we get our turn at bat, and since Lina knows the entire town we get in for free. But once inside - woah. It's like we just stepped into the Wiemar. Two rooms of labrynthine hedonism, packed to the gills. We march towards the room where Lina's friend was playing and are greeted with a band playing some kind of amped up swing, with three fraulines up front, a horn section, stand up bass - the whole deal. I feel transported to 1929 and half expect Joel Gray to appear from the shadows. The timetravel didn't last however, as after a short break the group launched into a swing-flavored cover of Nirvana's "Come As You Are" which is probably a more esoteric joke here than in America. Not bad, but a hexbreaker. More covers followed: Nancy Sinatra, En Vogue. Still entertaining, but at that point I am half-hoping for an erotic snake dancer or something.
We exit to the other room, which played nothing but solid, loud-ass metalcore, the thirsty crowd served by a shirtless tattooed bartender. Sorry guys, it was a he. No topless bartendress action yet. We stay for a while on the network of couches; Lina catches up with her friend the singer and I people watch while drinking Berliner's. Observation: there are no ugly people here, which makes all the beautiful faces monochromes. I search for some kind of character to pop out from the throng, but things are getting blurry at this point anyway. Of course theres nothing left to do but head to a new bar!
We end up at a place called Travolta's, which made me laugh as I was hoping for some kind of Battlefield Earth/Scientology theme bar. I end up dissappointed. We stayed after hours and I switched to water. I met a man named whose English had a slight accent to it. Thinking he's from Spain or France I ask him where he's from. He replies: "Michigan". He hasn't been back to the States in 21 years, and he told me the story of how he came to be an American expat. Apparently he had followed the love of his life to a small town in Germany, he knocked on the door and found that in their separation she had married a local. Broke and alone, he travelled to Berlin in an attempt to show his value, to be somebody, and to possibly win her back. He's still here, they're not togther, and his story immediately brings to doubt any notion of emigrating here. This city certainly has many attractions, but the idea of being that guy in a bar wondering how the US has changed in his absence and still pining for a lost love was by turns frightening, heartbreaking, and pathetic.
We finally get home at nearly 5 in the morning. Lina has to leave the next day for work in Cologne. I can tell already that I will be sleeping all day.
November 9th, 2007
I slept all day.
November 10th, 2007
Nazis! Nazis! Nazis! Today I took a walking tour of famous Thrid Reich sites in Berlin. The tour was offered by Original Berlin Walks and has many informative tours for the Berlin sightseer. I originally wanted to take the "Berlin-Nest Of Spies!" tour, but that only ran through September, and as mom always said, when in doubt, go with the Nazis. We began at the Ministry of Propoganda, Joseph Goebbels gigantic brainwashing empire. The father of modern propaganda, Goebbles was the first man to apply the principles of advertising to politics, and came up with the idea of the People's Reciever, a cheaply bought radio set that brought Hitler's ranting insanity into nearly every home in Germany.
Our walk brought us next to the sights of the Luftwaffe Headquarters (now the Ministry of Finance), depicting the "best" in fascist architecture - large stones, narrow windows - attributes contructed to fashion a fortress-like appearance, a building meant to last a thousand years. Turns out that these bulidings were built very quickly and very cheaply. After the war, the deteriation was such that renovation would cost as much as a completely new building, but they pulled down the eagles, pried off the swatstikas, and left it standing.
A hail storm erupted as we make our way to the "Topography Of Terror" memorial, a citizen funded and constructed monument to the horrors of the Third Reich. Built to approximate both the look of a concentration camp and a fighting trench, the exhibit gives a timeline of the Nazi Party's rise and fall, with all the major characters and locations described in detail. Most interesting of which the story of Johann Georg Elser, the man who very nearly assassinated Hitler in Munich with a home-made bomb. With the hail turning to snow and the temperature dropping, we learn about the Nazi occupation in Russia, capturing three-million Russian POWs in a fenced-off concentration camp without food or shelter. More than half died the first winter, the survivors used for slave labor. This sobering monument is constructed of all weather laminated museum boards that hang from the rafters of the mock-trench and has recently been updated with text in both German and English - I hope to go back if I have more time.
Our final stop was at the site of Hitler's bunker, now a parking lot, and the place in which Hitler and Eva Braun spent their last days. Our guide told us that Hitler had taken poison, but apparently Hitler was not sure if that that would be effective, so he shot himself in the head to make sure. Many think that his remains were cremated upon discovery, but our guide told us that this was not true, and that his corpse was taken to Russia to be buried in the grounds of The Kremlin where he remained for many years until he was finally officially cremated and either a) thrown into the sea or b) flushed down the toilet. Of course I hope neither story is true and that his body is secure in an underground laboratory undergoing experiments by an society of evil scientists, or that his animated, rotting corpse is currently haunting the depths of the Black Forest. Mustache intact, of course.
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