Marcel Winatschek

The Best Place to Waste Your Life

Vice published a Berlin city guide and it opens like this: Berlin is the best place in the world to waste your life. The city is one long, happy, drunk parade of immigrants, lazy bastards, and dogs shitting endlessly in the street. The only people wearing suits are homeless men, and even they mean it ironically. It’s the only city in Germany where you’re allowed to be lazy—in fact, Germans come here specifically to be lazy, or, as they call it here, to ’study.’

That’s Vice doing what Vice occasionally does well—crude and accurate in the same breath. I’ve spent enough time watching this city operate to confirm it isn’t satire. A friend named Ines was apparently racing me to post about this guide. She can have the win. I just wanted the quote somewhere I’d find it again.