Ninety Nights, Ninety Beds, One Berlin

A mutual friend named Meltem showed up one afternoon with another woman in tow and announced, with the casual authority Meltem always operates at, that this was Christine and she was writing for this journal now. That was the whole introduction. Christine Neder, standing there, apparently fine with being presented like a fait accompli.

She grew up in Schweinfurt—deep Franconian Bavaria, ball-bearing capital of Europe—and had the childhood of someone who was going to end up doing something creative whether or not the institutions around her cooperated: piano lessons, riding lessons, and a German teacher who handed her consistent failing grades for her essays. Which is, as any working writer will confirm, about the most reliable origin story there is.

She went to Bielefeld to study fashion design, discovered with some efficiency that needle and thread weren’t her medium, and pivoted to writing about fashion instead—a more honest outcome, honestly. From there: Vogue, Elle, Sleek, Zeit Magazin. The masthead circuit. And then, because a career built on glossy spreads apparently wasn’t providing enough material, she spent ninety nights in ninety different beds across Berlin. The project became a book called 90 Nächte, 90 Betten—ninety nights, ninety beds—and it reads like a field study in human strangeness: the city as habitat, the bedroom as the room where people finally drop whatever performance they’ve been maintaining all day.

She runs a blog at lilies-diary.com. She has a personal rule about never staying anywhere longer than ten days. She’s partial to small dogs with excessive hair, which I find defensible. When Berlin gets to be too much, she retreats to her kitchen, ties on an apron with apparent earnestness, and bakes a Becherkuchen—a simple cup-measure cake, the kind where the ratio is the recipe. That detail, for some reason, is the most vivid thing about her.