The Berlin Type

I moved to Berlin thinking I was immune. Turns out everyone thinks that—it’s part of the guarantee the city makes you. Within a year you’re in some gallery basement that used to be a bathhouse, drinking wine that costs nine euros because the bottle’s ugly, nodding at people you’ve seen three hundred times but never spoken to. The thing about hipsterdom in Berlin is that it’s so complete, so inevitable, that pretending you’re above it just makes you complicit in a different way. You become ironic about your own participation, which the city has already accounted for. It’s not that Berlin turns you into a hipster. It’s that Berlin is a city built specifically so that becoming a hipster feels like having no other choice.