Finding Berlin

The smell hits you first—currywurst and dog shit, warm and sharp. Berlin doesn’t bother covering its own tracks. That’s the whole point.

I went there because someone was leaving. Sarah had this project going, documenting the city before she vanished on a world tour—just impressions, fragments, tips for the newly arrived and the chronically lost. Finding Berlin. I helped with it, and somewhere in the process I stopped seeing it as her project and started seeing it as a place I actually wanted to understand.

Most great cities are performing all the time. They’re showing you a carefully arranged version of themselves. Berlin gave up on that. It’s too broke to afford the performance, too tired, too committed to staying exactly as messy and unfinished as it actually is. Money exists there, but quietly—nobody’s got anything to prove. You can kiss someone in a park in the middle of the day and nobody cares, or MTV shows up and films the whole thing. Both are equally unremarkable.

What works about it is that the refusal is genuine. It’s not an aesthetic. The people I knew there—Mustafa, Arék, whoever was at the bus stop that day—they weren’t being raw or authentic for anyone’s benefit. That’s just how they were. The city lets you be that way too, which is rare. Most cities demand you show up already formed, already with a story. Berlin just lets you exist.

I don’t know if I loved it exactly. But I understood why someone would leave everything to chase the world when they came from a place like that. Once you’ve lived somewhere that doesn’t need you to be anything, anywhere else feels like a costume party.